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These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
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The Origin of Dreaming The US psychiatrist Fred
Snyderadvanced the hypothesis that,
from an evolutionary perspective, REM sleep came first and dreams came later.
First bodies developed the brain state of REM sleep, which was retained because
it had a useful function for survival (for example, because it kept the brain
alert and ready to react to emergencies even during sleep), and then dreams
were engrafted upon REM sleep. REM
sleep was available and was used to host dreams. Dreaming evolved after a physical feature made them possible,
just like language evolved after an anatomical apparatus that was born for
whatever other reason. Dreaming, just like language, is an "epiphenomenon". The real purpose of REM sleep was to act as
a sentinel. The psychologist Anthony
Stevenshas provided a practical explanation for why some animals started
dreaming: dreaming emerged when oviparous animals evolved into viviparous
animals. By dreaming, the brain could augment its performance with some
off-line processing. This made it possible to limit the size of the brain
while leaving brain activity free to grow. Brains, and thus heads, would remain
small enough to pass through the maternal pelvis. In Winson's scenario, dreams helped us survive a long time before our mind was
capable of providing any help at all. And dreams, unlike higher consciousness,
are likely to be common to many species. The mind could well be an
evolution of dreaming, which happened in humans and not in other species. First
the brain started dreaming, and then dreams took over the brain and became the
mind, which could be viewed as a continuous dream of the universe that we
inhabit. This hypothetical history of
the mind does not differ too much from the one in which the mind was created by
memes (concepts that spread from mind to mind). The relationship between
memes and dreams is intuitive, and the psychologist JosephCampbellindirectly summarized it with
his celebrated aphorism that a myth is a public dream, a dream is a private
myth. Back to the beginning of the chapter "Dreams" | Back to the index of all chapters |
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