The real world likes to get into my dreams

January 24, 2005 7:52 PM

I just took a nap, and was having a really interesting dream--which I can't remember right now, except for the ending, in which someone poked me in the stomach, waking me up.

When I woke up, my cat had just jumped up on me, and was pressing her paw into my stomach. I'm amazed that this was translated into the dream so quickly, but it's happened to me before with other things, like sounds. Does anyone know how the brain can so quickly react to "reality" stimuli and so quickly convert them into dream material?

...I'd also like to know if this happens to other people.

posted by interrobang to Science & Nature (34 answers total)

This happens to me pretty often. I have a theory. The theory has no scientific basis. I just made it up. It's based on the fact that I have long intricate dreams all the time, and also on some SciAm reading on the current state of knowledge on dreams and sleep, but mostly it's my own theory. So if we're clear on that...

My theory on dreams is this: Basically neurons are firing more or less randomly (maybe not literally randomly, but random with regards to your dream) in your head and this gives you images. Some images (people and places you know well, things you like to do etc.) will come up a lot in your dreams because basically you're devoting a lot of your neurons to them.

So you have a bunch of "random" images floating in your head. Now I think some other part of your brain steps in and sticks a story on top of it. Some strings of images are easier to tie together than oters, which is why some dreams make more sense than others. And sometimes you can't tie them together at all, which is when you get these sort of "jumps". I think if our dreams "mean" anything, this is where the meaning gets inserted. Attaching a story to your random images is basically a rorschach test.

So as to your cat pressing her paw into you, I think it's just another random "image" and your brain incorporates it into the plot of your dream the same way it weaves the story around any other image you come up with.

That's my made-up theory.
posted by duck at 8:02 PM on January 24, 2005

All the time, most often with sounds. There will often be an involved story leading up to the noise, in such a way as it seems like I must have been dreaming about it before it happened.
posted by Nothing at 8:02 PM on January 24, 2005

Response by poster: There will often be an involved story leading up to the noise, in such a way as it seems like I must have been dreaming about it before it happened.

See, this happens to me too, and it always seems really weird when it happens, because a lot of the time, it's kind of the "punchline" to the dream.

I don't attribute this to psychic powers or anything like that, by the way. It almost seems like the dreams--which seem so cohesive to someone like me who has really detailed dreams--get retroactively re-plotted or something.
posted by interrobang at 8:07 PM on January 24, 2005

It happens to me all the time.

As for how it happens... well, no one really knows. There are many conflicting theories about dream production.

Does anyone know how the brain can so quickly react to "reality" stimuli and so quickly convert them into dream material?

I'm not sure I get the question, but I don't the speed of stimuli affecting dreams as being much of a problem. In waking you life, you can look at something and instantly form beliefs about it or imagine things about it or think about it... I don't see why dreams should be any slower.

You may have been prompted to ask this question because you think that "dream material" is different from normal thoughts, and would take longer to produce (as if a dream is a story that has to be written). I don't know of anyone who holds this view. There's a debate in the literature about whether dreams are best considered false beliefs, or imaginings, or a prediliction to tell wild stories upon awakening, but I can't think of anyone who holds that "dream material" needs to be produced.
posted by painquale at 8:08 PM on January 24, 2005

I agree with duck. Freud thought the same thing, incidentally--that dreams were fairly random, but that in recalling them and retelling them consciously, we turn them into stories that can be analyzed and thought about semi-rationally.
posted by josh at 8:10 PM on January 24, 2005

Response by poster: No, painquale, I think that dreams are totally random neuron-firing that forms a narrative just because the brain doesn't know what else to do with them but to make them into something resembling reality.

I'm just wondering if there's any literature about how something like this can happen so fast, and if I'm alone.
posted by interrobang at 8:11 PM on January 24, 2005

This happens sometimes. A reoccurring dream has me in a room full of clocks. One of them is beeping really loud and I do my best to smash them and stop them from beeping. Naturally, I can't make the beeping stop because it's my alarm going off in real life being translated into my dream. I hate that dream and I always fall for it.
posted by Arch Stanton at 8:33 PM on January 24, 2005

I had a dream last night where I was walking in a store downtown with a cup of starbucks coffee. Then two guys walked up to me and told me I can't have coffee in their store without a lid. I said I couldn't find one, and right when I said it one of them said "Did you just do that on purpose?" I looked down and saw a lid in my right hand and the coffee in my left hand. There was some coffee on the lid and I spilled some of it without looking. Then one of them said "Look, we don't like you or your 90's attitude. Get the fuck out of here."


Then I walked out through the front door and stood around. One of them went outside and started yelling "Hey get off the property you douchebag!" That's when I walked up and snapped his arm in two. Interesting to note I woke up half an hour before my alarm clock went off thinking I was going to be late for work, and I had energy.
posted by Dean Keaton at 8:45 PM on January 24, 2005

This will fuck with you. Read closely and think about it.

This very topic was addressed in The New Yorker, in an article by Oliver Sacks, in the August 23 issue. It is not available on-line, but I blogged it extensively at the time. Writes Sacks:

Sometimes, as one is falling asleep, there may be a massive, involuntary jerk–amyclonic jerk–of the body. Though such jerks are generated by primitive parts of the brain stem (they are, so to speak, brain-stem reflexes), and as such are without any intrinsic meaning or motive, they may be given meaning and context, turned into acts, by an instantly improvised dream. Thus the jerk may be associated with a dream of tripping, or stepping over a precipice, lunching forward to catch a ball, and so on. Such dreams may be extremely vivid, and have several “scenes.” Subjectively, they appear to start before the jerk, and yet presumably the entire dream mechanism is stimulated by the first, preconscious perception of the jerk. All of this elaborate restructuring of time occurs in a second or less.

Is that the coolest fucking thing ever, or what?

So, there's your answer, interrobang.
posted by waldo at 8:49 PM on January 24, 2005 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: (From waldo's link):

Striking accelerations may also occur in Tourette’s syndrome, a condition characterized by compulsions, tics, and involuntary movements and noises. Some people with Tourette’s are able to catch flies on the wing. When I asked one man with Tourette’s how he managed this, he said that he had no sense of moving especially fast but, rather, than to him the flies moved slowly.

This sounds cool, in a Spider-Man kind of way, and I love reading Oliver Sacks, but I don't think it really has to do with my question because it has to do with the subjective passage of time while awake.

I've experienced "the jerk" before (in dreams where I've stepped too far down on a staircase or have ridden my bicycle into a post), but I don't think this is really what I'm asking about.

I'm asking about the seemingly instantaneous translation of a physical phenomenon (i.e. a sound or a feeling that is really happening) into part of a dream, or--specifically--the very end of a dream, where the thing that happens wakes you up, and you sort of see it happen, but you know that it was the ending of the dream.

Thanks for the link, by the way, waldo.
posted by interrobang at 9:00 PM on January 24, 2005

Unless there's some deviation from the scenario that Sacks describes, you had that whole dream after the cat jumped on you. It's not a coincidence that the cat jumped on you as you were poked in the dream -- you were poked in the dream, and you had that whole dream, because the cat jumped on you.
posted by waldo at 9:13 PM on January 24, 2005 [1 favorite]

When I had an alarm it would happen that I would hear the alarm in my dream, but not with any source for the noise. This went on for a while once - a great long dream (30 seconds? 10 minutes?) with alarm noise all through it.

That thing with the jerk happens to me all the time. Wakes me up. Very interesting if the dream is made up after the jerk - it always seems to me that I'm having a few minutes of dreaming, fall, and it wakes me up. I also thought the jerk was a reaction to the tripping in the dream, not the cause.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 9:16 PM on January 24, 2005

I have news dreams on occasion when the alarm (radio) goes on. It's always bizarre to be walking down your dream street and Hey! There's Silvio Berlusconi!
posted by judith at 9:30 PM on January 24, 2005 [1 favorite]

I remember having a very strange dream many years ago about playing tennis with Ronald Reagan. I woke up thinking, "what the hell?" Then I realized the radio was on, and they were repeating the news headlines - one of which involved some tennis player, and another of which involved Reagan. I was very relieved to realize I hadn't come up with that plot on my own.

There doesn't seem to be a general consensus on exactly how or why the brain incorporates external stimuli, but it's not uncommon. Most of the literature I've read on the subject suggests that external stimuli doesn't cause a person to start dreaming, but it is incorporated very quickly into the dream.

A quick Google search turned up this:

The net effect of occlusion is the outright neglect of external stimuli or the facile incorporation of them into the internally generated information stream of dreaming. In a REM-sleep dream, I once interpreted a buzzer (which timed the EEG records in our sleep lab) as a telephone ringing. Such stimulus incorporation into dreams not only helps preserve sleep, but also provides insight into the temporal aspects of the brain-mind interaction in sleep.

this:

"Probably the most general conclusion to be reached from a wide variety of disparate stimuli employed and analyses undertaken is that dreams are relatively autonomous, or 'isolated,' mental phenomena, in that they are not readily susceptible to either induction or modification by immediate presleep manipulation, . . ." However, on the rare occasions when stimuli are incorporated, "the speed and ingenious fit of the incorporation into the meaning and imagery context of the ongoing dream" are often "remarkable," suggesting the high cognitive level of the dreaming brain.

And these notes:

The hypothesis of dreams involving maintenance of neural pathways such as those involved with consolidation of new knowledge suggests that dreams are cognitively restrained. For instance, they are frequently constrained by events from the previous day or events in our environment. A controlled way to demonstrate how dreams involve immediate events is by affecting the dream content of a person while in REM sleep. For instance, dipping the finger of a person who is in REM sleep into a cup of water. Later these people will often report having had dreams associated with waterfalls or lakes. Thus, all sorts of external stimuli can influence the content of dreams.

posted by Aster at 9:52 PM on January 24, 2005

Wow, 'the jerk' happens to me all the time, really annoying too. I assumed it was just a quirk of my own brain, never thought to ask if it happens to anyone else.
posted by furiousxgeorge at 10:49 PM on January 24, 2005

I have the news dream all the time. Once it was extremely elaborate and involved me and my girlfriend going to lunch in St. Petersburg with Putin, then being expected for dinner in Chechnya. There were all sorts of difficulties in arranging for transportation to the dinner, and (I think) Putin was offended that we'd think of going to Chechnya after visiting him.

You can guess what was on the radio. I must have been hungry too.
posted by lackutrol at 11:20 PM on January 24, 2005

Ah yes, the myoclonic jerk (waldo, you -- I assume you and not the New Yorker, fact-checked as it is by Jay McInerney -- mis-spelled "a myoclonic"). I get those a lot; I've always taken them as some sort of weird reflex feedback loop and my only complaint is that sometimes they wake me up enough that it's hard to go back to sleep.

Freud thought the same thing, incidentally--that dreams were fairly random, but that in recalling them and retelling them consciously, we turn them into stories that can be analyzed and thought about semi-rationally.

Why would we need to re-tell them? Why can't we have the same mechanisms present in dream-consciousness as in waking life? It's always been my impression that dreams have fully-formed narratives (not ones that necessarily make sense in the larger scheme of things, but ways that the dream continues to make general sense as you experience it). Then again, I'm slightly more aware of my dreams due to extensive practice remembering them back in college (hint: write them down immediately), and I have a reasonably good level of in-dream meta-reaction (realizing I'm in one, sometimes redirecting behavior). Just as the visual cortex is amazingly good at what it does and beats the fastest graphics card from Taiwan hands down, I see no reason that we have to wait until later to process these narratives in our minds. The human brain is amazingly talented at narrative, which has subtle strangleholds on consciousness. We need narratives, we need stories. I don't see why we can't hatch them on the spot, as it were.

Hm. myoclonic jerk. Anybody want to buy me a sock puppet?
posted by dhartung at 11:47 PM on January 24, 2005

I had something like this once where I was dreaming that I was waking up in my bed because my roommate was outside the door asking me a question.

Then I started to wake up for real and realized that I was in my boyfriend's bed, and he was in the room at his computer and had turned on the radio to our college station, and my roommate was doing her weekly show on the radio.

The most impressive part was that she had only been my roommate for a few weeks, and before that I hadn't known her. So her voice shouldn't have been that familiar, except that she has a distinctive giggle, which my brain latched onto I guess.
posted by mai at 12:00 AM on January 25, 2005

Why would we need to re-tell them? Why can't we have the same mechanisms present in dream-consciousness as in waking life?

I imagine that Freud thought that the unconscious and conscious minds would tell very different stories about the same dream experiences. The unconscious keeps trying to send up messages, and consciousness keeps trying to repress and reinterpret those experiences. Hence his dream dictionaries to tell you what dreams are actually about.

There are still quite a few theories running around today that demand that our post-waking consciousness makes sense of dreaming. Many of them are holdovers from behaviorism. Norman Malcolm, for example, was a hardliner: he thought that dreams aren't actually experienced during sleep at all - they're dispositions to tell really weird stories upon awakening.
posted by painquale at 2:03 AM on January 25, 2005

I don't see why we can't hatch them on the spot, as it were.

We certainly do in highly emotional states--we think far differently about the same people when we are angry than wnen we are not and supply ourselves with instant and intricate stories about why they are currently the scum of the earth when our blood is up. Yet how incredibly attractive they suddenly become when our blood is up another way.
posted by y2karl at 2:20 AM on January 25, 2005

interrobang I get what you mean with the "punchline".

I'll have a dream where I need to go and visit someone at their house. After a long and slightly confused journey via plane, train and automobile, I'll arrive at the door and ring the doorbell.

But wait, it really is the door bell.

So I'm left thinking, wow that dream seemed to go on forever, if that was a TV program it would have been on for 40 mins or so, but somehow, once I heard the doorbell ring, I must have very quickly dreamt the whole lot in a fraction of a second, just to get to the "punchline".

My own take on how it works is different, and this is just the framework I like to use to fit it in and accept what's going on...

When you wake up after such an event, you brain writes over the contents of your recent memory. It's basically writing the story backwards from the final event, into you most recent memory store and then further back. 10 minutes before I rang the doorbell in the dream I was in a car, so the brain writes the "I was in a car" bit into the '10 minutes ago in my dream slot', in memory.

I could have been dreaming about anything, pink fairies dancing around, whatever, and if I woke up 'naturally', that's what I'd remember I dreamt about. If I get woken up 'unnaturally' the memory of the dream I did have is over written by a memory of a dream I didn't, to make dealing with the unnatural waking up easier to deal with.
posted by ModestyBCatt at 2:25 AM on January 25, 2005

Real simple one.. I was dreaming of my friend's all-girl band playing Joan Jett's "Bad Reputation" in a divey bar. Very realistic, and when I woke up the song was playing on the radio. I have no theories about how this works, but it is interesting.
posted by fixedgear at 2:59 AM on January 25, 2005

My stupid alarm clock translates to a giant UFO landing beep beeep beep beeep until I realize that it is indeed, my alarm.

Now, how I can hear the song which will play on the radio after the beeping stops in my dream baffles me. It's after I turn the alarm off, and clearly am somewhat awake that the radio switches on, and I know what song will come every time. That is weird. Are the fillings in my teeth picking up the radio? ;)
posted by dabitch at 3:34 AM on January 25, 2005

a massive, involuntary jerk–amyclonic jerk–of the body

I get this all the time - for me it's like a door slamming in my mind and as soon as I 'hear/feel' it I know I'll be asleep within seconds.
posted by kamylyon at 6:00 AM on January 25, 2005

Yeah, what happens often I think is that you get the stimulus, create an explanation within the dream, and insert it chronologically before your perception of the feeling, all within a short span, like Oliver Sacks says about myclonic jerks.
posted by abcde at 6:01 AM on January 25, 2005

Something similar happens in entirely conscious states as well, and can be observed via the Phi illusion. Flash a dot at one point, then shortly after flash a dot at a nearby point. If the interval is short enough, it seems to be not two separate dots, but one moving dot.

Here's the interesting bit: if the two dots are different colors, the moving dot appears to change color en route - in the middle of the perceived path, not at the end. (Note: there is a link to a color phi illusion on the page I linked above, but I think it's a bit too slow for me to get the effect.) How does the brain know what color the dot will change before it gets there? Something similar can be observed if the dot "moves" in different, random directions each time. How does the brain know what direction the dot is going to move in before the second dot appears?

Daniel Dennett has some interesting things to say about this, which are summarized here (scroll down to "4. The Multiple Drafts Model for Consciousness").
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 7:07 AM on January 25, 2005 [1 favorite]

A book called The Mind at Night has a good, accessibly written, summary of current research and theory on brain science and dreams.

I have the "whatever's happening on NPR shows up in my dream" phenomenon a lot myself. It's especially disconcerting when I go through the daily world wondering if some news item really happened or if I just dreamed it.
posted by matildaben at 9:12 AM on January 25, 2005

Happens to me too, a lot. Both the myclonic jerks, and waking up to a sound, both of which appear as denouements to complex dream narratives. I've often wondered how this gets constructed in a fraction of a second. Great question, interrobang!
posted by carter at 9:15 AM on January 25, 2005

It's amazing that the myclonic jerks cause you to create a dream to explain them. I always thought it was the other way around - that the dream itself causes you to wake up. My scenario is always the same. I'm running through the woods and I trip on a root . . . ugh! I hate it. It's such a violent feeling. My boyfriend loves it when they happen to him.

My radio dream is usually that there's a song playing that I hate, and I'm trying to change the station. The song is playing on every station, so I unplug the radio and the song won't stop. Like many others, I've also dreamed the news.
posted by peep at 9:32 AM on January 25, 2005

My feeling is that ModestyBCatt is on the right track.

This phenomenon reminds me of certain time-altering effects caused by LSD.
posted by hartsell at 9:39 AM on January 25, 2005

I think Duck nailed it.

There was an experiment done where an electrode was connected to the part of the brain responsible for laughter. Applying some stimulus to that location would make the subject giggle.

The subject was shown a series of photographs; a house, a car, an apple, a horse. The subject would be made to laugh and then asked why. The subject would explain that the horse had done something funny.

The horse, of course, did absolutely nothing; it was a still photograph of a horse in a field. The explanation for the disconnect between actual and perceived reality was that the brain hates "random" events and will come up with an explanation for what just happened. This, they hypothesised, was what caused dreams; the brain receives random input, either from external sources or its own internal memory, and then creates a story to explain everything.
posted by Monk at 9:57 AM on January 25, 2005

For some reason I like to sleep with the TV on all night so I end up incorporating a lot of TV shows in my dreams. Probably a lot like where people are incorporating what they are hearing on the radio as it goes off in the morning.
posted by Justin Case at 11:11 AM on January 25, 2005

Dreams work along a framework of emotional states: fear, embarrassment, lust, etc. - these are the subconscious elements. External input such as events, gathered memories etc. form the 'content' and will appear to fit whatever underlying motive you already had -- the two meld together.
posted by tommyc at 11:30 AM on January 25, 2005

I rolled onto the zipper of a sleeping bag once and it was poking my leg, meanwhile I had a dream about being bitten by a snake on the same spot.
posted by milovoo at 1:13 PM on January 27, 2005