                      Plane Talk: Astral Meanderings

                           by Don DeGracia, Ph.D.

                        (dondeg@compuserve.com)

                   Copyright  1996. All rights reserved.

                                October 1996

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                         ABOUT THE WORLD OF DREAMS

     Hi folks! Its been a while since I've written a Plane-Talk
     column. What I'd like to do this time around is focus on the
     question: what is the dream world? For afterall, in our dreams
     and our lucid dreams (or OBEs or astral projections, or whatever
     we wish to call them) we really appear to be somewhere. In our
     dreams we are in places; we move through landscapes - sometimes
     of a mundane character, sometimes of a bizarre and surrealistic
     character. Whatever the forms they may take, what is clear is
     that when we dream we are somewhere. What I'd like to discuss is
     some of the ideas I've been kicking around about just what this
     somewhere really is when we talk about being in our dreams.

     In DO_OBE., I put forth the idea that the world of our dreams are
     the planes of nature described by occultists, particularly of the
     Theosophical variety such as Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater. In
     fact, by the end of this article, I hope to illustrate how naive
     of a viewpoint this is. As you readers of this column know, I
     have been focusing more and more on scientific explanations of
     the phenomena of lucid dreaming/OBEs/astral projection, and this
     way of thinking sees these experiences as being products of our
     brain. As I have allowed my mind to open up to this scientific,
     and biological, viewpoint - and the body of evidence that
     supports such a viewpoint - the question has occurred to me: if
     indeed our dreams and lucid dreams are products of our brains,
     then how is it our brains can create the realistic, complex and
     detailed worlds we move through in our dreams and lucid dreams?

     In pursuit of an answer to this question, I have surveyed a
     fairly large amount of literature about how our brains work.
     Initially, I was very skeptical that one could explain the
     environments, landscapes and places of our dreams in terms of how
     the brain operates. However, after much reading and learning, my
     initial skepticism has been replaced with some inkling of an
     understanding of how the brain indeed can create within itself
     whole worlds through which we, as personalities, move, live and
     have our being, not only in our dreams, but while we are awake as
     well.

     As with most questions we ask, there is a huge philosophical
     component to this issue of the nature of the dream world. The
     philosophical questions revolve around this: we take our waking
     experience as our point of departure when we talk about our
     experiences in the dream world. And in our waking experience we
     move through this physical world, a world which is revealed to
     our conscious awareness through the agency of our senses. Our
     senses include seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting,
     which are the five commonly known senses. But we have other
     senses in our body too: we can sense temperature, pain, up and
     down (i.e. gravity), the motion of our bodies and limbs, we can
     feel vibrations, and pressure and there are many unconscious
     senses constantly monitoring the internal organs of our bodies.
     It is through all of these sensory modalities that we know of the
     world we inhabit while we are awake. And the most important point
     is that we take all of this very for granted. We simply assume
     that the world that is revealed to us through our senses exists
     as an objective world that exists outside of us, and we assume
     that we perceive this world truly as it is.

     Now these really are important philosophical questions that have
     plagued philosophers throughout the centuries. Philosophers like
     Kant and Descartes, and many others, have worried about the
     reliability of our senses for revealing to our minds about the
     nature of the world, and they have worried about the seeming
     objectivity of the ideas we create to describe the world in which
     we find ourselves. What I find of great interest is that asking
     the question "what is the world of dreams?" has an awful lot to
     do with these philosophical questions.

     Again, we assume the world of waking is real, solid and
     objective. And we move through this world as we live our lives in
     time, never giving any thought at all (unless of course you are a
     brain scientist!) to the marvelous bio-machine in our heads - our
     brains - that make life as we know it possible. But the fact is,
     it is because of the properties of our brain that we can perceive
     the world of our waking experience. It is because of the
     properties of our brain that there is continuity in time to our
     waking experience. Even though every day of being awake is
     interrupted by a night of sleep and of dreams, we wake in the
     morning and continue on with our waking life, continue the events
     of yesterday, looking forward to the events of tomorrow. The
     continuity in time of our waking lives is due to the fact that
     our brain stores memories of the things it experiences. If our
     brains did not store memories, then we would not remember what
     happened to us, nor would we remember the things we were planning
     on doing and the things we strive to achieve and for which we
     hope.

     In fact, there are types of brain damage that people can suffer
     where their brain losses the ability to form memories. Such
     people live constantly in the present. They do not remember
     yesterday, nor do they remember to plan for tomorrow.

     Likewise, as we take our memories for granted to a large extent
     in our day to day lives, so too do we take our brains ability to
     perceive the world of our waking experience for granted. Don't
     you ever wonder just how it is that you can open your eyes and
     see the world? Seeing happens quite automatically. You don't have
     to do anything, it just happens. Nor did you have to learn to
     see. The ability to see is built into your body; built into your
     eyes and the nerve connections between your eyes and your brain.
     You were born with the ability to see - it is a gift that God has
     given you. Although the how of seeing never enters into our minds
     as we go about our day-to-day business (again, unless you are a
     brain scientist who studies vision!), the fact is, there is a
     very complex set of processes that underlie our ability to see.
     What I want to do now is explain a little bit about the hidden
     and unseen (one could even call them "occult") processes that are
     happening every time we look at the world.

     First off, what allows us to see is light. Light exists in the
     world of our waking experience, and it exists as waves of
     infinitesimally small particles called photons. These
     photons/light waves move around through space at massive speeds -
     the speed of light is the fastest speed of anything we know of -
     and these photons/light waves bounce off of things that are made
     of matter. They either bounce off of material things, or they go
     right through them depending on the frequency of the light waves
     and the nature of the matter they encounter.

     Now, as these light waves bounce off of things, some of the light
     waves enter our eyes. And inside of our eyeballs, the whole back
     wall of our eye ball is made of cells that respond to the light
     waves. These cells make up a region of the eye called the retina.
     And the cells of the retina that detect light waves are called
     rods and cones. The rods and cones do not respond to all light
     waves, but only to a very narrow range of light waves that we
     call visible light. This range of light waves is visible because
     we see them, and we see them because the rods and cones can
     detect them.

     To make a very long and complex story short, when visible light
     enters the retina, the retina sends nerve impulses to the brain.
     These nerve impulses are not pictures in any sense at all; they
     are patterns of electricity. So, our retinas convert light waves
     which have bounced off of, or were emitted from objects around
     us, to patterns of electricity inside our brains.

     So, if the eye sends patterns of electricity into our brains,
     then how is it we can see? Or what is seeing? Well, frankly, if I
     could answer this question, I'd be famous. The fact is, no one is
     quite sure of how the patterns of electricity that leave the eye
     and enter the brain get converted into this subjective mental
     phenomena we call "seeing". However, some of the more clever
     scientists who grapple with these issues have taken an
     interesting tact to the problem. Instead of wondering how
     patterns of electricity get converted to the things we actually
     are seeing in our consciousness, these scientists have dealt with
     the issue by stating that what we call "seeing" is actually
     patterns of electricity coursing through our brains, and
     actually, only through very specific parts of our brains.

     And the fact is, there is good evidence to support this
     viewpoint. You can imagine that if a person's eyes got damaged,
     then that person would become blind, and indeed this is the case.
     However, it turns out that people can become blind by having the
     parts of their brain that are involved with seeing become
     damaged, even in their eyes are perfectly intact. In this case,
     the person has brain damage, not eye damage, but they become
     blind nonetheless. Clearly then, this supports the notion that
     what we call "seeing" involves patterns of electricity moving
     through specific parts of the brain; if those parts of the brain
     get damaged, the person can no longer see - they are blind.

     Now, everyone reading this is using a computer. Many of you know
     that the computer screen you are looking at is composed of small
     dots of light called "pixels". By combining many pixels together
     on the surface of the TV tube of your computer monitor, it
     creates a picture. It turns our that our brain does a similar
     thing with vision. Our retina is made up of many millions of
     cells - the rods and cones - and each of these is like a pixel.
     Now, each pixels on your computer screen has its place on the
     surface of the computer screen. The pixels form a two-dimensional
     grid and the location of each pixel is defined by stating its
     place on this 2-D grid. Likewise, the retina is also a 2-D grid
     of cells and each cell has a definite place on this grid. And
     when a particular cell senses light, it - by quite indirect means
     - sends a little nerve impulse out of the eye. The impulses go to
     very specific regions of the brain - to a part of the brain
     called the visual cortex - in such a way that each region of the
     visual cortex corresponds to a specific location on the retina.
     Or stated another way, there is a region (actually several of
     them) in the visual cortex of our brain which is organized the
     same way the retina of the eye is. What this means is that when a
     particular region of the retina senses light, this causes
     patterns of electricity to enter very specific regions of the
     visual cortex. Therefore, when you see something in the upper
     left corner of your visual field, this image activates cells in a
     very specific region of your retina, and in turn, these retinal
     cells activate very specific regions of your visual cortex which
     correspond to the upper left part of the space at which you are
     looking.

     What this means is that you really do not "see" the thing in the
     upper left corner of your visual field until the cells in the
     visual cortex of your brain become active. It is the activation
     of these cells in your brain that causes you to "see", not the
     activation of the cells in the retina.

     Again, this all happens totally automatically. It does not matter
     whether or not we know that all this is going on because it goes
     on anyway. It has been the cleverness and ingenuity of brain
     scientists that they have figured out that all this stuff is
     going on "behind the scenes" when we perform the simple act of
     looking at something. And there is much more going on as well,
     but because this is not an essay dedicated to visual processing,
     I will not go into any more of the details.

     The important idea at this point is that there is literally a MAP
     of visual space inside a particular part of your brain. And when
     this map of visual space gets activated it creates in us the
     conscious experience of seeing. What this idea means is that if
     you could somehow artificially stimulate these parts of the brain
     with electricity, it would cause the person to see something that
     is not truly there (which is the definition of a hallucination).

     Now, these ideas apply to all of our sensory modalities. Hence,
     you have an audio map of space in your brain, and when it gets
     activated, you experience the subjective sensation of hearing.
     You have a tactile (touch) map of your body in your brain, and
     when it gets activated, you experience the subjective sensation
     of touch on the surface of your body. You have maps in your brain
     of all your sensory modalities, and when these maps get
     activated, it creates in your conscious awareness, a perception
     of that sensory modality - be it touch, hearing, balance,
     temperature, pain, etc. etc.

     For you clever readers out there, it should be quite obvious
     where my argument is going. All that I have discussed above can
     only mean one thing: the world you perceive to be "out there" is
     not "out there" at all. It is, in fact inside your brain. The
     world that is seemingly outside of us is not outside of us at
     all: it is inside our brains. That the world "out there" seems to
     be outside of us is an illusion created by our brains. Our brains
     CREATE the world that we perceive and of which we are aware, and
     this means that "out there" is actually inside our heads.

     And this gets back to the philosophical stuff I mentioned at the
     start of the article. Months ago, when my curiosity lead me to
     the question "how does the brain create the world of our dreams?"
     I was assuming that our brain constructed the world of our
     dreams, but did not construct the world of our waking experience.
     I naively assumed that the waking world was totally objective in
     some sense independent from the action of the brain. However,
     what I realized as I learned more and more about how the brain
     works is that the brain actually CREATES the world of our WAKING
     experience. Again, the world we perceive to be outside of our
     bodies is NOT outside of our bodies at all. The outside world of
     waking is inside our brains. ALL OF OUR PERCEPTIONS OCCUR IN OUR
     BRAINS.

     However, these ideas do not imply that the world is a construct
     of our imaginations as the ancient Greek Sophist philosophers
     believed. There is an objective world that exists outside of us
     and within which we live, move and have our being. However, what
     I am saying is that ALL WE CAN KNOW OF THIS WORLD IS THE
     REPRESENTATION OF IT CREATED BY OUR BRAIN. I'll elaborate on this
     point ahead.

     So, let's get back to the story of how the brain works. The key
     idea is that the brain creates REPRESENTATIONS of the world
     within itself. That is the function of our brains: to create
     representations of reality. So, naturally enough, the question
     arises: how come the representations created by the brain seem to
     so accurately mirror the reality that is outside of us? Well, the
     answer is simple: because of our senses. The easiest way to think
     about it is that our senses are like cookie cutters. Cookie
     cutters MOLD cookie dough into specific shapes. Likewise, our
     senses - when they are active - MOLD our brain's ability to
     represent reality into specific "shapes". The senses are MOLDS or
     TEMPLATES that determine the shape of perceptions that the brain
     will generate in our awareness.

     Now, so far, all I have said applies to the case when we are
     awake. And again, the irony is that the waking world we know in
     our awareness is actually patterns of electricity in our brain,
     which are shaped by our senses.

     However, what happens when we sleep?

     Again, to make a long and complex story short, when we sleep, the
     ability of our senses to mold our brain's ability to represent
     reality within it are turned way down.

     If you will recall, there are two main phases to sleep: the
     nonREM phase and the REM phase. It is now known and well
     established that we dream during the REM phase of sleep. Dreams
     sometimes occur during nonREM sleep but are much less frequent
     than during REM sleep. So, it would seem that during nonREM
     sleep, the ability of the brain to generate representations is
     itself turned down.

     What all this leads too is this conclusion: DREAMS ARE THE BRAIN
     GENERATING REPRESENTATIONS OF REALITY DURING REM SLEEP, WHEN THE
     ABILITY OF THE SENSES TO "MOLD" THE BRAIN'S REPRESENTATIONAL
     ACTIVITY IS TURNED DOWN.

     In other words, dreams are patterns of electricity being
     generated by the brain during REM sleep that result in conscious
     perceptions in exactly the same fashion that occurs during
     waking.

     Now, there are many differences between waking perceptions and
     dream perceptions. The most important is that our senses are
     turned on when we are awake, but turned off when we dream and
     this has important consequences. When the senses are on, they
     MOLD the representational function of the brain. When the senses
     are off, as in REM sleep, the brain generates perceptual
     representations of reality that are NOT molded by sensory input.

     Are there other factors in the brain that help mold the
     representations generated during dreams? Yes, absolutely. The
     most important is probably our motivational state: our wishes,
     drives, desires, and other similar emotional factors. Our
     memories are also important determinants in forming our dreams.
     And there are probably unconscious factors that help mold what we
     consciously perceive during dream states. However, right now I am
     not going to dwell on this topic of what molds the contents of
     our dreams - this I will save for another column.

     The function of our memories is also different between being
     awake and being in a dream. We all know that we don't remember
     dreams as well as we remember our waking experiences. This points
     to a big difference in the function of the brain between waking
     and dreaming. However, what is the same between waking and
     dreaming is that the brain is generating representations of
     reality that enter our consciousness as perceptions of a world
     "out there".

     So, we come back to the main question of this article: what is
     the dream world? Well, according to all I said above, the dream
     world is in fact patterns of electricity within our brain, in
     those regions of the brain that create our perceptions of
     sensations. The world of dreams are worlds - actually,
     perceptions of worlds - generated by the brain in the ABSENCE of
     the senses molding the brain's ability to generate perceptions.

     So, is this all mundane? Does this destroy the old occult views
     of the planes of nature? What the ideas I've presented above
     force us to do is not be so naive in our thinking. The idea that
     dreams are patterns of electricity in the brain does destroy any
     simplistic and naive notions that the planes of nature exist as
     objective worlds analogous to an objective physical world. If you
     understood what I said above, you now appreciate that even the
     world of our waking experience is NOT objective in any simple
     sense. The world of our waking experience is a REPRESENTATION
     inside our brains - one that is MOLDED by the action of the
     senses. Hence, the whole idea of objectivity becomes hopelessly
     naive from this point of view. If objectivity exists, it must be
     a notion that includes the fact that what we perceive is only a
     REPRESENTATION - a bunch of patterns of electricity - INSIDE THE
     BRAIN. So, not only are the old occult notions destroyed, but so
     are many nonoccult notions. What is destroyed is a simplistic and
     naive assumption that what we perceive can be taken at face
     value. We now know enough about the hidden and invisible (i.e.
     occult) process that underlie our ability to perceive that we can
     no longer take what we perceive at face value.

     So what else is there if we cannot take our perceptions at face
     value? What this all points to is an extremely subtle interplay
     between our conscious thoughts and the automatic ability of the
     brain to generate representations of reality. It is, afterall,
     our conscious mind - and the ideas and habit it contains - that
     gives meaning to the perceptions generated by the brain. Thus,
     the Sophists (who believed that reality is created by the mind)
     were half right: our ideas give meaning to the perceptions
     generated by the brain and so in this very indirect way "create"
     reality. Just as the brain will generate representations of
     reality in our conscious awareness in spite of what we think and
     believe (i.e. culture), contrawise, we will give whatever meaning
     we give to our perceptions whether it is "intrinsically correct"
     or not.

     So, this all points to something much deeper than the standard
     fair of traditional science, philosophy or occultism. But its not
     a depth with no precedence. Again, we are lead back to the
     mystical insights of the ages that point to transcendence of the
     mundane and the discovery of a transcedendal essence behind mere
     appearances.

     Next time, we'll get into this topic some more and look a little
     more closely at the factors that mold the contents of our dreams,
     whether they be lucid or not. For now, the take home message is
     that the world of dreams are patterns of electricity in our
     brains, but just the same, so is the waking world. In some future
     column, we'll dwell on the ramifications of these ideas.

     Until next time, happy day, everybody!

     Don

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