Pleasant Screams!

[monk222]

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The Times has been featuring a number of articles on sleeping and dreaming. Even I find the theme enchanting, as though dreams might be the key to unlock the door in the subconscious that opens to the Other Side. This is from an article about nightmares:

With so much of the sleeping body and brain apparently colluding to allow us to wander safely through an ominous dreamscape of extravagant characters, most sleep scientists are convinced that dreaming serves an essential, possibly evolutionarily adaptive, purpose.

In a recent paper in Psychological Bulletin, Dr. Nielsen and Dr. Levin proposed that dreaming served to create what they call “fear extinction memories,” the brain’s way of scrambling, detoxifying and finally discarding old fearful memories, the better to move on and make synaptic space for any novel threats that may show up at the door. “The brain learns quickly what to be afraid of,” Dr. Nielsen said. “But if there isn’t a check on the process, we’d fear things in adulthood we feared in childhood.”

Ordinary bad dreams rarely recapitulate unpleasant events from real life but instead cannibalize them for props and spare parts, and through that reinvention, Dr. Nielsen explained, the fears are defanged. “A bad dream that doesn’t lead to awakening is successful in dealing with intense emotion,” he said. “It’s disturbing, but there is some kind of resolution to the extent we don’t wake up.”

The Monk theory for why nightmares are so common has to do with the fact that life is actually pretty fucking scary. Since it would be uncool to always be scared, we repress that fear, so that it is only in our sleep through nightmares that we can acceptably release some of that pent up fear.

Or maybe it would just be boring to have sex dreams all the time. I wonder if the Times will do an article on wet dreams, or is that just too self-explanatory?


(Source: Natalie Angier for The NY Times)

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