Consciousness at the Crossroads: Conversations With the Dalai Lama on Brainscience and Buddhism by Dalai Et Al. Lama

Author:Dalai, Et Al. Lama [Dalai, Et Al. Lama]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Snow Lion Publications
Published: 1999-08-25T00:00:00+00:00

DAIAI LAMA: Dogs make limb movements, and on occasion when a person has a rough dream, like a nightmare, the arms may flail about.

ALLAN HOBSON: Yes, but then it is not a nightmare. There are two kinds of frightening experiences that occur in sleep. Bad dreams, or nightmares, in which you imagine a scenario and frightening things happen to you may occur in REM sleep. They can erupt, which usually results in the subject's spontaneous waking. There is another kind of night terror, which tends to occur in nondreaming sleep but not in REM sleep. This is a purely emotional experience, lacking the associated hallucinatory activity that accompanies dreaming. It is this night terror that may be accompanied by flailing limb movements.

There are some human subjects in whom the brain stem fails to inhibit the skeletal muscles. When they have REM sleep, they act out their dreams. This is a very dangerous brain stem defect.

Now let's look at the way the sleep cycle is organized. First, as the night progresses, come phases of sleep associated with little or no mental activity. Next are periods of sleep associated with dreaming. The dream periods tend to become longer as the night progresses, lasting thirty, forty, even fifty minutes at a time. So the best time to obtain dream reports is in the early morning when these dreaming periods are quite long.

The cyclic alternation of non-REM and REM sleep is very regular. This suggests that the brain stem neuronal controls themselves constitute a clock, or that they observe an accurate clock, whereby they trigger activation of the dreaming state at regular intervals throughout sleep. This is an automatic, intrinsic process. It looks, therefore, as though this activation of the brain for dreaming purposes must be very important in some way. We need to understand this better.

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