On Dreams, Dire Days, and Death
Try to recall a time you were in danger — a potentially life-threatening situation, say coming across a rampaging bull, a rabid dog, or a snake that you were about to step onto, or maybe a close shave on the road. Alternatively, if you are fortunate enough to be unable to reminisce any such narrow escape, picture this: you are alone in the house and have just finished watching a horror movie at 2 AM. The faintest of rustles, the tiniest of scamperings, and the most minute of creaks seem so pronounced and clear. You seem to have gained the sensory acuity to detect the slightest of commotions and stirs, visually, auditorily, and even tactilely. It’s almost as if you have awoken some sort of latent quasi-superpower within you, a dormant ability unlocked by the prospect of duress. This superpower is Adrenaline, also known as Epinephrine, a hormone produced in response to stress, that activates your fright-fight-and-flight response, prompting and equipping you best to either face the threatening situation head-on, or make your best escape. The hormone enables one to capitalise on the available resources and make a bid at survival.
Adrenaline secretion is caused by stress but it, in turn, activates certain reward centers of the brain leading to a tantalising feeling of exhilaration. This is exploited by those who routinely partake in adventure sports, gamblers, as well as businessmen habituated of high staking and risk-taking. The pleasurable sensation triggered by an adrenaline rush evoked in response to a stressful impetus is, some experts believe, addictive, and leads to people becoming what is called “Adrenaline Junkies” who can range from bungee jumpers to young, feisty, headstrong CEOs who unwaveringly makes quick, radical and firm decisions. Emergency Service and Armed Defense Force Personnel are known to have elevated adrenaline levels during operations. In fact, certain commando units are known to inject themselves with epinephrine right before entering a zone of potential combat. When you need to pull off that risky rescue in uncharted territory and unfamiliar terrain, having acute senses certainly helps. Although adrenaline is often associated with belligerence, indiscriminateness, and brute force, it doesn’t merely impart blind strength but enhances one’s sensory potency in order to enable them to make the best possible decisions in order to survive. After all, it’s a survivalistic hormone, not necessarily a combative one — it’s ultimate aim is to ensure that the threat posed is averted, not that its source is eradicated. Towards this end, adrenaline gives you a sort of “bullet-time” ability, making you perceive your immediate environment in slow motion — pupils dilate, neural coordination streamlines, relaying and processing improves. You could imagine this unprecedented acuity as being temporarily bestowed with powers of heightened perceptual awareness and focus akin to that of Neo from The Matrix franchise, Max Payne from the eponymous video game series, or James McAvoy’s Wesley Gibson from the 2008 flick Wanted.
The hormone, besides empowering one with the abilities to best ascertain, dodge, and counter the immediate threat, also simultaneously invests in a long-term project. The brain’s accelerated coordination, processing, and information input and documentation, serving as a sort of multisensor data-recorder, registers situational data into a ‘crisis library’ for future reference. What this essentially means is that whenever you are in a dangerous situation, your brain quickly rewinds and replays your memories with a special emphasis on previously-encountered threatening situations, sifting through every previous instance of danger to find a solution that then worked, with the intention of emulating erstwhile survival. It desperately forages, scours, and gropes around past encounters with various sorts of dangers to find a relevant way out of the current one. Thus, even when the brain is struggling to fend off the immediate threat, it also dedicates itself to recording the current situation in great detail and elaboration, for the sake of the next hazard that it may find itself in, presumably some time later. Thus, to quickly and accurately analyse the perilous semblance and threat at hand, as well as secondarily, in order to refer to this during a future jeopardy, the brain turns sensitive, etching into it all proceedings of the showdown. It is why you possess vivid reminiscences of traumatic and critical encounters — like remembering how the car that brushed you by a hair’s width appeared or moved, or possessing a snapshot of the exact moment the bull charged at you, a reminiscence that you would best want forgotten. The reason the brain doesn’t erase these vivid, clear impressions is because it will rapidly search through this library in event of a future crisis for determining the best course of action in the scenario. Traumatic Memories might very well be a trade-off sustained in lieu of retaining vital experience gained from such incidents.
Gazebo of Memories
I sit in the gazebo of memories
As the emotions meander around.
I sit as the reminiscence of my austere self,
Makes me covet to travel to the past.
I sit in the gazebo of memories
As the emotions meander around.
I sit as I am reminded by them,
How my demeanour has changed,
How, from a soft-hearted boy,
I became an iron-hearted man.
I sit in the gazebo of memories
As the emotions meander around.
…
This beautiful poem, perhaps unintendedly, reminds me of poignant Near-Death Experiences. (It could evoke in someone fond nostalgia, or pleasant recollection, it’s a poem after all, an idyllic one at that.) In the eerily accurate and realistic portrayal of inundation by the drowning simulator seen here, towards the end of the sequence one can get a rough idea of what a typical Near-Death experience looks like. Most people who very narrowly escaped the clutches of death have reported seeing flashbacks of their lives along with various sorts of blinking lights. In the moment of trauma or fatality, the brain desperately sifts through all of a person’s memories, rewinding the stored reel to look for something of potential aid or utility that could potentially salvage one’s life.
Now high-speed (slow-motion) action sequences recorded while facing calamitious scenarios and experiencing fear isn’t the only “what-to-do” reference database that our brain creates. Dreams are another source of learning. Now this is all not very firmly-anchored scientific ground, it’s credence can be best described as slippery, however, its rival theories are just as, if not more precarious, and hence this deserves due consideration at the least. At the very outset, it seems that dreams are the playground of the brain. They actually are its laboratory — however, dreams are more alchemy than hard science. Dreams don’t care for the underlying causes, if mixing 1 and 2 yields 3, it works fine for it.
I often get dreams where my friends from school and my friends from university seem to freely and familiarly interact, and during the course of the dream, I don’t find it odd. In most dreams, two otherwise incompatible scenarios, things that don’t jibe either in principle or in practice, come together and seem to seamlessly blend. Moreover, this infusion doesn’t seem bizarre or even out of the ordinary, you just play along with it as the dream unfolds, until you wake up and recall the sheer peculiarity and awkwardness of all of it — writing the school examinations with my college classmates, check! Introducing your favourite superhero to your family, check! Infiltrating the embassy of a random country armed with a bow-and-arrow for no good reason, check! Finding yourself in your old home crawling with unusually gigantic venomous serpents, check! being the brother of a television celebrity feuding with a tennis player who happens to be a member of a vampire cult, check! Realities seem more to be fused than gradually converging, maybe because it is difficult to recall where a dream began, you just seem to be sort of airdropped in it unconscious, or rather have been living in it forever, at least as long as you could then remember. It all seems so natural and consistently ongoing while in it, well, unless you are a lucid dreamer. The brain essentially tries to use your sleep time — which comprises roughly a third of your lifespan (although dreams only occur in the REM Phase) to experiment how two elements from your life will come together or how an element will look in a new scenario, where it has previously not been encountered. So yes when you see your school being attacked by leviathan alien crabs, your brain is randomly trying a combinatorial subcase — one of the theoretical possibilities and trying to gauge and grasp how it is supposed to act in that scenario. The city sewers crawling with tentacled anthropomorphic beasts? Brain: Might just happen in the near future, let’s be prepared for it. The brain is essentially combing two elements or an element and a scenario or a set of elements and a scenario in novel, unprecedented ways lest it happen.
To understand the rationale behind this seemingly baseless frenzy, consider this: You are a goalkeeper. You know how to instinctively mind something you see out of the corner of your eye, and to keep an eye out in the first place — the ever-vigilant peripheral vision. You need to cursor and scan all directions, scouting out for potential openings. Only when an attacker comes too close, you trade awareness for focus and train your eyes on a singular point. You also know how to drive. But when you are driving on a highway, you seldom expect something to hit you from the side and rarely watch out as you would normally do on a playfield. You don’t employ your 360-degree vigilance skillset here. You focus on the road, sights set on the oncoming traffic, straight ahead. Now you have a dream where you see a giant football lob at you from the bushes while you are driving. Ridiculous, isn’t it? You at once, dismiss the dream. Now you are driving on a new route, one that passes through a thicket, and before you can realise it, a deer leaps out of the bushes, and bounces off the bonnet of your car. The brain tries to cover all potential combinations of things, most of these combinations are obviously physically impossible and often downright comical, still others are unlikely to transpire and mildly bemusing, but every now and then, there is something that in some form or the other, is preparing your brain to react well in case of a novel, unexperienced combinatorial scenario. The brain is preparing so that it has to afford less processing time when such an actual scenario, or something, abstractly or corporeally similar happens to come across. Even if most of these experiments are failed bids, it’s not a bad deal to come across a ton of obvious, unambiguously-discardable trash, when you can get a couple well-meaning reminders and warnings every now and then. Humans have a knack for carelessness, dreams randomly remind us of things that we forget to take care of, or account for. It’s random and inefficient, but it gets credit for trying. After all, the right compounds are often found after a generous deal of hit-and-trial, explosions, spillages, and general messing around.
Both Crisis-Flashbacks and Combinatorial Simulations are the brain’s ways of building and invoking a reference volume to cut down critical reaction and decision-making times via experience and experimentation respectively.
So, yeah next time you see that alien unicorn centipede decimating your city, be grateful, your greatest well-wisher your brain, is preparing in advance. It’s 2020 after all, one just can’t be overprepared, too sound, too sure!
Author: Pitamber Kaushik
