The realm of dream and reality

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The realm of dream and reality

The Financial Express
Syed Fattahul Alim
5/20/2006

Dream and sleep are interconnected experiences in humans. Like humans, lower animals also sleep. However, it is not known if lower animals also dream. Dream is a mysterious human experience and its secrets are yet to be unlocked by science.

Though the answer to the phenomenon of dream is still a scientific mystery, humans have never stopped interpreting dream. In prehistoric times when human society was in its formative phase, people could not differentiate between dream and reality. They thought dreams as an extension of the reality. Dream and reality were not only interchangeable in the minds of the ancient man; he even thought that the world of dream was more powerful than that of the real one.

The Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Greeks and the Romans considered dreams as messages from the gods. Temples known as Asclepieions were built around the power of dreams. It was believed that sick people who slept in these temples would receive instructions for cure through the dreams.

The people of ancient Egypt looked up to priests to interpret their dreams. They recorded their dreams in their sacred writings called hieroglyphics. People who could remember their dreams vividly were treated with regard. The interpreters of dreams, on the other hand, were thought to be gifted with divine powers. The religious scriptures also considered dreams as having special meaning having bearing on the life of the person dreaming. Dreams, though they are of personal origin, were thought to have social contexts.

The gods, the souls of the dead friends and relatives would appear in dreams to inform and warn the dreamers that they should fulfil their unfinished duties. Many in every society still believe that dreams are oracular in origin and the dreamers are agents through whom the secret warnings from the heaven are conveyed. Dreams often dictated the actions of political and military leaders. In ancient Greece and Rome, dream interpreters accompanied military leaders into the battlefields. Some interpreters aided the medicine man in diagnosing diseases. Dreams offered a vital clue to the healers in finding what was wrong with the dreamer.

The Chinese believed that people's souls or spirits leave the body of the dreamers for a place where they really belong. That is why they were against awakening a sleeping person suddenly, for in that case the soul that had left the body may fail to return in time. This belief is also held by many in our own culture. The Chinese of modern era still believe in this travel of their souls in dream so much so that they have a prejudice against alarm clocks. Some Native American and Mexican tribes have strong beliefs in the dream dimension of their lives.

However, dreams were not always held in such a positive light. In the Middle Ages, for example, dreams were seen as evil and its images were considered as temptations from the devil. In the vulnerable sleep state, the devil was believed to fill the mind of humans with poisonous thoughts and misguide him towards the path of sin and ruination.

As the magical and the spiritual dimension of life gave way to its materialist-scientific interpretations in the nineteenth century, dreams began to lose their hidden meanings and were treated as mere reflection of anxieties and unfulfilled desires of the people in their day to day lives. Then again, it is in the 19th and early twentieth centuries that serous scientific investigations also started to unravel the bodily and psychological mysteries behind dreams. Freud, Jung and Adler were such scientists, who restored the past importance of dream in the life of man. The modern-day psychoanalysts now started to delve into the realm of dream to look for the roots of some physical symptoms and psychosomatic disorders. Dreams were no more dismissed either as the work of the devil or meaningless association of bits and shards of memories in sleep of what people come across in their life when wide-awake.

Artificially induced dreams

In dreams, what people experience is that they lose control over what they go through in their dreamy realms. Such kind of experience may also be induced in them through artificial means, for example, by applying psychotropic drugs. Cannabis, cocaine, heroin, LSD, marijuana, mescaline or Ecstasy, Prozac, you name it, they are all mind-bending drugs. Nowadays drug addicts use these drugs either for getting artificial pleasures out of them, or for escaping the hard real world full of frustrations, anxieties and sadness for a short while. However, unlike dreams, which are healthful, the dream-like conditions created under the influence of psychotic drugs may be damaging to the subjects so craving for pleasure or running away from the unpleasant realities of their lives.

The impact of drugs on the mind of the subjects have been long known to the crooks, cheats, phoney spiritual leaders and sorcerers. They used drugs on their victims to cheat them out of their possessions or influence them into believing that they (the fakes) are a repository of some divine powers. In the Middle Ages, one such power greedy impostor used hashish in the drinks he supplied to his gullible subjects. Under the influence of these drinks, his victims believed that the charlatan masquerading as god would take them to the heaven. By such means he created an army of blind devotees who were ready to die at the slightest indication of their god, Hasan bin sabah. This man who belonged to the times of Omar Khayyam created a reign of terror in the entire Middle East. His army of suicide squads under the influence of his mind-bending brew would kill kings, highly placed government officials from Egypt, Syria, Babylon, the then Persia and to wherever his targets lived. From his hideouts in the mountain headquarters, he struck terror in the hearts of all the kings of that era in the then Muslim world in the Middle East and central Asia through his method of secret killing. He proved to be invincible in his methods until however Hulagu Khan, the Mongol, appeared in the scene whose armies destroyed Hasan bin Sabah's centre of operations in the mountains once and for all.

However that may be, the effects of these hallucinogens and other kinds of mind-altering substances and drugs have been under the constant study of the scientist to discover their total effect on human mind and body. A recent such study carried out on subjects using cannabis is given below:

"Volunteers taking cannabis-based therapeutic drugs as part of a controlled trial, which had been approved by an ethics board as safe for the subjects, experienced psychotic effects just as strong as if they had smoked cannabis. These findings, highly unexpected in such a controlled environment, are published today in the peer-reviewed, Open Access journal BMC Psychiatry.

Dr Bernard Favrat and colleagues, from the Institut Universitaire de Medecine Legale in Switzerland, were conducting a clinical trial into the effects of orally administered delta-9-tetrahydrocannibol (THC), the active ingredient in cannabis, when two of their male subjects experienced impaired psychomotor functions and severe anxiety typical of cannabis-induced psychosis.

When smoking cannabis, the effects of THC on psychomotor functions usually start once the concentration in the blood has reached 10ng/ml plasma. The trial should have been safe as the subjects were given low doses of THC and had much lower concentrations in their blood. However, the two male subjects experienced their reactions with blood concentrations of 4.7ng/ml and 6.2 ng/ml, respectively.

Favrat and colleagues found that both subjects reported severe anxiety and impaired psychomotor functions. Other effects included transient symptoms of derealisation and depersonalisation, and paranoid delusions. They were described by one subject as worse than those experienced after smoking cannabis. One subject was given dronabinol, a synthetic THC that has been in medical use in the USA since 1985. The other subject was asked to drink a decoction of natural THC. The authors hypothesise that the effect may have been because the THC had been ingested, rather than inhaled; digesting THC may produce potent THC metabolites, which induce psychotic effects.

Research into designing THC-based medications has boomed in the last few years, due to the many therapeutic effects of THC. These drugs could be used to alleviate muscle spasticity in multiple sclerosis patients, restore appetite in AIDS patients and alleviate pain and nausea in cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. Such research has to be approved to ensure that it is treating patients ethically and safely. Dr Favrat's research had been approved, which makes the findings even more unexpected.

Favrat and colleagues' report adds to the body of evidence that cannabis might be more harmful than previously thought. In the UK, cannabis was downgraded to class C early last year, but government officials have called for a review of the decision following a series of studies revealing that cannabis dramatically increases the risk of developing mental illnesses."

Dream like conditions induced in humans sometimes reveal yet unknown properties of these substances that provide a clue for scientists and psychoanalysts into the magical world of the mind and the brain. Therefore, notwithstanding the harmful effects of these psychotropic drugs on human psyche and body, they will remain a favourite tool of the scientists to peer into world of mysterious mind. Dreams whether natural or induced are a conduit into the elusive realm of mind. Again, dream is what probably distinguishes humans from animals. If man ever loses his power to dream, that will spell the doom of his human existence. So, they must go on dreaming at least so long as they are humans.