In Somnium Veritas

I'm staying with my companion in a rather unusual hotel in Ireland. This place was known as a haunted castle. The room affordable for our budget was located in a secret tower where we came after a royal dinner on the first floor of the hotel: there was a long table covered with a red tablecloth with plenty of delicious dishes. Approaching the entrance to the tower where our room was, I am explained that this is a rather sacred place and only certain people can live and work here. Opening two doors, the iron one and the heavy wooden one, we climbed the dark staircase upstairs and entered a large bedroom. Below it, one floor down, were the restrooms. We felt that this tower was a direct haven for the spirits of the castle. I had a virtually sleepless night because I was scared. There were some rustles all night. I wrapped myself in a blanket and lay motionless. Something strange happened to my companion, she became as if possessed by these spirits: she moaned a lot and talked in her sleep. At 4 a.m., she got up and went downstairs to the bathroom. When I woke up, it was 7:20 a.m. and I noticed that my companion wasn't in the room. I lay alone in a large dark, dimly lit bedroom with small windows. This disappearance seemed to be very strange. I threw a blanket over myself and went downstairs to look for my companion, but I couldn't find her.

And then I wake up and realize it was just a dream. Beautiful, bright, terrifying, exciting. I scroll it over and over again in my mind, so I don't forget it and have time to write it down to the last detail. I also remember the "singing room" with walls that repeatedly echoed each sound so that it remained in the room for a very long time. No wonder voices were heard here. This room was masterly painted with frescoes on a medieval theme. Along one wall with an entrance, there were four pianos of different colors: white, red, black, and golden, – and I really wanted to play them.

Well-well, don’t sleep, it’s morning, time to get to work! I put down the phone where I recorded my dream, finally scrape myself off the bed, and go to the bathroom. Looking at my shaved face, I ask myself, "Ghosts? Spirits? Castle hotel in Ireland? Mysterious disappearance of a companion? What does all this mean?"On my way to work, I search for the meaning of the dream and find numerous interpretations in various dream books. Can they be trusted? And which interpretation is the correct one? Spoiler: my own.

Indeed, each person’s life experience is unique, and finding a universal interpretation of dreams is impossible. For one person, a dream about a white cat may signal danger—especially if they do not tolerate cats—while for another it may be about their recently deceased pet whom they miss dearly, and Miller’s dream dictionary would be of no help here. It's also worth keeping in mind that dreams themselves don't have any predictive power, unless we want them to come true, but that requires some effort. In other words, prophetic dreams do not exist. “What are you talking about?” you might object. “I had a dream today that came true: I dreamed I was a passenger on a spacecraft, and the next morning I learned that Elon Musk’s ship was preparing for launch!” A coincidence, I would say. And the work of your subconscious. However, such accidents can’t help but amaze us; you feel confident in life, because everything goes exactly as it should.

Although each person’s inner world is a universe unto itself, dreams across different people reveal common features and images that objectively characterize the human mind and allow us to compare mental activity. Carl Gustav Jung linked these images to archetypes and to manifestations of the collective unconscious, rooted in culture and human instincts.

You have probably dreamed of standing naked in a public place, feeling embarrassed. Psychoanalysts would tell you that you struggle with self-acceptance and fear your own imperfections. Another very common dream is the death of someone close—or perhaps your own death. This may indicate that you are on the verge of major changes that you fear.

And everything would be sweet and smooth if all these interpretations were not absolute speculation. Where is the truth?

That is precisely why I abandoned attempts to interpret my dreams. I was interested in something else...

It is known that most dreams occur during REM sleep, a phase in which we are immobilized while our eyes move rapidly. Scientists know fairly well what physiological changes and plastic reorganizations occur in the brain during this phase, but it remains unclear why the brain generates these strange movies we watch every night. Do they have any biological function, or are they merely an epiphenomenon unrelated to cognition?

Allan Hobson argues that dreams are a kind of virtual reality used to train and maintain our waking consciousness. If we assume that the brain is an organ that produces inferences or logical conclusions, then consciousness must be tied to explaining what happens around us. Every second, the brain models objective reality—and it can only operate on this model. You reach for a bottle of water to take a drink. Your brain must calculate the optimal trajectory of your hand to grasp the bottle. To do this, it uses information about the current position of your hand and the position of the bottle in your visual field, computing a so-called prediction error, which it seeks to minimize by moving the hand toward the bottle. After you take the bottle, the brain evaluates the accuracy and optimality of the movement. During wakefulness, the brain calibrates its calculations using sensory input (information from primary sensory areas) and prior experience interacting with the environment (information from prefrontal areas).

Thus, all models generated by the brain have two key properties: accuracy in describing the external environment and the number of parameters (complexity). These models are hierarchical: each high-level model can be decomposed into lower-level ones. Complex models with many parameters are energetically inefficient, and this problem of energy efficiency is resolved during REM sleep. If we stay awake for too long, the brain literally becomes hotter over time, and the ability to build accurate, generalizable models that can be applied to new situations declines. With complete sleep deprivation, severe disruptions in thermoregulation occur, leading to metabolic disorders and immune dysfunction, ultimately causing death in animals.

Interestingly, during REM sleep the brain disables an extremely important function—thermoregulation—just for the sake of optimizing its neural mechanisms. In addition to thermoregulation, all primary sensory systems are turned off. The brain receives no external signals, including certain internal ones (such as changes in body temperature). During dreaming, the internal censor that monitors the correspondence between internal programs and reality is also disabled. The brain gains freedom within itself and begins to play out various scenarios that could occur in real life. As these scenarios—hierarchical models of reality—are replayed, they are simplified: lower levels become more tightly and unambiguously linked to higher levels, and intermediate levels are reorganized. Upon awakening, the brain is better prepared for optimal and efficient interaction with the environment, since the models optimized during REM sleep can now be applied to interpret previously “hidden states” of reality that could not be understood before. Dream narratives thus serve as tools for explaining these hidden states.

This is how the chemist Kekulé discovered the structure of benzene, inspired by a dream image of a snake biting its own tail. This is how I realized what I wanted to do in life: I dreamed of performances and of searching for something unknown, and I realized that creative activity was something I belong to.

Yes, dreams can perhaps answer any question, as they carry enormous creative potential. During REM sleep, the brain stops releasing norepinephrine—a neurotransmitter necessary for sustaining attention and concentration. This creates conditions for greater associativity in thinking: the brain can afford to form distant and ambiguous associations, unlike in active wakefulness with high levels of attention and norepinephrine, where information from the external environment must be interpreted as quickly, accurately, and objectively as possible. Innovative ideas most often arise in states of reduced attention—during “mind-wandering”—when the brain disengages from the current problem and switches to an “autopilot” mode: a flow of thoughts irrelevant to the task at hand, which later significantly facilitate problem-solving. This was demonstrated in an experiment where participants were asked to generate as many unusual uses as possible for everyday objects (such as bricks) within a set time. Those who, during the break between two two-minute sessions, engaged in an activity that required little attentional effort and promoted mind-wandering performed better than those who either simply rested, engaged in attention-demanding activities, or continued working without a break.

Dreams are also a key to reconnecting with oneself, since dream narratives are always first-person stories reflecting a purely subjective aspect of reality. REM sleep is the brain state in which the model of the self—through which we interpret the entire sensory world—is established and refined. According to Hobson’s theory, this self-model begins forming even before birth, in the womb, when the proportion of REM sleep is maximal.

It seems to me that when real life does not correspond to one’s dreams—when dream scenarios cannot be played out in reality—this leads to a mismatch between the inner and the outer, between what is required and what is desired, and a person loses themselves. Hence the advice: if you suddenly feel that you have lost yourself, try to remember and analyze your dreams. Find in them what you fear most—something sacred. It will tell you what you need. Fall asleep with this in mind, so that in the morning you are fully armed to answer the tormenting existential question and find yourself once again.