The dream world: it’s not the realm of humans alone but may be synonymous with being alive for most animals and even plants. Everyone poops, but they also dream.
Studies suggest bees and spiders may have a dream-like experience, but it’s anyone’s guess what they’re dreaming of. Maybe bees dream of playing, as experiments have shown they enjoy toys!
Even without eyelids, researchers are finding signs of REM sleep in fish, cuttlefish and zebrafish. Imagine that the next time you look at an aquarium.
Reptiles have REM activity during sleep, too, although it may only last 90 seconds. Maybe they’re dreaming of catching a juicy bug or sunning on a rock.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies suggest birds dream, and even what they’re dreaming of, rehearsing their songs and flying. Lab rats dream of the mazes they run during the day.
Incredibly, biologists even say plants dream through complex neural networks in the roots and stems. Some research suggests plants may have premonitions about future extreme weather and droughts!
Related: Scientists Discover Evidence of Bird Navigation Superpowers
Video by Science Magazine:
Why are We All Dreaming?
The question remains of where dreams are happening and why. Scientists look at REM activity and find it in modern birds and mammals in the forebrain. Yet reptiles and flightless birds have activity in the more ancient brain stem. So dreaming is associated with activity in completely different brain regions. It’s different depending on the animal, and, as noted, could even happen in a plant’s roots.
Is the brainstem the “ancestral crucible of REM before it slowly migrated toward the forebrain?” Is the bird brain the “where evolution designed dreams,” as a recent NY Times essay suggests?
Although brain activity is seen in specific brain regions during REM sleep, the dreamworld remains shrouded in mystery, like the subject of consciousness. And why would we evolve to dream in the first place?
“The purpose of dreaming remains a mystery, but infants (of all species) dream more often. This is probably because the sensory stimulation helps form new neural connections. In adults, the best working theory is that dreams stimulate the regions of the brain associated with memory,” writes Popular Science.
The same Times essay suggests an answer for why dreams evolved, which is tantalizing, practicing “the possible into real,” and evolving our “dreams into reality.” Birds practice their songs to sing them aloud when the sun comes up. They dream of flying to far-away places and then do it when they migrate, sleeping with one eye open.
Everything Was Once a Dream
Likewise, we rehearse what we will do as if preparing for actions in waking reality. As a Peter Gabriel lyric goes, everything we see was once a dream in someone’s head.
“Looking down on empty streets, all she can see
Are the dreams all made solid
Are the dreams made real
All of the buildings, all of the cars
Were once just a dream
In somebody’s head,” Mercy Street by Peter Gabriel.
Dreams as the Brain’s Defense
Dreaming, like consciousness, ventures into non-scientific, metaphysical, and spiritual territory. But as always, science looks for material explanations, like stimulating, creating, and protecting neural networks.
A new hypothesis is dreaming protects the visual cortex. If we didn’t go into a dream state, that region could be overrun by competing brain functions, so eventually, we wouldn’t be able to see.
“Think of dreaming like a computer screen saver that is set to go off every 90 minutes—except that instead of protecting against frozen images, dreams prevent the visual cortex from being usurped by other functions. These visual hallucinations in the night may let us see during the day,” reported Scientific American.
Which Dream is Real?
If dreaming protects our visual cortex, why do blind animals, like blind mole rats, still have REM sleep? And, what of plants, if they do indeed have a dream state? It all leads to the multidimensional, metaphysical, and spiritual territory, as with consciousness. Dreaming turns science on its head, asking, “Do we really know what’s real?”
“We wake from one dream into another dream.”– Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Finding the answers to dreaming requires abandoning left-brain logic in favor of right-brain intuition. There, we fall down a rabbit hole where science can’t follow. Yet, there’s information to suggest that heightened REM states allow our consciousness to travel out of the body.
If so, it suggests our physical bodies, our brains, and our cells and universe of neurons are not abiding, yet the dream goes on regardless.
Where Dreams Merge with Consciousness
For example, watch the video below about the CIA’s declassified information on the Gateway Process. According to the report, REM states can even lead to astral projection anywhere in the universe, even into other dimensions. In this view, the universe is the holographic construct of consciousness itself, which we all share. A collective consciousness or dream? Which is it? It merges into one.
According to Gateway, one can, for an instant, “click out” of human perception. And there, you find infinity beyond time and space, the ‘Absolute.’ Put in non-scientific terms, it’s the abode beyond Ra, the place where enlightened ones and mystics like Buddha and Christ traveled through meditation. According to ancient beliefs, this singular undefinable consciousness is what dreams us all into being, similar to how we create our individual dreamscapes each night.
So, which dream is real? Does it really matter when matter itself is temporary? Maybe the more important question is which dream is abiding and which is just a distracting illusion.
The Gateway Process by The Why Files:
Featured image: Buddha via Pixabay