Status Updates From Why we dream - the definit...

References and notes start at 90%. Love it! Review to come. It took a while for me to get into this book, but I think the screen I was reading it on was too small and I couldn’t focus well enough on it. Once I switched to a bigger screen, it was great! LOVED this book!

“Interesting studies from WHO show that flourishing rural communities in third world countries, using these sort of naturally supportive approaches, have a much higher success rate in curing psychotic illness than developed western countries that have come to rely on ‘antipsychotic’ meditation. (Note 46)”

“Because psychotic people are so hypersensitive to metaphor, mental health professionals need to be trained how to reduce their patients’ arousal levels with calming metaphors. Conversely, they need to consciously avoid metaphors that may remind patients of their predicament, flipping them back into right hemisphere dominance and psychosis.”

“Neurophysiological evidence confirms that, when schizophrenic people are hearing voices, the speech centers in the left neocortex are activated. (Note 38)”

“We don’t talk when the right hemisphere is dominant during dreaming in REM sleep... during a psychotic episode, if the person is in the REM state awake, there would still be some logical activity and thinking taking place in the left hemisphere. But, because the REM stare is not anticipating any input from the left hemisphere, it has to interpret those thoughts metaphorically...” (aliens, voices, etc)

“...she was very agitated and in an active psychotic state. The more we studied the video, the more it became clear to us that the teacher was exhibiting REM state phenomena. These included rapid eye movements with the eyes open, dissociation, instant emotional responses to metaphors, ... This gave us the possibility...schizophrenia is waking reality processed through the dreaming brain.”

“It is in Stage 4 slow-wave sleep that growth hormones are released, which is thought to repair the damage caused to body tissues by the west and tear of everyday activities.” So too much REM sleep prevents the body from healing.

“In one meta-analysis of hundreds of studies, for example, it was found that depressed people given psychodynamic, ‘insight’ oriented therapy (such as psychoanalysis and gestalt therapy) had a poorer outcome than control groups of depressed people who received no treatment of any kind. (Note 29) In other words, psychodynamic forms of therapy can make depression worse.”

“Today’s worry brings on tomorrow’s depression.”

“Research by drug companies (not highly publicized) has shown that there is virtually no difference in outcome between antidepressant treatment and treatment by placebos. (Note 28)... a well-delivered placebo generates hope. And hope will focus attention elsewhere. With realistic hope in place, individuals are less likely to misuse imagination and catastrophise.”

Their theory is that depression is caused by mis-use of imagination. Interesting.

This is going beyond just dreaming and I like it. So deep!

“Once you are sensitized to the prevalence of metaphor in everyday communications, you may be surprised to discover that an apparently irrelevant anecdote or joke that a friend or relative suddenly feels inspired to tell may actually be a metaphor for how they feel about an aspect of your relationship with them, which they are consciously reluctant to communicate.”

Now he’s discussing how we learn metaphorically and need to go into a trance like state to connect new info to what we already have in our head. This is so fascinating!

This book is growing my Mt. TBR...

Wow! I just realized I had internalized the knowledge that dreams resolve open issues when I had a dream that a friend of mine who was backing off of our friendship was driving away from me. I woke up and felt better about our relationship changing. Before I was sad and confused, but after the dream I realized that they were the one leaving me and I was ok with respecting their decision.

The common everyday trance happens about every 90 minutes and lasts for about 20 minutes. During that time, the brain switches from left brained thinking to right brained. It is then when one is more suggestible as the logical left brain isn’t in primary control. Good to know!

“Trance logic is regarded by some investigators as a sure sign that someone is hypnotized.” Ie-being told to close a window in a hot room and the hypnotized person saying it was because the room was cold and drafty.

“Hypnosis is simply any artificial means of accessing the REM state whilst awake.”

Hypnosis is a trance state and when used properly, it can aid in the healing of ailments of the mind and body. Interesting!

“We all flip in and out of trance states many times a day, and we will show that this is intimately connected with the REM state. A trance is a focused state of attention, a state of utter absorption.”

Dreaming helps memory. “Once the metaphorical acting out of the introspected false starts has taken place, the autonomic arousal is switched off, allowing the ‘correct’ memory to be consolidated-hence the improvement in memory for certain types of learning after REM sleep.”

“...as Jung expert Professor Richard Noll of Harvard explained...’If you were actually somebody in need, Jung basically just opened up your head to his crazy ideas and made it fuzzier. His techniques took away people’s ability to focus their attention and separate out thoughts. He shot their cognitive resources to hell.’ “

“Freud, who once wrote, ‘In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow men, with few exceptions, are worthless,’ was a walking disaster as a therapist. He had no written up cases that were successful and frequently blamed his patients for their failure to recover.” (Note #11)

“Freud’s notion that the unconscious is a filthy cesspit of stored-up repressed wishes and sexual desires that accumulate from childhood was hopelessly wrong.” I always thought Freud was projecting his sexual issues onto his patients. Everything can’t be about sex.

“Joe reflected that the repeated false starts which a stutterer makes when he tries to speak could easily be caused by both speech areas (in each brain hemisphere) trying to control speech at once.” Parentheses added by me to clarify.