How to make a million overnight?
By dreaming of it, duh.
However, let’s make something clear: even if you’re a bankrupt Warren Buffet and you wrap your mind around money 24/7, your trip to that sweet little dreamland cannot be guaranteed--because dreams are pretty damn unpredictable.
Since the dawn of mankind, dreams have long been as well a poetic source of inspiration as, in the form of nightmares, a chaotic origin of suffer. Still, it stands as the last resort of occultism; neither phycology nor neuroscience has touched the veil of its true nature.
Although, well, there are quite a few theories.
A new one was recently proposed by Johan Frederik Storm, a doctor and professor at the Institute of Basic Medical Sciences at the University of Oslo. Dreams, according to Doc. Storm, occur in the same cells in the cerebral cortex that receive the sensory stimuli through which we experience the real world when we’re awake.
When we sleep, these brain cells are activated by internal information in a different way, which leads the brain to present imaginary (but extremely immersive) simulations of possible scenarios that could actually happen. Those bizarre nights might be your brain reminding you of a potential crisis (figure 1).
(Or training you for potential assaults, as was in the unfortunate power nap of that wealthy Japanese target on the flight in Inception.)
It symbolizes an evolutionary function, as research in human, cats, dogs and various mammals yields similar results. That is to say: dreams of overnight fortunes symbolize the danger of wealth. Big ones, because it is so important that your descendants’ potential evolution is threatened!
Remember the Wolf of Wall Street?
The real question is: where do dreams come from?
A small cerebral wood behind your brain is where any possible dream originates.
I mean ANY. All possibilities. Buzz Lightyear kisses Sharon Stone, Deadpool assassins Da Vinci (perhaps a bad example), or Big Foot playing The Elden Ring----all simply a piece written and shot overnight in your brain.
How did it do it?
Cerebral cortex: Dream Theatre
Dreams arise in the cerebral cortex, which is the outer layer of the cerebrum.
The cells here are what we use to think and perceive with. The largest of these cells are called pyramidal cells, or pyramidal neurons (figure 2). They resemble trees, with roots, trunks and branches called dendrites.
“These cells are in a completely different state when we dream, which means that they’re driven by information from the brain's internal stores, instead of being activated by new sensory input from the real world”, Storm explains. “The SAME cells take in information from outer sensory stimuli and from memory, which is sent to the "tree crown" at the very top of the cell.” Researchers believe that the sensory stimuli coming in at the cells' "roots" are consciously perceived only when the cell has interpreted them by comparing them with the information at the treetop, at the opposite end of the cell.
Greek to English: the feelings (not thoughts, but direct, unprocessed feelings) are stored in the sensing cells connected to our eyes, noses, etc., and these cells make feelings the material for dreams.
Let’s assume that Riley’s always had a kink for ice hockey, and she often dreams of playing for the Minnesota Superior in the PWHL.
So, every time she watched or played a game, went to the stadium, closed a ticket sales pop-up ad, or saw the team’s franchise logo, the ‘roots’ record a note.
During nighttime, a band starts to remake the record. They take all pieces that could be found, and with a final touch by imagination, they perform a wonderful choir for our girl sound asleep: Riley got into Superior, sat on the bench for a few seasons, lost the final with her team, injured, retired and got divorced by her husband.
Yes, a nightmare. But hold on--who wrote the scripts for such dreams that go beyond our expectations, yet made them seem so logical at the same time?
The formation of dreams
The answer is still cortex cells, only those at the top of the corporate.
Based on the structure of cerebral cortex, Storm and his team theorize that the tree crown – the top of the pyramidal neurons – drives the dreams.
Researchers call this apical drive which means that the cells are "top driven" when we dream (figure 3).
This is where it gets abstract.
When we are awake, the pyramidal neurons in the cerebral cortex receive information about the world from the sensory organs. The cells interpret it according to internal information from memory and experiences.
Now, we are consciously perceiving things.
Yes, when Riley is pushing the puck forward, she actively accepts the feeling of joy.
When we dream, on the other hand, the cells receive less input from the sensory organs. However, large amounts of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine change the condition of cells so that they are driven by internal information from inside the brain.
Now, our experience is that we’re dreaming.
Here, note that the basis of this internal information is the experience and knowledge of the world that we learn and collect throughout our lives and store in our memory.
Thus, part of the reason why dreams seem absurd is that “consciously forgotten” memories are brought back to light and mixed up with new ones, which can easily confuse minds asleep.
So, next time you have one of these dreams, just sit back and quietly reflex:
Where do these memories come from???!!!
Brain’s model of the world through… guessing?
As mentioned earlier, dreams are models the brain builds to simulate possible future scenarios.
Data from sensory organs are not enough though. You got to have functions to build these models.
How?
"Even when we take information from real sensory stimuli directly into the cell roots in an awake state, the information is very difficult to interpret and basically completely incomprehensible to the brain,” Storm says, “But the pyramidal neurons can recognize patterns in the signals by comparing them with patterns stored in memory. This is how the brain can guess what we perceive, like recognizing a cup, a house or a human being.”
This is how the brain builds up an internal model of the outer world, by assembling and interpreting the sensory signals from the sensory organs. The brain thus uses previous experience to interpret what we see, smell, taste or hear. In an awake state, the cerebral cortex receives most of its information through the roots of the pyramidal cells. But when we sleep, “this information flow to the roots is turned almost all the way off,” Storm says. This is why some dreams make no sense: as fragments of memories are presented in a chaotic order, we can’t understand them with our experience.
To conclude, there are two explanations of the logic behind Riley’s nightmare:
She read the story somewhere in the news (short-term memory combined with sensory impressions)
She didn’t think much about her future as a Minnesota Superior, and just let her brain assemble her impressions with chaotic functions that make little sense.
The Functions of Dreams (if there are any)
Researchers are still unsure of what functions dreams have. The topic is controversial and was discussed by leading experts in the Forum for Consciousness Research in Oslo in 20196.
An interesting possibility is that dreams can serve to explore, complement and improve the brain's internal model of the outer world. Through simulations, they prepare us for situations we could possibly imagine.
In dream models where few functions exist, the brain can test new combinations of sensory input that we can never or rarely experience while awake. This may explain why a lot of dreams seem so absurd and different from our real experiences, since it is exactly in models that we feel anxious.
Researchers believe that this function may be an important basis for our imagination, fantasy and planning ability. Though observed in many mammals, these abilities are especially highly developed in human beings.
"The new mechanism that we propose in our dream theory, apical drive, may actually be even more important in our waking state than in dreams,” Storm says.
Conclusion
What we see is what we dream, although not in a strict chronicle order.
Did the spin stop? Well, the extent of certainty in your answer to the question is exactly the extent that your dreams differ from reality.
References
1. Jaan Aru et.al.: Apical drive - a cellular mechanism of dreaming?, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 2020.
2. J.F. Pagel, Philip Kirshtein, Chapter Three - Animal Dreaming—Animal Consciousness, Editor(s): J.F. Pagel, Philip Kirshtein, Machine Dreaming and Consciousness, Academic Press, 2017, Pages 33-48, ISBN 9780128037201.
3. Francesca Siclari, Neurobiology of dreams, Editor(s): Clete A. Kushida, Encyclopedia of Sleep and Circadian Rhythms (Second Edition), Academic Press, 2023, Pages 208-216, ISBN 9780323910941.
5. Neophytos Christodoulou, Paris A. Skourides, Cell-Autonomous Ca2+ Flashes Elicit Pulsed Contractions of an Apical Actin Network to Drive Apical Constriction during Neural Tube Closure, Cell Reports, Volume 13, Issue 10, 2015, Pages 2189-2202, ISSN 2211-1247.
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