CEO

How you see mathematics as being involved in psychological problem solving during sleep?

I brought up the subject of mathematics merely to indicate how I was initially led to believe that I might have an insight into sleep. (See in this Website, Additional Information in English/ Articles on Line/ Normal Adult Human Sleep as a Problem Solving. I/II, New Look at Freud’s Botanical Dream Monograph) Theoretical physics at the work-a-day level is mathematical problem solving. While working to solve such math problems, I recognized certain regularities in the way my mind worked. The parallel I drew was between non-REM sleep and unconscious problem solving effort, on the one hand, and REM sleep and conscious problem solving effort, on the other. A sameness in mental activities was assumed to extend merely to the supposition that whenever humans solve problems of any kind, they do so in cycles of activity. In other words, it was not assumed that we solve problems during sleep using exactly the same mental processes we use when solving math problems.

I probably would not have pursued this viewpoint any farther if it weren’t for other intriguing parallels between daytime problem solving and sleep. These parallels involve the irregularity of non-REM/REM cycles, body movements, and galvanic skin responses. Success in these areas gave me the confidence to tackle the data pertaining to naps and sleep and REM-state deprivation. This viewpoint remains the only credible process-level concept of sleep that has ever been postulated.

Could you explain your interpretation of major aspects of the physiological data pertaining to normal adult human sleep?

I believe that sleep is dominated by a learning process and that homeostatic and other physiological processes are integrated with this, as they must be. The learning process involves the integration of new learning with learning held in long-term memory. This supposition, made 30 years ago, assumes that long-term memories can be modified by new information. Interestingly, that has been found to be the case. That is, it has been demonstrated that long-term memories are retrieved in a liable state and then become “reconstructed” through the incorporation of new learning. I believe that the REM state involves a literal simulation of experience that has the purpose of evoking and integrating old and new memories. Much new information about what occurs during non-REM sleep has recently become available. I am taking a look at this to see how the concepts I introduced 30 years ago need to be modified. I don’t expect to change the view that non-REM sleep functions as preparatory effort for REM sleep.

What is the difference between solving problems during dreaming, through math, and through other approaches?

The main difference is that problem solving during sleep is much more all-embracive and that it is dominated by social learning. We are the most social beings on the planet, in the sense that our social interactions continually call for adjustments in behavior to a degree that is unmatched by other species. This degree of social adaptiveness during the day explains why learning dominates human sleep to a greater degree than is true of other mammals.

What is your opinion of the statement that is often assumed that dream recall accurately reflects the mental activities interrupted by awakening?

I believe that we accurately recall only a small fraction of the mental activities interrupted by awakening.  In the first place, the adaptations being formed during sleep must embrace both motivational and skill learning, yet all we recall in terms of dreams is motivational content. The skill learning component is absent. Secondly, we are most likely to recall REM sleep content when we awaken. Our final REM period of the night is often 45 minutes to 1 hour long, yet if one were to go to dream databases such as at http://dreambank.net, one would find no dream report that credibly describes events of that duration. Obviously, content is missing. Thirdly, it is known that mammals have a poor memory for events that occurred during one conscious waking state while in another conscious waking state. That is true even when the differences in states of consciousness are minor. Our state of consciousness during the REM state is arguably vastly different from that while we are awake. So simply on this basis, one would expect the recall of REM state events to be poor .That assumption is obviously false. In the first place, the adaptations being formed during sleep must embrace both motivational and skill learning, yet all we recall in terms of dreams is motivational content. The skill learning component is absent. Secondly, we are most likely to recall REM sleep content when we awaken. Our final REM period of the night is often 45 minutes to 1 hour long, yet if one were to go to dream databases such as at http://dreambank.net, one would find no dream report that credibly describes events of that duration. Obviously, content is missing. Thirdly, it is known that mammals have a poor memory for events that occurred during one conscious waking state while in another conscious waking state. That is true even when the differences in states of consciousness are minor. Our state of consciousness during the REM state is arguably vastly different from that while we are awake. So simply on this basis, one would expect the recall of REM state events to be poor.

Does REM dream content reflect common considerations of everyday life concerns?

Yes, primarily as these events relate to the person’s psychological and social development.

How does physics help explain dreaming?

I don’t think it does, but I do think that the general approach to science taken by physicists would help advance sleep research. Physicists train to become either experimental physicists or theoretical physicists. In the life sciences generally one finds only experimentalists. Those who delve into theory are primarily experimentalists who have had a great deal of experience over the course of a career in some area of specialty. What this means in practice is that the theories that get generated are actually minitheories framed around the experimentalists’ areas of specialty. The subjects of sleep and dreaming require a global perspective, not a hodgepodge of competing minitheories. I believe that the theoretical state of disarray we find ourselves in today will continue until we start turning out sleep and dream researchers who are trained to advance aspects of global theories, as theoretical physicists are trained today, thereby maintaining a global perspective. Of course, before one can start this training program, a provisional global sleep/dream theory needs to be developed.

What does the New Look of Freud’s Botanical Monograph Dream consist of?

When people interpret dreams, they generally make appeals to emotional logic, which is an inferior form of logic. Dreams are also often not interpreted as preparations for the next day. Nor do dream interpretations usually take into account a dream’s participation in psychological development. The point of that exercise in dream analysis was to show that (1) dreams can be interpreted without recourse to inferior logic, (2) dreams can be interpreted in terms of their relevancy to the next day’s events, (3) they can be interpreted in ways that include psychological development, and (4) all of these various interpretative goals can be accomplished in an integrated fashion. Accomplishing all of that in a limited space meant providing a “bare bones” analysis, which struck me as being somewhat unsatisfactory, but I didn’t want to blur the lines of discourse by including more speculative information. This is why I didn’t provide a more psychoanalytic interpretation of the dream, even though my colleagues in the San Francisco Psychotherapy Research Group (http://www.sfprg.org) would have preferred I had done so.

Vic Comello's study of sleep, dreaming, and psychoanalytic psychology has resulted in the publication of a continuing series of articles that may be found on this website and on the San Francisco Psychotherapy Research Group's website at http://controlmastery.org.

Email:vcomello@anl.gov.