- In the modern age,
we've lost our reverence for the dream state-
but REM sleep is what has made us special.
We see glimpses of these other possible worlds
in our dreams, and more and more evidence is accumulating,
which suggests that REM sleep was absolutely critical
to the evolution of the special cognitive capacities
that human beings; evidence and therefore, critical
to our cultural evolution, and our special creativity.
And what REM sleep normally does is it creates
this very high cholinergic environment in the brain.
And that environment allows
for intense creativity because it promotes connections
between otherwise disparate ideas.
So it creates all kinds of bizarre ideas,
but all kinds of creative ideas as well.
So, when our ancestors
in the upper-Paleolithic acquired greater access
to the REM sleep state, both during sleep
and during waking consciousness, it helped to fuel the onset
of cumulative cultural evolutionary processes.
We know that REM sleep is especially important
for human beings because we, as a species,
have invested some 22%
of our total sleep time in REM,
and that's 10% more time devoted to REM
than our primate relatives.
So it's constantly creating these dream worlds for us,
and we can then compare our current world
with these alternative simulations of possible worlds.
And it gives us something to say,
"That world is valuable and this world is less valuable-
so let's strive for the ideal."
And that creates tremendous forward goal-seeking behaviors
in all human cultural groups.
So REM has been crucial to human creativity.
Now human REM sleep has a lot
of very peculiar characteristics.
Every 90 minutes, we go into REM sleep,
and our bodies become paralyzed.
Yet our brains are more activated
than they are during waking consciousness,
and we're forced to watch these things we call dreams.
So why would Mother Nature do something like that?
We don't know.
But among its effects are,
it creates these dissociative experiences
and associative experiences.
The dissociative experiences are something that lots
of us experience.
There's dreamy states where you feel
like you're not quite yourself
and you're in like a déjà vu experience
or a fluid mental state,
a flow state, but you're not sure what's real,
what's unreal because you're immersed in all this imagery.
But as you go through those kinds of dissociative states,
it starts to relax or resolve into an associative state
so that things that were previously unrelated get combined.
And when unrelated ideas combine,
creative, innovative things happen;
and REM sleep promotes
that associative state big time.
So, one might wanna harness REM given its contributions
to the human evolutionary project and human flourishing.
To do so, I'd recommend two things:
One is to seek out surprise
because what triggers REM is when you find
that your current self model isn't operating that well,
you need a new self model.
What happens with a surprising event, particularly
if it's intense, is it triggers an orienting reaction.
The more intense the orienting reaction,
the more likely it's gonna recruit
what's called PGO waves.
So seek out surprise so that it will trigger these PGO waves
and then more intense REM states.
And then just traditional methods,
like keeping a dream diary and trying
to trigger lucid dream states might be advisable as well
in some people, not everybody.
Our culture has lost its reverence for the dream state,
whereas traditional cultures absolutely reverenced dreams,
and I think some due reverences would help the culture
because it would create more openness
to creativity and disparate ideas.
This can help us solve the unknown unknowns,
and help us get creative solutions
to the problems people are facing.