- So I've been arguing that REM sleep is crucial
for religious consciousness
and for human creative capacities
and for human cultural evolution,
but when it goes off the rails, it's associated
with a lot of very serious disorders as well-
everything from depression to isolated sleep paralysis
and nightmares in particular.
Now a "nightmare" is defined
by most sleep medicine specialists
as simply a scary, terrifying dream that wakes you up.
A lot of other sleep medicine specialists say,
"Well, it doesn't need to wake you up."
If you have a really terrifying dream, that's a nightmare.
And we know that nightmares tend to occur during REM sleep.
And we know that lots of kids go through a phase
where they have lots of nightmares,
and then they sort of disappear for most people.
But the people who are vulnerable to nightmares
have sort of a disinhibited form of REM neurobiologies.
REM tends to erupt into their waking consciousness,
a little bit,
and they get these dissociative states during the daytime,
and, unfortunately, nightmares during the night.
So, nightmares for the most part,
there's nothing good about them,
and I just wanna underline the fact
that there are very good treatments.
You don't have to suffer from nightmares.
But from the point of view of somebody
investigating religious consciousness,
nightmares are particularly important
because for most people who have nightmares,
supernatural agents appear,
and for many of them,
particularly for people with religious backgrounds,
those supernatural agents will be demonic agents.
And unfortunately, those demonic agents
really have very specific, enduring effects
on this person's suffering from nightmares.
There are many examples,
but when you look at series of nightmares over time,
one common pattern is that before
the series of nightmares begin,
a demon appears just in the room.
The person has a nightmare and they say,
"I woke up from the dream and, wow,
there's this weird demon in my room.
But he was just there, he wasn't doing anything.
It scared me, and I woke up."
And then a week later, they'll have a very similar dream
with the same demon, and the demon will now be near the bed.
No longer in the corner of the room, but near the bed.
The third week I have the nightmare again,
it's a very similar nightmare,
and now the demonic agent knows
that the dreamer is aware of them,
and so the demonic agent ups his game
and tries to get closer and closer
to the individual having the nightmare.
And so the individual starts to put up barriers
to protect themselves.
In an individual who's particularly vulnerable
to nightmares, these barriers will eventually not work.
And they need to get clinical help before that happens
because in many cases, the demonic agent is out to possess
the individual's consciousness.
And the individual will wake up.
I mean, if you look at case studies of demonic possession,
they invariably occur after a series of nightmares
and then finally the demonic agent in the nightmare
possesses the individual's consciousness,
and they wake up in a possessed state.
And then you need, you know, like, exorcism rituals
to get rid of the demonic agent.
So those are some of the ways in which nightmares teach us
about supernatural agents and religious consciousness,
and why, obviously, you do not wanna have nightmares.
However, nightmares have been around, we're almost certain,
for many thousands of years.
We have evidence
that people who experience frequent nightmares
but are able to control them
and able to control the demonic agent
in traditional tribal societies gain great social status,
'cause who can be more powerful
than a person who can control a demonic agent?
The nightmares mark them off as special human beings
that the divine has called them in a special way,
and only somebody who's strong enough
to deal with those demonic agents are called to be a shaman
or a spiritual guide for others.
So, that's how people with nightmares
in traditional societies were held,
you know, in special, high regard
because they carried this special burden.
So, nightmares tell us a lot about religious consciousness,
and about REM neurobiology.
One of the things they tell us about REM neurobiology
is REM has special, computational, neurological machinery
to handle trauma.
We think that the fear extinction circuit in REM sleep
functions differently during a nightmare
than during a ordinary dream,
and the reason why the fear extinction circuit,
the computational machinery that's used
to handle emotional traumas, doesn't function well
is that the fear extinction circuit breaks down
at a certain gate-
it's blocked for some reason in some individuals.
And because the brain uses REM sleep to handle traumas,
and when that trauma can't be handled effectively,
immediately the trauma memories hang around in REM sleep,
and you get PTSD.
So, every night the individual continually tries
to integrate the trauma into long-term memory stores
and then get rid of it.
And that's why REM is so crucial
for getting through calamities and plagues
and all kinds of horrible events
because it's nature's special way
to handle emotional trauma.