Phosphenes and false memories

When I was a little girl, I had an unsuitably early bedtime. I wasn't even tired until about 2 hours after my bedtime. (Not a good parenting strategy, BTW. I became incapable of falling asleep in less than 2 hours even when I was tired, and it took until I was nearly 30 to overcome this.)

However, when I was small I did want to be a good girl, so I would lie in bed with my eyes closed trying really hard to fall asleep.

But a small child doesn't have the inner resources to just lie there doing nothing. I needed something to amuse myself.  Something that I could do while lying in bed with my eyes closed.

So I started watching the colours that I saw behind my eyelids when I closed my eyes (which, I would learn decades later, are called phosphenes). They would move and morph of their own volition, making for an interesting light show.

After some time, I gradually gained control over how the phosphenes moved and morphed.  It never became easy to move them - imagine the nuance of playing a theramin combined with the force required to fight the repulsion of like magnetic poles - but with effort I could manipulate them. I made it into a game, with my goal being to produce a red and blue checkerboard (the reason why I chose a red and blue checkerboard was lost to history) and I was able to reach the checkerboard almost every night.

However, around the age of 8, I developed a new intellectual skill. At the time I called it "thinks", but I now know that it's called Mary Sue fanfiction - mentally writing stories inserting myself into various works of fiction. I found this a far more enjoyable way to spend the hours before I fell asleep, and my phosphenes fell by the wayside.

That pattern has continued ever since, with the addition of romantic fantasies once I reached the point in my life where that was of interest.  But every once in a while, during a bout of insomnia, I'd reach for the phosphenes again and find that I was out of practice, but could still manipulate them.

Until my head injury.

In the aftermath of my head injury, I completely lost the ability to daydream or fantasize. (It began returning 4 months later, but even now a year later, it's still not available 100% of the time like it was before the head injury.)

So, as I lay in bed waiting to fall asleep, I reached for my phosphenes.

And they weren't there.

I could see a pattern that looked like a red and green lava lamp, but it wasn't moving at all. And, behind the lava lamp, I could see the eye of Sauron. But it wasn't my phosphenes. It was immovable, unchanging, and vaguely terrifying.

I spent a lot of time lying in bed with my eyes closed after my head injury, and this eye of Sauron was always staring back at me through the lava lamp. I couldn't control it, I couldn't change it, my old familiar patterns weren't there, and I couldn't even fantasize.

I wasn't even sure if I was human any more.

After some months, the eye of Sauron went away. (Its departure correlated with my first burst of vision therapy progress, but I can't tell if this is a cause and effect relationship.)  I also regained the ability to fantasize, so I luxuriated in my newly-regained imagination and stopped worrying about my phosphenes.

Then, a few weeks ago, my phosphenes came back.

And they're completely different!

Sometimes they consist of green figures that remind me of Chinese characters (I can't read Chinese so I couldn't tell you if they're actually Chinese characters, and it's not logistically possible for me to draw them. But wouldn't it be interesting if they said something in Chinese!)

Sometimes they consist of indescribable shapes and colours that are completely different from the indescribable shapes and colours I had previously.

A new and interesting feature is that occasionally a cartoon character will peek its head out from behind the swirling shapes and colours. I can't name any of the cartoon characters, but I have no idea if they're my brain's own creation or existing cartoon characters that my subconscious memory somehow internalized. (Again, it's not logistically possible to draw them, and I haven't been able to google my way to a "Yes! That's it!" moment of recognition.)

These new phosphenes are so interesting and different that I've put daydreaming/fantasy aside, and spend some time exploring them every night as I wait for sleep to overtake me.  I can't control them like I could the old ones (or, at least, I can't yet control them - I haven't a clue whether I'll eventually regain that ability), but I can sort of look around, zoom in, and generally watch the show.

But the most fascinating thing about Phosphenes 2.0 is that after I spend some time watching them, I get a false memory.

Example of a false memory: I was climbing up the side of a building. Partway through I thought "This doesn't seem safe - I shouldn't be able to hang onto the side of a building with just my fingertips." Then I thought "Don't be silly, you've done this thousands of times, people do it every day!"

Of course, I've never actually climbed the side of a building, and I'm not physically capable of hanging off a building by just my fingertips.  And people don't do it every day.

But, somehow, my brain served up that ridiculousness like a memory (as opposed to like a dream or a predream).

Ever since my phosphenes returned, this happens every night. The Phosphenes 2.0 Show, followed by a false memory, followed by the realization that the false memory is false, and then I promptly fall asleep.

It will be interesting to see how long my brain keeps this up for!

How working from home affects my subconscious

One side-effect of working from home is that my subconscious seems to be less active.  I don't notice the lack of subconscious activity itself, but when I have a now-unusual) high-interaction day, I notice that I'm predreaming a lot more as I wait to fall asleep.  And the content of the predreaming is most often directly related to the interaction of the day - I can hear the voices and cadences of the people I interacted with echoing in the background, like you would if you were nodding off in a crowded room.

I don't specifically remember the influence of the people I interacted with in my subconscious before I started working from home, but it's quite possible I didn't notice it because it was baseline. 

If asked to think about my dreams or predreams in isolation, I would never say that I feel they're not what they should be on a regular work-at-home day. But, nevertheless, they are far more vibrant on high-interaction days, with content directly related to the interactions of the day.

Dreams of being stalked

Lately I've been having dreams of being stalked and harassed to an extent that has never happened in real life.

For example:

1. I dreamed I was an astronaut on my way to go to space.  (This is not an uncommon theme in my dreams - quite often I'm an astronaut on my way to space when I get interrupted by people being mean.)  I was walking to my spaceship, and this gang of frat boy types came along and kept blocking my path and catcalling me.

2. I dreamed I was grocery shopping, and one of my purchases was a bottle of champagne.  (Yes, from the grocery store. Apparently my subconscious doesn't know Ontario liquor laws.)  The cashier, who was a very tall, large, imposing teenage boy, packed all my groceries normally, then opened the bottle of champagne and started pouring it over the rest of the groceries.  I was shocked and told him to stop, but he just kept mocking me for not liking him pouring my champagne all over my groceries.  I called for the manager by shouting "MANAGER! MANAGER!" and all the people in line joined in calling for the manager, until the manager eventually came over and made him stop. But then, as I walked home, the cashier started following me and yelling at me for complaining that he'd poured champagne all over my groceries.

The strongest correlation of these dreams is computer-related stress.  If I go to bed feeling stress or nerves because of computer issues, I'm highly likely to have a dream of being stalked or harassed.

Psychoanalyze that!

In which I dream my way into a starring role in a Community spin-off

Last night I dreamed I was a student at Greendale Community College (where the TV show Community is set) and I had to take a chemistry placement test.  The chemistry prof was a crotchety old man (who, in retrospect, bore a striking - but not perfect - resemblance to the criminology prof who's been introduced this season) and, during the placement test, he led me to believe I was nowhere near good enough to be in his class.

Towards the end of the dream, I was in the chemistry lab, and I mentioned to someone "I'm not going to be taking any classes in this room.  Well, probably not."  The crotchety prof, without letting his facade of crotchetiness drop an inch, said something like "Don't be so sure about that" and lifted the piece of paper he was holding so I could see I'd gotten an A- on the placement test.  (For those of you who don't watch it or aren't caught up, this season of Community has established that an A- is the grade professors give to students they don't like who have done work worthy of an A.) 

I gave the crotchety prof a knowing smile and said "I look forward to it," knowing in that instant that I was setting myself up for multiple seasons of respectful antagonism à la Leslie Knope and Ron Swanson.

Then I woke up.

It will be interesting to see if I ever dream my way back there for further adventures.

What if bad dreams are contagious?

Every time I tweet that I had bad or weird dreams the night before, one of my local twitter followers replies that they did too. Every time someone local on my twitter feed mentions they had bad or weird dreams, it turns out I did too.

What if bad dreams are caused by something in the air? Weather or air pressure or air quality or something? I wonder if anyone has ever studied whether people in the same geographical area have bad dreams at the same time?

(Of course, based on this same anecdotal evidence, one could also conclude that Twitter causes bad dreams.)

Failure dreams

Many many people (including me) have dreams that they didn't finish high school. If you tell someone "I had that dream where I didn't finish high school," it's quite likely they'll know exactly which dream you mean.

I wonder if there's a similarly pervasive dream in culture that don't have high school? I wonder what people who actually didn't finish high school (but are no longer in school) have in place of it?

My dreams are back!

For my whole life, I've gotten particularly vivid, interesting, and emotionally satisfying dreams right before I wake up naturally. That's why it's so important to me to sleep to completion at least once a week. My typical pattern is I sleep until early morning, wake up to pee, and, if I don't have to get up early that day, go back to bed for dream time. The dreams come at their best around 8-10 a.m., regardless of what time I went to bed.

But this pattern got disrupted when my GERD asserted itself this past summer. During the initial phase when I couldn't eat, I was going to bed early from fatigue and weakness and waking up early from hunger. After I was diagnosed, my diagnosis kept haunting my dreams (a recurring character was a demon with my face and a gremlin's body who had been sentenced to a hell where she was forced to eat the exact same quantity of the exact same dry, tasteless food every day, regardless of how hungry she was). The changes to my bedtime routine I made to trick myself into drinking less made me go to bed early, which made me wake up early, which made me miss peak dreaming time.

But the past few nights, I've naturally stayed up late, and naturally slept later, and finally started having dreams like I'm used to. Vivid, interesting, plot-filled, satisfying dreams that I'm physically capable of returning to after waking up if I roll back over and close my eyes again.

Some might say that this isn't a good thing, that it was better when I was naturally waking up earlier without any particular incentive to go back to sleep. But my dream time is an important part of myself that I'd thought I'd lost forever, so I'm very glad to have it back!

My subconscious does mashups

Last night, I somehow ended up watching a bunch of Springsteen videos on youtube. Then I had dream based on the Dancing in the Dark video, where an oddly attractive young Bruce Springsteen pulls a girl (who the internet swears is Courtney Cox) out from the audience to dance with him on stage. But in my dream, they started doing Billy Elliot-style dancing (like starting at 1:30 here) in perfect unison while singing Born to Run.

I think I'd actually pay good money to see that.

(Unfortunately, that was followed by a dream where I had to stay at in university residence to do on-site training and my room was infested with scorpions, so I woke up edgy despite such entertaining dreams.)

My subconscious is smarter than me

In the dream I was having just before I woke up, I needed to exchange cell phone numbers with a strange man. I didn't like him, he didn't like me, but we would be needing to make some logistical arrangements later. So he reads off his cell number for me: "Four one six, five nine four, **mumble mumble mumble mumble**"

"I'm sorry," I reply, "I didn't catch those last four numbers."

With facial expressions, body language, and intonation that all suggest he is reading off the numbers slowly and clearly, he once again mutters something unintelligible.

I'm feeling kind of embarrassed now, but we do have to get this done, so I say "I'm sorry, I still didn't catch that. I don't know what's wrong with me. Maybe if you just type it into my phone yourself..."

"Oh, don't worry," he says "I was just testing to make sure you aren't a spy."

It turns out he thought I might be a spy from the country that he perceived to be his country's enemy, so he was casually reading off the numbers in the mother tongue of the country he thought I might be spying for to see if I understood.

That's brilliant! It wasn't his own mother tongue, it was the mother tongue of the enemy country. So someone from that country might have effortlessly understood the numbers and typed them in without even realizing it. I never would have thought of that! I might have thought of using my own mother tongue, but I never would have come up with using the enemy country's mother tongue.

Except that I did think of that. In my subconscious, because this was a dream I had! Spooky!

Spooky dream

Last night I dreamed that I was going to meet my mother and grandmother somewhere, but first had to pick something up at her house. As I looked through her kitchen for the macguffin, I accidentally hit something on her gas stove (IRL it's an ordinary, old-fashioned gas stove, but in the dream it was a multi-layered, wall-sized, pipe-organ-like affair). It started spurting flames and I couldn't figure out how to turn it off. Everything button I pressed and knob I turned just caused more flame to come out.

Then I noticed my grandfather standing behind me. He walked up to the stove and turned it off for me.

My grandfather has been dead for 10 years.

That was the first time in my life I have ever, to my knowledge, had a dead person turn up in a dream. I don't know what it means.

That was no fun at all

I recently blogged about how I've never dreamed about translation.

Last night I did.

I dreamed that an IRL person with whom I've recently had a (private, on-the-surface-civilized) disagreement about translation (and I should emphasize that this is NOT one of my co-workers) tracked down some old translations of mine. (IRL these are tucked away in the corner of the internet, but my name isn't on them and it would take some hardcore digging through systems to which this person doesn't have access to find them and attribute them to me.)

They then went over these with a red pen and released the results to the media, spinning me as incompetent. (IRL, the translations are not incompetent, but might be more suboptimal than I'd prefer. Worst case they'd get a mark of 75% when I'm aiming for 100%.)

Their spin was very effective, and the media ran with it as one of those shocking oversensationalized lead stories (like a while back where some government consultant expensed cookies.) People were calling for me to never work again, people were following me around with cameras taking my picture, people were criticizing my physical appearance and speculating on my sexual proclivities in comments threads, people were criticizing me for being overpaid because I recently (IRL too) started wearing real silver earrings (for piercing health) instead of cheap $2 crap from mall kiosks.

All because in a long time ago, in a couple of places, I translated effectué une recherche as "searched" (like it normally is) where in that context it should have actually been "conducted a search".

DO NOT WANT!

I wonder what my subconscious's criteria for dream material are?

I sometimes dream about being a child (although in the vast majority of those dreams I'm in the back of my parents' car going somewhere boring). I sometimes dream about being in high school (although most of the time it's that dream where I've forgotten to take a class and I wake up thinking "Wait a minute, don't I have enough credits to graduate? And now that I think about it, don't I have a job and an apartment in Toronto?"). In most dreams I'm just generically myself, sometimes I'm inserted into various fictional universes, I've had one or two where I'm wandering around my middle school (but, fortunately, not a student there).

But I've never ever in my life dreamed about translating.

I've been translating for six years. I was only in high school for five years. I wonder why translation hasn't shown up in my dreams yet? I've had one dream where I was in the general vicinity of my office because my co-workers needed to show up and catch me doing something "bad" for plot purposes, but none about actual work.

And now that I think about it, university hasn't shown up in my dreams yet either. The "OMG I forgot to go to class!" dreams are always high school.

The majority of dreams have no particular setting, but the only places I've been before adulthood show up as recurring real-life settings. Which is odd, because when I dream myself into fictional universes, they're always from fandoms I've gotten involved in since adulthood.

I wonder what this all means? I wonder if other people notice similar patterns?

The clearest dream I've ever had

I have record this one before I forget. It's significant because it was extremely clear, possibly the clearest dream I've ever had.

I was with some of my cousins in the attic of my great-grandmother's house, and we found a secret trunk containing an extensive collection WWI artifacts (uniforms, letters, weapons, etc.) that belonged to my great-grandfather. It was a very important historical find and would ultimately be donated to a museum. That great-grandmother's house existed in reality and that great-grandfather - her IRL husband - was in fact a WWI veteran. Given the clarity of the dream, I would be certain my family has a cache of historical artifacts somewhere, except that IRL:

- We already know about the WWI artifacts that great-grandfather left behind (just a few things, not an extensive collection) and they were donated to a museum already.
- The great-grandmother passed away at least 15 years ago and her house was cleaned out. Anything in the attic would have been found back then.
- I've never been in the attic of that house, at all, ever. And the cousins who were helping me were from the other side of the family - they are not at all related to that great-grandmother.
- All the artifacts were completely illogical. For example, the belt buckles were made out of wood, the in-dream reasoning being that they didn't have metal back then. The letters were written in some non-European language on papyrus scrolls with quills. The weapons (in this dream he took his weapons home from the war with him!) functioned on alchemic principles.

But it was so ridiculously clear, unlike any dream I've ever had.

I just had the weirdest dream

I was at my parents' and there had been this giant snowstorm. The snowplows in the area consisted of only a giant scoop, like you'd find on the front of a front-end loader, and the driver would sit on top of the scoop and move the snow around.

As we were driving up the street, we saw this one "plow" trying to dump snow in the ravine. Dumping in the ravine isn't allowed. (Aside: sometimes they put up "no dumping" signs in places where they don't want people to dump stuff. Does that stop anyone, really? Because the general rule for the universe as a whole is "no dumping", so I can't see someone about to dump a load of old tires into a ravine being stopped by a sign.)

So this plow driver sees us seeing him and decides that we're witnesses so he has to kill us. He makes two snowballs and starts stalking us on foot with one snowball in each hand. Despite the fact that we're in a car and there's three of us, we seem to take him seriously. We all got into the house safely, but we knew that the dude with his two snowballs was totally going to come back and get us. Fortunately I woke up to a beautiful spring day before that could happen.

Refining the Dream Drugs

I previously came up with the idea of Dream Drugs, which make your dreams more interesting.

I have an idea of how to achieve that: reverse the sleep cycle.

If I remember my science properly, at the beginning of the night you fall into a deep sleep, then you get more REM cycles (and therefore more dreams) as the night wears on.

This is inconvenient. If you aren't going to be able to get a full night's sleep, you aren't going to have as many dreams. If you happen to wake up an hour or two before you've completed your sleep cycle, it's extra tempting to go back to bed because that's when all the good dreams are going to happen.

So what the Dream Drugs should do is reverse the sleep cycle so that the dreams come first and the deep sleep comes second. Then every night you can enjoy dreams, even if you don't get a full night's sleep. And if you happen to wake up an hour or two before your alarm, you may as well get out of bed and get a head start on your day since you aren't going to get any more dreams to play with.

Psychoanalyze this

Last night I dreamed I had to go camping with a bunch of fat people. I didn't want to go because I hate camping (I prefer activities involving more indoor plumbing and internet access and fewer bugs, thank you very much), but everyone kept saying that I was discriminating against fat people. It had nothing to do with the fat people, it was just that I didn't want to go camping, but no one believed me and I quickly gained a reputation as being biased against fat people.

xkcd imitates life

1. I always have these dreams. (Click on the link - I tried to embed but it's too wide.)

I've even blogged about them. They always take place in high school. And I always find myself thinking "Hey, wait, don't I have enough credits to graduate? And haven't I in fact been to university? And I seem to remember something about an apartment in Toronto?" just like in the comic. The odd thing is I've never had a translation dream. I'm coming up on my sixth anniversary in my job (and spent three years in translation school before that). I spent five years in high school. And yet I keep dreaming about high school and have never dreamed about translation.

Speaking of translation...

2. Some of my co-workers have actually had this happen:



The source text says "pun not intended" or similar. The translator goes crazy trying to figure out what the pun is. Finally the translator swallows their pride and goes to a mother-tongue speaker of the source language, only to find that there is no pun whatsoever. Our goal, which no one has yet succeeded in fulfilling unless they've neglected to brag about it, is to insert a bona fide pun in the translation. If anyone succeeds in doing so, pun jar fees will be waived.

My subconscious doesn't want me to shop

Last night I dreamed I was shopping for shoes. When I took of my own shoes to try on a new pair, the store had someone steal them so I'd be forced to buy new ones. The problem was none of the shoes in the store fit me, so I was left shoeless. The store also had an inconsistency between their website and their actual stock: everything was in reality running shoes, even if they looked like boots or sandals on the website.

The spammers are invading my dreams

Last night I dreamed that the spammers were coming to my door to deliver their messages in person. Someone would knock on my door, I'd answer (I never answer IRL unless I'm expecting someone), and they'd try to sell me penis enlargement or fake diplomas.

At one point the Chinese guy from Ocean's 11 was at the door holding a printed-out email, and told me (in English) to read it when I was drunk. I said, "Sorry, I'm not drunk right now," and slammed the door in his face. Then I started drinking vodka.

Dreams of things falling on my head

Last night I dreamed I had a car - an adorable little blue Mini! It was parked on the street in front of my building (not allowed IRL, perfectly legal in the dream) even though the street was also a construction zone with like six cranes lifting heavy stuff. (IRL, there's a construction zone with four cranes further down the street.) One of the cranes dropped a tree, almost killing me, so I ran inside to figure out what to do to protect my car.

Even though I went up the elevator in the same glass building I live in IRL, my apartment was a dark, dank underground hole. It was also in New York City, even though the outside of the building was in Toronto. It had these sort of diagonal windows (like greenhouses) at street level, but it was such a deep dark hole these served as skylights. So I was chatting with Poodle, trying to figure out if I'm allowed to put my car in the garage because I only have a G1 licence, when suddenly a bad guy came crashing down through the window into my apartment, looking for drugs and getting quite erratic when we didn't have any. So I subdued him (luckily he weighed literally nothing) tied his arms and legs in a knot and handed him back out the window to a passing fireman.

Then suddenly I was in the ravine behind my parents' house with my mother. It had been raining heavily, and the ground was literally swollen with water - it was like walking on a giant waterbed. All this rain caused the trees to wake up and start walking around - turns out they were really Ents. Then the Ents started dropping coconuts on our heads (there are no coconut trees in this ravine, it's a temperate zone) because humans used that part of the ravine to smoke marijuana (true IRL).

So I ran away to where the President of the United States was giving a speech in this same ravine. Except it wasn't the real president, it was the fictional one from the Covert One novels. And my mission was to protect him. So I jumped into a LAV with all the other people whose mission was to protect the president (but we left the president outside, apparently at the mercy of the Ents) and started driving around. Then the same bad guy came crashing through the windshield. But I woke up before I could find out what he wanted this time.

So that's two trees being dropped on my head, two bad guys breaking through glass to come crashing down on my head, and an ongoing drug theme (I haven't done any drugs IRL). I wish I knew how to analyze dreams.