The patient was a 37-year-old man who had been physically abused as a boy by his schizophrenic mother, often while he lay in bed trying to fall asleep. Nevertheless, he had grown into a reasonably normal, gainfully employed adult, and he thought that the worst was behind him, until one night he awoke to find an intruder rummaging through his dresser drawers. After that, his nightmares began — terrifying, recurrent dreams in which the intruder was a middle-age woman and a knife dangled with Damoclesian contempt from the ceiling fan over his head.
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In a recent paper in Psychological Bulletin, Dr. Nielsen and Dr. Levin proposed that dreaming served to create what they call “fear extinction memories,” the brain’s way of scrambling, detoxifying and finally discarding old fearful memories, the better to move on and make synaptic space for any novel threats that may show up at the door. “The brain learns quickly what to be afraid of,” Dr. Nielsen said. “But if there isn’t a check on the process, we’d fear things in adulthood we feared in childhood.” Ordinary bad dreams rarely recapitulate unpleasant events from real life but instead cannibalize them for props and spare parts, and through that reinvention, Dr. Nielsen explained, the fears are defanged. “A bad dream that doesn’t lead to awakening is successful in dealing with intense emotion,” he said. “It’s disturbing, but there is some kind of resolution to the extent we don’t wake up.” By this scenario, nightmares, in allowing you to escape prematurely, represent a failure of the “fear extinction” system. “Bad dreams are functional, nightmares dysfunctional,” he said.
i read this when it was first online on 23rd Oct after some minor league odd dreams last night it came back to me so i meme it now for your reading pleasure plus i'm reminded of something i have believed for years that art is like the dreams of a culture - an expression of the cultural unconsciousness - those that study narratology talk about the creation of a magical resolution, clearly sometimes it is a nightmare like in Kafka's The Trial, a sustained surreal journey that ends with the execution of K. I looked for some old text books to explain magical resolution but couldn't find what i was looking for but it's about closure, resolving the story arc and having a happy ending (obviously The Trial isn't a happy ending but like Shakespearean tragedy the nightmare has closure). The Tempest is a rather literal example of magical resolution. A Midsummer Nights Dream, Fanny Hill, Pride and Prujudice. Sometimes there is too much magic and the ending is perceived as too forced, too contrived and the book or film isn't satisfactory. Peter F Hamilton's conclusion to his Nightsdawn trilogy springs to my mind. edit
googling magical resolution i came across a great example "Neo’s triumph over the Agents is a magical resolution" from here absolutely the ending of The Matrix is a great and rather more contempory example of a magic resolution which is artistically successful Neo is dead/dying but revives by hacking the Matrix itself Nightmares - Sleep - Dreams - New York Times |
