Dreamtime

My son had a dream last night. There was some mayhem and some police action, and the dream ended with him hearing a police siren. He woke up and his alarm was going off.

What happened? Two possibilities, as far as I can see. The first is that he had been dreaming for some time before his alarm went off and then the dream somehow dovetailed with the alarm going off. That would be either be an uncanny coincidence, or he was anticipating the alarm going off even though he was asleep. He had awakened shortly before and was just drifting back to sleep, so he possibly knew that it was getting close to alarm time. But not consciously. And his mind constructed a dream that would lead up to an alarm-like siren.

The other option is also notable:

The alarm went off first and then in a few moments his mind constructed a dream narrative in which the alarm had a place. If true, that has two interesting implications. First, it means that the brain can construct a story-line at lightning speed. Between the time the alarm went off and the time he came out of sleep to hear it, he had a dream that seemed to go on for a half hour. Second, it means that the mind, even while asleep, constructs a narrative to make sense of sense “data.” He didn’t just hear a sound; he heard and sound and instantly his mind began constructing a plausible (well, plausible in a dream context – he was throwing cars around like baseballs) narrative to explain it.

If we do that when we sleep, it seems we must also do it when we’re awake. We experience sensations, perhaps prior to a narrative context. But we rapidly try to make sense of sensation, and that making-sense takes the form of a story. I hear a real siren, and my mind flashes through various options – fire, accident, robbery. Or, I hear an indistinct sound, which begins to make sense when I can fit it into a story.

We do affix names to sensations to make sense of them. But that’s not all; affixing names is too static. We hear a siren, and we don’t just think “siren.” We think of reasons why there might be a siren, and those reasons have a narrative form.