I soon learned that sleep was more than rest. My mother, after getting out of bed, from what I remember, said: “I have dreamed of my father, he is in a good place”; “I have dreamed of bulls, there will be sorrow”; or “I dreamed of a river, we are going to win the lottery”. She was never right with the last dream, but with her continuous stories I began to glimpse, since I was five or six years old, that while we slept things happened and that those things announced something. For those that happened to her, my mother, without a shadow of a doubt, predicted the vigil, so with all normality when I realized that I was also dreaming, I assumed that my dreams would also announce reality, they would sponsor my future, although verifying that they did not I dreamed of my grandfather, of bulls or rivers, whether it was a sinkhole that was difficult to overcome.
I grew up between doubts and dream discoveries that did not go beyond the recognition of the characters that dealt with family conveniences and inconveniences, entertainment and entanglements between friends, work or university vicissitudes, but what happened to the dreams that I did not understand? Those were the ones that interested me. And I did not know what to do. One night, before I was twenty years old, I dreamed that I entered a house where, behind a counter, a tall man, very tall, as tall as I had ever seen, was talking to me and although I answered his height made me hesitate . What a simple dream! And yet what a threshold! Days passed in which doubt and curiosity were the answer and spur to inquiry, until I remembered an event from weeks ago, which occurred in an establishment in the center of the city, in which when I entered, behind a counter, I saw a short man, very short, as short as I had never seen so close: I was attended by a dwarf. This memory, which came to me like an outburst, was not, however, very clarifying, because, first, I doubted that a trivial fact, such as this seemed to me, could be the object of dreams, and, second, I was convinced that being so would fit the facts.
The fact that the dream did not respect them not only prevented me from relating the tall man to the short one, but also impelled me to reject any other relationship between the dream event and the waking event, since accepting a certain similarity meant validating the modification that the nocturnal story had fact, and, consequently, could repeat on successive occasions, to change a datum for its opposite, without, however, substantially modifying the message, which, despite what I would have accepted and expected from “I have been impressed by a very low man ”, could well be “the stature of a man has impressed me”. That the dream was not faithful to the waking state confused me until I noticed the ‘counter’, -more than a clue, “the clue”- because being the unquestionable common element between the dream and the waking state, it invited me to conclude that “The man who had impressed me with his height was behind the counter.” It was a discovery to have noticed the presence of this, and a satisfaction to have accepted the risk of considering that “the opposite” could refer to the origin.
From the day I knew, without a doubt, that the message of the dream attested to an impression, the nights changed for me. If my mother’s dreams presided over my childhood, and part of my adolescence, this inaugurated the nocturnal adventure that I have lived every day since then. I love dreams. I wouldn’t be who I am without them. Without the journey they make, every night, for my existence. Since the reported dream, every morning I look for clues in them. In almost all there is one that relates the dream event with the waking event that causes the dream, and although it is not always easy to find or achieve a guarantee of understanding, dreams are much more than a clue, finding it can be a successful principle.
Ancient societies, perhaps searching for this principle, believed that dreams were one of the means of communication with the divinity, although they were absolutely unaware of the process by which we come to dream, that if they had known, they might have felt the power or the fear of the incarnation of divinity in their nocturnal minds or they would have shown a similar astonishment as I did when I first learned about the kaleidoscopic brain wave effect that enlivens the dark forest of night. In 1953, in the sleep research laboratory of Nathaniel Kleitman, a Russian researcher who emigrated to the United States in the 1920s, Eugene Aserensky, a doctoral student and one of Kleitman’s collaborators, breaking the usual practice of sleep researchers clinic of connecting at intervals, kept a patient’s brain connected to the electroencephalograph, EEG, during an uninterrupted period of eight hours of rest.
The next morning, his eyes would gaze incredulously and enthusiastically at the prodigious response to his daring. On the EEG paper, an absolutely unknown dreamlike tracing appeared. And revealing. And, although it would not be until 1957 that Willian Charles Dement and Kleitman would describe the complete sleep cycle, -period, NREM, (not rapid eye movement, not rapid eye movement) made up of four phases, which takes its name in contrast to the period that follows and after the baptism of this; and REM period (rapid eye movement, rapid eye movement) composed of a fifth and final phase- before him, that morning, Aserensky contemplated the discovery that, hidden between the centuries, kept the night, and that later investigations have confirmed and expanded through the application of new technologies. Without the five known types of brain waves (electrical impulses that, at different speeds measured in cycles per second, Hz, are emitted by neurons to communicate with each other) the human species would not leave a mark on Earth.
The one that leaves during wakefulness is protected, preferably, by the Betha and Gamma waves. The Betha, from 13 to 35Hz, of fast frequency, appear in attention processes, problem resolution or management of daily affairs, such as working, studying, taking an exam, driving; and the Gamma, the fastest of the five known, from 25 to 100Hz, are produced in bursts in states of maximum brain resolution, such as the calculation of a mathematical formula, extreme states of alertness, or states of spirituality, altruism, or love . It is believed that they modulate perception, consciousness and intuition and that they disappear during anesthesia, although not during sleep, since this, far from being produced under the effects of a passive brain, and this was Aserensky’s discovery, is produces, compiling activity, structured in two periods: the NREM period in four phases, and the REM, in a fifth, and last. Phase I is made up of two types of waves: Alpha waves, from 8 to 13Hz, which generate states of calm, such as the one felt after the satisfaction of a job well done, or that of a certain relaxation; and, to a lesser extent, Theta waves, from 3.5 to 8 Hz, related to imaginative capacity, creativity, intuition, and personal internal processes. In phase II, in addition to the so-called K complexes and sleep spindles, which facilitate greater numbness, Delta waves appear, 1-4Hz, very frequent in children and scarce as they age.
These two phases form the so-called Light sleep. During phase III, Delta waves, -essential for the regeneration of the Central Nervous System and also recorded in deep states of meditation-, are present in the brain between twenty and fifty percent. Phase IV is characterized by the cerebral emission of one hundred percent Delta waves, a percentage after which some sudden changes powerfully attract attention, since the eyelids, closed, begin to move rapidly; the temperature of the human body is adapted to the environment; and heart rate, blood pressure, and respiratory rate accelerate. The REM period is announced. Its only and last phase, in which dreams are produced, generates mainly Theta waves, with flashes of Alpha waves, and, according to some researchers, sporadic Bheta and Gamma waves, the latter detected in lucid dreams. The four phases of the first period, NREM, last approximately ninety minutes; phase V, or REM period, ranges between fifteen and twenty minutes. After the REM period, the human brain behaves as if it had not been deeply asleep, and resumes the process from phase I. And so on four to six times a night. And from four to six dreams. I don’t know what fascinates me more: dreams, the version of me that is presented to me every night, or the invisible weave that braids them. None of the people I regularly meet has dreamed of the war in the Ukraine. Neither do I. But how many dreams do you remember when you wake up? What does he do with his dreams?