The Science Of Sleep

In The Science of Sleep there is a strange effect called synchronized parallel randomness. But what is it exactly?

It is based on the curious idea that our brains can create an incredibly complex loop. It is not about our minds communicating (telepathy), but rather as if, with each step we take, we evolve in the same direction.

The Science of Sleep is a film about the surreal and exciting world of dreams. It narrates the misadventures of Stéphane (Gael García Bernal), a young graphic artist in whose brain a television program is broadcast in continuous competition with reality.

For perhaps more than three thousand years, dreams have preoccupied humanity as something inexplicable, magical, perhaps laden with meaning, but one that eludes us. At times, we can experience dreams so vivid and clear that we feel the need to relate them, to tell them to someone, and we make an effort to remember and verbalize them (Guardiola, 1993).

In this act of remembrance and verbalization, a process of ineluctable distortion begins, so we always have a feeling that there was something else. What was more profound and difficult to explain, what we experienced asleep.

The science of sleep

How are dreams formed? The scientific community is unaware of the process in its entirety and this opens up a wide range of interpretations, such as the one offered by the movie The Science of Sleep .

The key to this film, which was awarded by the public at the Sitges Fantastic Film Festival, lies in its peculiar theory of daydreams and in the delicate combination of complex ingredients; verbatim quote from the film;

First, we put random thoughts. Then we add a pinch of reminiscences of the day, mixed with some memories of the past. Love, friendships, relationships and all those words with songs that they heard during the day, things they saw and also something personal. And we start to stir …

After approaching dreams in a surreal and somewhat irrational way, a contingency of their own , we will analyze daydreams from a more pragmatic and scientific perspective.

What are daydreams?

Daydreams are conscious experiences that occur during sleep in the form of dramatic, narrative representations, usually involuntary. They involve and link sensory, imaginary, cognitive, affective and motor mental states and processes (Guardiola, 1993).

Although daydreams often have a particular aspect of strangeness and discontinuity, they are, at the same time, a representation of a personal reality. They provide material that can be contrasted with recent and old memories (Guardiola, 1993).

In turn, a dream can be stored in memory and compared with events, events and circumstances in the future. We can imagine what a trip we are going to do will be like, the dangers we will be involved in and what we would like to see happen.

These daydreams also have a high probability of being realized in the future, which gives dreams a false premonitory character (Guardiola, 1993).

Dreams in science

The study of the mechanisms and functions of the states of attention, wakefulness, somnolence and sleep by Neurophysiology and Psychiatry is relatively recent. In fact, the establishment of physiological measures that could be related to mental activity and states of consciousness was not possible until the middle of the last century.

Modern day-dream research has emphasized the importance of the manifest content of dreams. These are related to the mental structure of the subject, with their waking thoughts, their concepts and concerns (Lombardo and Foschi, 2009).

Neurolinguistics has shown that the process by which the meaning of a word is accessed can be outlined by a module. The justification for establishing the existence of this module is found in the behavior of patients with brain injuries, which selectively affects the input and output dictionary.

During wakefulness, a word can trigger a series of images and concepts that have characteristics similar to those that occur in daydreams. Through the method of free word association, cognitive elements can be seen in common with the structure of dreams when sleeping (Lombardo and Foschi, 2009).