Dreams, Memes and Motif
Hobson, McLuhan and you
Conscious States
I highly recommend going to used bookstores in college towns. Avoid the corporate wannabe boutiques with pop libtard slop displayed in the front window. What you're looking for is an establishment with no aesthetic mentality whatsoever. You want a Bookmaxxer. The shelves are jammed so tightly with volumes that it is nearly impossible to squeeze them back in. As you move through the musty narrow rows that blatantly disregard ADA regulations, you stumble across sudden bends into small adjoining rooms. Books are piled in the corners. The average paperback costs $3, and the price is written on the inside cover and faded pencil. I've been to more than a few of these places and they never disappoint. Many years ago now, I bought the book The Chemistry of Conscious States at one of these bookstores.
Although I consider myself an intellectually curious person, neurobiology was never a subject that held my interest while in school. I was abysmal at chemistry. And received only slightly higher marks in biology. Despite my own shortcomings, the book captivated me. J Allan Hobson's ability to present his theories about consciousness and dreaming in an eminently readable way had me flipping through the pages as though I were reading a thriller novel. In fact, it is near the top of the list of books that altered the course of my life.
Before reading Hobson's book, I had little interest in dreams apart from the typical pedestrian allure. Hobson's theory of the dream state seemed so intuitive and elegant. It opened a new dimension of understanding that anchored dreaming and a biochemical system which did not detract from the mystery. This sordid presumptuousness of Freudianism seems vulgar and self-indulgent by comparison. I will explain Hobson's AIM model in brief below.
Activation is the level of electrical impulses present in a brain state. These are increased during waking hours, decreased during most forms of sleep, but increase again during the dreaming sleep of the REM cycle.
Input and output gating denotes the process that the brain uses to let impulses in and out during different conscious states. While awake, you think the words and then you say them. Your dog shifts in the corner of the room and you hear the slight movement. While dreaming, input pathways have been blocked or redirected. Your input is internal. You aren't simply looking at the inside of your eyelids. The typical visual and aural processes accept input and output to and from your brain alone. You say something, but nothing comes from your mouth. You walk across a dreamscape, but your body remains inert on the bed. Your dog shifts in the corner of the room, but you do not hear it.
Modulation involves the chemical processes the brain uses to change and maintain conscious states. Waking consciousness is an aminergic process, while sleeping consciousness is cholinergic. The reasons for these changes are still not well understood, but the changes are observable. The brain in a cholinergic state loses ability to form coherent memory and will is diminished.
From these three axes of variable change between states, we can not only understand the descent from waking consciousness to dreaming, but even from sanity to madness. Hobson theorizes that the psychotic individual undertakes attributes of the dream state while awake. They have lost the ability to clearly transfer between and maintain stable states. Internal inputs are confused with external, and fluctuating modulation causes people to lose short term memory. They lash out at a dream image and then cannot even remember what happened moments later.
Hobson establishes an important recontextualization of the dream state, not as a mystery box set apart from our waking hours, but as an essential function of the brain-mind along an observable continuum of interrelated processes. Dreams are not the secret prophets of your subconscious, but rather an extension of the conscious as it struggles for stability in the disorienting alien fog of cholinergic overthrow. And then you wake up.
The Maelstrom
In his 1977 lecture at John Hopkins University, Marshall McLuhan makes an astute observation about art and pattern recognition using Edgar Allen Poe. In Poe’s story, The Maelstrom, an old sailor tells the story of how he survived a great whirlpool at sea. The man accomplished this feat by first observing the behavior of various objects as they are pulled into the vortex. He then chooses an object which was previously observed returning to the surface often and grasps on to it. McLuhan is suggesting an ethic necessary for survival in the digital age. The constant and instantaneous flow of electric information is a chaotic storm that pulls in and reorders things by a stochastic order.
Despite this, the pattern remains. Perhaps it is more difficult to see in the storm, but it inevitably returns. In the history of art and literature the emergence of meaning by pattern recognition is plainly shown in the return of motif. The flow of generations of information is slower in the history prior to the electric age, but much like the debris floating on the surface in the Maelstrom, plots, character archetypes, points of conflict, and internal human struggles reappear over the ages. These shared literary and artistic motifs often determine the survival of work. Readers recognize the pattern and gravitate to it.
So, what does this have to do with conscious states of the brain and the AIM model? There is a method of storytelling that everyone of us undertakes, whether we consider ourselves creative or not, and unrelated to whether we have purposely ever picked up a pen to write a story. This storytelling is dreaming. During the dreaming state of the brain, we all undertake auto-creativity. According to Hobson's model, input gateways are closed. Nobody is whispering anything into our ears, at least not audibly, and even if they were, it would not make it to our aural processors. In the dream state are only shared. History is what the dream can capture from the cholinergic maelstrom of fragmented memory processes. The chemical modulation of the brain makes memory recording impossible. We only remember our dreams that occur as the brain state shifts toward waking.
Yet, out of this chaos presented to our waking consciousness, there emerge repeated motifs shared among people who don't even know one another. Most of us have experienced variations on similar dream plots. We arrive at school and realize its test day for a class we never attended. We are unprepared for a stage performance, and the curtain opens in five minutes. We are attacked by an enemy, but all methods of defense fail us. The sword breaks or bends in our hand. The gun won't fire. As simple as these examples are, they are motifs that each of us auto-create without prior agreement.
The Freudian would argue that this dream motif is a form of subconscious shared anxiety suppressed by the Superego and stored within the Id. Hobson, and I as well, reject the Freudian model. Shared returning motifs are not our common anxieties begging to be liberated from a repressive conscious society, but neurological brain state processes that we share due to common hardware. Dreaming, a universal component of that black box known as sleep, which is an essential process to human survival, like breathing, and eating, undertakes the auto-creative process of shared motif. The search for survival in the maelstrom continues even when we aren't in direct control of our brains. As a writer of fiction, I find that very heartening.
Digital Dream
I'll include a short final segment for my own amusement. In my compulsive reading about dreaming and electronic media culture, it occurred to me not long ago that the state of the digital being shares much in common with Hobson's version of dream state categorization. To clarify, I'm speaking about the experience of the children of the Internet, the younger millennials and beyond who experience the digital landscape as a primary form of living alongside the physical world.
In Hobson's model, brain activation levels are high in both the conscious and dreaming state. The argument could be made that this is currently the case with the digital citizen and that the activation may be more intense in digital consciousness due to the rapid flow of electric information. Input gateways are closed off. The Internet being’s awareness of surroundings are dulled, and in extreme cases, local physical surroundings are deterritorialized by the constant invasion of Internet logic and abstract realities. One is reminded of the exploding head syndrome sometimes experienced in the dreaming moments on the verge of sleep as input gateways swing closed and real-world sounds are substituted in meaning with the aural imagery of the dream and vice versa. The digital being will semiotically mutilate its surroundings to account for the moral codes and bizarre logic of the Internet world.
Much like the dream state, the digital experience defies memory creation. Whether due to the volume of events-as-consumption or a conscious attempt to avoid inconvenient nuances to firmly held ideology, the digital memory is very short. This is clearly illustrated in the process by which one moves through both dreams and digital space. Surroundings can suddenly fall away and be replaced immediately with alien context and disregard for past events. In the face of this, the individual is unfazed. Context only matters in the most immediate sense.
Just as the brain in its cholinergic state does not waste space on recording its sleep state visions, so the digital being avoids the inconvenience of consistent memory. The one consistent exception to this is the meme. The meme is the forgotten class before the test. The meme is the gun that won't fire when the attacker beats down the door. The meme is the motif in the maelstrom of the digital dream. It reappears like a metronome. It loses old meaning and gains new meaning. It is fought over like territory because, like territory, its permanence and power is taken for granted and unquestioned by all parties. The question becomes whether the digital meme’s value can be transferred into physical space like the dreams in the moments before waking or if the output gateways are closed, and we can only speak in our own heads to apparitions of the mind in a language that will be forgotten in an instant.