Minhye Kwak

Dream and REM Sleep

The brain cycles through five distinct phases during sleep: stages 1, 2, 3, 4, and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. REM sleep makes up about 25% of your sleep cycle and first occurs about 70 to 90 minutes after you fall asleep. Because your sleep cycle repeats, you enter REM sleep several times during the night.

During REM sleep, your brain and body are energized and dreaming occurs.1 REM is thought to be involved in the process of storing memories, learning, and balancing your mood,2 although the exact mechanisms are not well understood.

The reason for dreaming during REM sleep is not understood. While some of the signals sent to the cortex during sleep are important for learning and memory, some signals seem to be random. It is these random signals that may form the basis for a "story" that the brain's cortex tries to interpret or find meaning in, resulting in dreaming. More

Capturing Mysteries about Dream

Excerpts from Marcel Proust's novel, In Search of Lost Time. Volume 1, Swann's Way, (Yale University Press, 2013).

Revisiting Past :
"Or, perhaps, while I was asleep I had returned without the least effort to an earlier stage in my life, now forever outgrown, and had come under the thrall of one of my childish terrors, such as that old terror of my great-uncle’s pulling my curls, which was dispelled on the day—the dawn of a new era to me—on which they were finally cropped from my head. I had forgotten that event during my sleep; I remembered it again as soon as I had succeeded in making myself wake up to escape my great-uncle’s fingers; still, as a measure of precaution, I would bury the whole of my head in the pillow before returning to the world of dreams."

Dream and Universe :
"When a man is asleep, he holds in a circle around him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, and the order of the universe. Instinctively, when he awakes, he looks to these, and in an instant reads off his own position on the earth’s surface and the amount of time that has elapsed during his slumbers; but this ordered procession is apt to grow confused, and to break its ranks."

Beyond Time and Space :
"Or suppose that he gets drowsy in some even more abnormal position; sitting in an armchair, say, after dinner: then the world will fall topsy-turvy from its orbit, the magic chair will carry him at full speed through time and space, and when he opens his eyes again he will imagine that he went to sleep months earlier and in some far distant country."

Existence and History :
"But for me it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was deep and relaxed my mind entirely; for then I lost all sense of the place in which I had gone to sleep, and when I awoke at midnight, not knowing where I was, I could not be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal’s consciousness; I was more destitute of human qualities than the cave-dweller; but then the memory, not yet of the place in which I was, but of various other places where I had lived, and might now very possibly be, would come like a rescue from on high to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped by myself: in flash I would traverse and surmount centuries of civilization, and out of a half-visualized succession of oil lamps, followed by shirts with turned-down collars, would put together by degrees the component parts of myself."

Where do dreams come from?

I have been always wondering that how dreams are made and where these come from. It is not fully proved in academic way, yet distinguished scholars like Froid exposed significance of dream in psychological way. However, there are a bunches of questions on dreams that Froid or Carl Jung's theory could not solved. Those are some vivid dreams that leave strong impressions like healing from mental traumas, getting a sense from current situations, receiving wisdom and insights for the near future. I am not saying all dreams give those effects, but some dreams are in no need of psychoanalysis or interpretation. As soon as those dreams are coming up on our brain, they are perfect as they are and the profound meaning is realized by dreamers immediately. Brain, is the most complex thing, and how can we explore this mechanism works between our brain and dream? I found an interesting research that brain cells, neurons, are similar to a large cluster of galaxies. More

Finding Connection between Dream and Universe

Fractal Cosmology

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz(1646~1716), a renowned German mathematician, physicist and philosopher, has published a unique idea called 'Monadology'. He thought that the universe consists of innumerable monads and a complete universe is reflected in each of them.
This is a metaphysical idea, but, if we apply this kind of view to the physical world, we might understand that it implicates a kind of fractal structure of the universe; when a particle contains another complete universe in it, such a universe must be again composed of much smaller innumerable particles, in each of which may another smaller universe repeat. In a fractal structure, this process continues endlessly. More

Following this theory, we can see even the smallest particle that constitutes human could be the universe of the other's infinite universe, and infinite universe we think we are belong to could be concluded as a brain of one gigantic being. I found this cosmology supports the mystery of the "vivid dreams." Human brain contains universe, even more complex universe than we can observe in our galaxy. Human is an independent being, but at the same time, human is functioning as a particle and as a universe itself. In that sense, in our unconsciosness, it is possible that we transcend our scale of time and space. I would like to prove more why we can transcend time and space when we are in dream.

The Fractal-Holographic Universe

This marvelous research on geometry of universe tells us that based on Einstein's general theory of relativity, the vacuum singularity, as we know as the black hole, is not a specific phenomenon happened in specific location. It is not a pit hole that devour everything, rather it radiates, and creates. When the perfect balance between gravity and electromagnetism has made, there is an event horizon, and perfect "nothingness" can be there. But it is not a dead end. At the event horizon, where the collapsing geometry and electromagnetic radiation are equal, a constant energy transfer happens between the infinite potential of the vacuum and electromagnetic information – which implies continuous creation at the event horizon of black holes. In simple terms, energy pulsates into and out from the black hole, creating a feed-back loop of information transfer between infinite potential and finite form. More

According to the Fractal-Holographic Universe, the singularity is essential, and universal characteristic above all creatures. It is a perfect balance of infinite potential. I found this theory can be adapted in our brain as a whole universe, and it can explain the mysteries about dreams. When we sleep, our brain can be resulted as a perfect nothingness; vacuum singularity. And as Nassim Haramein has proved above, the nothingness keeps create new information, the new radiation. That is the reason why the REM sleep phase is the last stages. I saw that information that radiates from vacuum is dream. This assumption gives the answer of those questions on "vivid dreams."