I'm Dreaming of a White Yom Kippur - R' Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Creativity, and Dreams

The Power of Sleep: by Jeffrey Kluger

Published in Time Magazine Special Edition - The Science of Creativity

We've all slept on a problem and had it sort itself out by morning. But that's only a small part of what the brain on nighttime autopilot can do. Paul McCartney famously said that he came up with the melody for "Yesterday" in a dream; Elias Howe, the inventor of the sewing machine, is said to have solved the problem of the machine's needle when he dreamed of an attack by warriors carrying spears with holes in the tips. "Dreams are just thinking in a different biochemical state," says Harvard University psychologist Deidre Barrett, author of The Committee of Sleep. "In the sleep state, the brain thinks much more visually and much more intuitively" . . .

Rem sleep usually begins about 90 minutes after the start of the first NREM cycle and is the real blue ocean of sleep. Heart rate and respiration accelerate, and brain activity, as measured by electroencephalograms (EEGs), increases too - a function of dreaming. For this reason, muscles become paralyzed, lest you act out the scenes unspooling in your head. Know those dreams in which you're trying to run away from something but can't seem to move your legs? That's not your imagination.

Most REM sleep comes in the last four hours of slumber, says cognitive neuroscientist Jessica Payne of Notre Dame University. "Dreams in the early, NREM phase can be kind of literal. It's in the REM phase that you get all these crazy binding errors."

"Binding errors" is one of those scientific terms that mean pretty much what they sound like. Your waking brain is orderly, your sleeping brain is fragmented - and the bits can get reassembled the wrong way. But "the wrong way" suggests that there's just one one way, and the genius of sleep is that it allows you to explore other, untried avenues . . .

The key to the brain's ability to make such good use of downtime is something it shares with your computer: the capacity to run multiple programs at once. The "aha" moment when you've been trying to remember a song title and three hours later it hits you is a result of that. "Conscious awareness is able to focus on only one thing at a time," says Barrett, "but problems go on getting processed under the radar."

Sleeping doubles down on this. The prefrontal cortex performs a traffic-cop like role, keeping the brain focused on a conscious task but also screening out thoughts it deems socially or rationally inappropriate. In sleep, that brake on your imagination comes off . . .

As with all matters scientific, the question of causation arises. Are we all equally imaginative in our sleep, or do people who are creative in waking hours retain an edge at night? Psychologist David Watson of the University of Notre Dame tracked 200 subjects over three months and found that those who scored high on creative scales when awake tended to remember their dreams more. "One reason is that they simply have more vivid and interesting dreams," he says. "That's linked to having an active fantasy life; the daytime behavior shades over into the night. This is a case of the rich getting richer."

That's not to say the creative middle class can't aspire to join the metaphorical 1%. The best strategy for remembering dreams is keeping a journal next to your bed, says Watson. Also suggested is avoiding alcohol and caffeine, which scramble the NREM and REM cycles. Engaging in some pre-bedtime priming - contemplating a problem you'd like to solve - increases the likelihood that sleep will bring some answers. Up to a third of the subjects in one of Watson's sample groups reported that priming had helped them find a solution that had eluded them during the day . . . .

A New Earth: by Eckhart Tolle (pg. 27-30)

The word "I" embodies the greatest error and the deepest truth, depending on how it is used. In conventional usage, it is not only one of the most frequently used word in the language (together with the related words: "me," "my," "mine," and "myself") but also one of the most misleading. In normal everyday usage, "I" embodies the primordial error, a misperception of who you are, an illusory sense of identity. This is the ego. This illusory sense of self is what Albert Einstein, who had deep insights not only into the reality of space and time but also into human nature, referred to as "an optical illusion of consciousness." That illusory self then becomes the basis for all further interpretations, or rather misinterpretations of reality, all thought processes, interactions, and relationships. Your reality becomes a reflection of the original illusion.

The good news is: If you can recognize illusion as illusion, it dissolves. The recognition of illusion is also its ending. Its survival depends upon your mistaking it for reality. In the seeing of who you are not, the reality of who you are emerges by itself . . . so what is the nature of this illusory self?

What you usually refer to when you say "I" is not who you are. By a monstrous act of reductionism, the infinite depth of who you are is confused with a sound produced by the vocal cords or the thought of "I" in your mind and whatever the "I" has identified with. So what do the usual "I" and the related "me," "my," or "mine" refer to?

When a young child learns that a sequence of sounds produced by the parents' vocal cords is his or her name, the child begins to equate a word, which in the mind becomes a thought, with who he or she is. At that stage, some children refer to themselves in the third person. "Johnny is hungry." Soon after, they learn the magic word "I" and equate it with their name, which they have already equated with who they are. Then other thoughts come and merge with the original I-thought. The next step are thoughts of me and mine to designate things that are somehow part of the "I." This is identification with objects, which means investing things, but ultimately thoughts that represent things, with a sense of self, thereby deriving an identity from them. When "my" toy breaks or is taken away, intense suffering arises. Not because of any intrinsic value that the toy has - the child will soon lose interest in it, and it will be replaced by other toys, other objects - but because of the thought of "mine." The toy became part of the child's developing sense of self, of "I."

And so as the child grows up, the original I-thought attracts other thoughts to itself: It becomes identified with a gender, possessions, the sense-perceived body, a nationality, race, religion, profession. Other things the "I" identifies with are roles - mother, father, husband, wife, and so on - accumulated knowledge or opinions, likes and dislikes, and also things that happened to "me" in the past, the memory of which are thoughts that further define my sense of self as "me and my story." These are only some of the things people derive their sense of identity from. They are ultimately no more than thoughts held together precariously by the fact that they are all invested with a sense of self. This mental construct is what you normally refer to when you say "I." Most of the time it is not you who speaks when you think or say "I" but some aspect of that mental construct, the egoic self. Once you awaken, you still use the word "I," but it will come from a much deeper place within yourself.

Most people are completely identified with the incessant stream of mind, of compulsive thinking, most of it repetitive and pointless. There is no "I" apart from their thought processes and the emotions that go with them. This is the meaning of being spiritually unconscious. When told that there is a voice in their head that never stops speaking, they say, "What voice?" or angrily deny it, which of course is the voice, is the thinker, is the unobserved mind. It could almost be looked upon as an entity that has taken possession of them.

Some people never forget the first time they disidentified from their thoughts and thus briefly experienced the shift in identity from being the content of their mind to being the awareness in the background. For others it happens in such a subtle way they hardly notice it, or they just notice an influx of joy or inner peace without knowing the reason.