Seeds of Doubt sown on my bottom in a dream

When I was about 12 or 13 years old, I was fascinated by dreams. My father had a book on dreams (Interpreting Dreams, or some such title) that was pure psycho-babble but I didn't know that. Even a bad book can fuel our imagination. I played the interpretation game every time I woke up and remembered a dream. Childish hope on the wings of ignorance.

One cold December night, I was sleeping and apparently dreaming of knights and swords. A battle scene and I was in the middle of it. When would a 12 year old be in a battlefield? When he has just watched a historical movie with an impressive battle scene. Someone was chasing me and I was wisely running instead of fighting. The man was coming after my heels with a sword. His face - which I can now authoritatively describe with hindsight - was changing like one of the characters in Philip K Dick's story A Scanner Darkly. I was running and not looking back at all. But that's didn't stop me from seeing him. Rational Thought had bolted far ahead of me when it saw what was coming. Such are the wonders that inhabit a dream!

The shape-shifting sword carrying soldier of my dream caught up with me and thrust his sword into my buttock. Ouch. He thrust it again, and again, and again. There was a vague sensation of pain. However, what woke me up was raw terror, the fear of being sliced up by a faceless man. I sat up startled, sweaty and groping for my bearing. The vague pain slowly came into clear focus. A pencil that I had left on the bed by mistake was poking my bottom. I pushed it aside. Did my brain make up the whole story on the spur of the moment when I woke up? If it had been aware of the pencil, the faceless man would have been the bespectacled scary math teacher of my school thrusting his freshly sharpened pencil into my buttock (a more fearful prospect for a 12 year old, as you can imagine).

What the heck was going on in my head while I slept? What's a dream? All this time I had imagined a dream to be a movie show, a coherent sequence of events geared towards a goal. But, now, I was not so sure. Maybe, the brain lets down its reins during sleep. When something wakes it up, it finds a mess of uncontrollably babbling neurons around and tries to make up a story for it, like what most nursery teachers do when a parent unexpectedly walks in. My dream seemed like one of the side effects of having a pattern-matching machine that cannot tell the difference between a pencil and an imaginary sword when its sensors are not fully engaged.

Sleep, the antidote for subjecting our brains to the impossible task of making sense of this world, has unintended consequences. Sleep is when the crazy side of humanity rears its head and goes on a rampage. Sanity is merely the ability to overlook the obvious bonkers that our world is. Isn't it?

Doubting myself was one of the seeds that was sown with a pencil on my bottom when I was growing up. Have you nurtured your own seeds of doubt into sprawling trees? Are they fruiting vigorously with questions?

More to read: Scienceblogs on dreams.