Words&Dirt

“Dreaming is a kind of insanity, a rush of visions, largely unconnected to reality, emotion-charged and symbol drenched, arbitrary in content, and potentially infinite in variety. Dreaming is very likely a side effect of the reorganization and editing of information in the memory banks of the brain. It is not, as Freud envisioned, the result of savage emotions and hidden memories that slip past the brain’s censor.

The facts behind the activation-synthesis hypothesis can be interpreted as follows. During sleep, when almost all sensory input ceases, the conscious brain is activated internally by impulses originating in the brain stem. It scrambles to perform its usual function, which is to create images that move through coherent narratives. But lacking moment-by-moment input of sensory information, including stimuli generated by body motion, it remains unconnected to external reality. Therefore, it does the best it can. It creates fantasy. The conscious brain, regaining control upon awakening, and with all its sensory and motor inputs restored, reviews the fantasy and tries to give it a rational explanation. The explanation fails, and as a result dream interpretation itself becomes a kind of fantasy. That is the reason psychoanalytic theories relating to dreaming, as well as parallel supernatural interpretations arising in myth and religion, are at one and the same time emotionally convincing and factually incorrect.”

––Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, by Edward O. Wilson, pg. 82

“The great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed. The great owners ignored the three cries of history. The land fell into fewer hands, the number of the dispossessed increased, and every effort of the great owners was directed at repression. The money was spent for arms, for gas to protect the great holdings, and spies were sent to catch the murmuring of revolt so that it might be stamped out. The changing economy was ignored, plans for the change ignored; and only means to destroy revolt were considered, while the causes of revolt went on.”

––The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, pg. 238