Being a card-carrying member of, if not one of the founders of, Insomniacs United I wanted to share a couple of thoughts with you.
First, one of the best ways to reach the state of sleep is to do an Internet search on "sleep" or "insomnia." Read all the articles. Take copious notes. You will soon lose consciousness.
However, one night while chipping around the edges of that massive compendium I came across an interesting little tidbit. The article - the references for which are long since buried in the twists and turns of my grey matter, apologies to the authors - asserted that "going to sleep" as an intentional act, is a myth. Rather, we "fall asleep" when the brain gets tired of being conscious and "falls asleep." Naturally, I lay awake for an hour or two wondering "to where?" Falling implies that one goes from one place to another. So where and what is this place called "sleep" to which we fall? Hmmmm.
Again, the extant literature provides a tsunami of opinions, most of which address the physical state of the brain at particular points in the "sleep cycle." e.g. This from the Cleveland Sleep Clinic: "Sleeping doesn’t mean your brain is totally inactive. While you’re less aware of the world around you, you still have plenty of detectable brain activity. That brain activity has predictable patterns. Experts organized those patterns into stages. The stages fall broadly into two categories: rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and non-REM (NREM) sleep."
These kinds of definitions do address whether or not we tend to dream during the various sleep stages. But leave ambiguous the question of the origin of these nocturnal dramas that seem as real as waking life, if not more so.
It is the nebulous nature of conclusions drawn from the disciplines of neurology and psychology that leave me to still assert that dreams arise in part, from that place, or places, to which we fall, when falling asleep. Hence, where is this land of dreams? A few personal suppositions about that place:
Dreamland (DL) is unique to each dreamer. While we may encounter, while dreaming "real life" people and locations that we recognize, they do not overlap with those same locations or relationships in "wide-awake-land" (WAL). i.e. Dreaming that you reconcile with an old antagonist has no effect of your WAL relationship with that individual. Or falling in love with an unattainable other in DL, sadly leaves that relationship unaffected in WAL.
Strangers are more common in DL than people we know in WAL. This may be unique to my DL, but in my DL, I encounter people I know in WAL very, very rarely. And then often only after waking do I realize "That was so-and-so!" And often I am not certain . . . "Or maybe so-and-so. . . ."
DL seems to be in higher definition than WAL. Again, this may be unique to my DL. But for me, colors are more intense in DL. Visual elements, people and places, are in sharper focus. This may be personal dreaming compensation for the fact that I have worn corrective lenses of one generation or another for as long as I can remember. Who knows?
But, yes, I realize. These suppositions still only describe the characteristics of Dreamland. They leave unaddressed the central question of where is DL? Where on the cosmic, existential globe of "me" is the continent of Dreamland? Can I plot a course to it? Can I find my way there? Or is it only a place to which sleep allows me to fall, once I cut the cords that bind me to the shores of "Wide-Awake-Land?" Again some personal suppositions:
Dreamland may lie amidst the "many worlds" proposed by quantum mechanics. Google's AI provides a fairly clean definition: "The 'many worlds notion' suggests that every possible outcome of a quantum measurement is physically realized in a different, non-interacting 'world'. This process is often called branching."
Or, as I think about it - every time we select a significant path in our life, the "paths not taken" in our WAL are actually "taken" in one of quantum mechanics' other "many worlds." An alternate WAL. Hence some other version of our self moves ahead with that life in that world. And while quantum mechanics goes on to assert that "the mechanism of decoherence explains why we only perceive one outcome. When a quantum system interacts with its environment, its different possibilities become entangled and "separate" into independent branches that can no longer interfere with one another." Or, more plainly, quantum mechanics tells us that the path we choose for our primary WAL must remain separate from all the other "paths not taken." Maybe. Maybe not.
It behooves us to remember that the "many worlds" aspect of quantum mechanics is but an enchanting notion within an equally fascinating theory. Like the religious, or philosophical notion of some sort of "life after death" we have no data (despite Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's belief to the contrary) that these many worlds exist in a form we can visit or perceive. So it comes down to belief:
I chose to believe that:
First: These many worlds do actually reside somewhere on an existential plane.
Second: While, as stated in quantum mechanics, these worlds are primarily "separate," leakage between the worlds can occur, and,
Third: It is this leakage that seeps into our awareness, influencing - but not totally dominating - the narratives of our unique Dreamland.
So, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it!
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