BETWEEN SLEEP AND AWAKE

The little clue about being "awake," from something, still haunts theorists.

The debate focus is on whether the sideways world was real, paranormal, heavenly or an illusion.

Scientists are researching the mental condition which occurs just before a person wakes up from sleep. There is a distinct period where things can happen to a person: experience a paralysis nightmare or sleepwalk. The sleep paralysis occurs when your mind wakes up prior to your body. The sleepwalking occurs when your body wakes up before your mind.

History is littered with references to "demonic" sleep attacks. No one knew why people acted strangely. Since it was not normal, the explanation had to be it was paranormal. The content of hallucinations can often be thematically linked to the feeling of paralysis –  manifesting as visions of an intruder in the bed who is physically holding the sleeper down. Records of incidents attributable to sleep paralysis can actually be found throughout history, in different cultures,  dating back as far as 400 BC. Some blamed witchcraft and curses.

Sleep paralysis is when your limbs are frozen but your mind is dreaming about a terrible thing, for example, a monster attacking you. Your mind races its instincts to flee or fight back, but your body does not respond. That increases the fear one feels in the moment.

Science states that a person could be awake and been dreaming at the same time. Sleep disturbances include types of parasomnia,  the inability to move, these periods of wakeful paralysis are often accompanied with vivid multisensory hallucinations. Effectively, imagery from your dreams can actually intrude into your waking reality.

The precise physiological mechanisms that result in sleep paralysis are still not entirely understood. What is known is that, typically, when we dream, our actions are confined to our imagination. We all have a built-in safety mechanism, which you can think of as something like a circuit breaker; it effectively blocks your brain’s motor planning signals from becoming motor action signals. This mechanism prevents us from physically acting out the actions that we dream of making. Thus, when you’re being chased by a monster in a dream, you don’t actually rise up and charge into the bedroom wall, or evolutionarily-speaking, tumble out of your tree. However, our brains are highly complex systems, and, as such, are prone to the occasional glitch.

One example is sleepwalking, which occurs when the paralysis eases too early, while you’re still asleep. On the flip side, sometimes the paralysis lingers – even after you’ve awoken. This typically happens just on the threshold of sleep – either just as you’re waking up or just as you’re drifting off. You can be conscious, with your eyes open, but be completely unable to move your body. Again, this is a fairly common occurrence, but the experience can be understandably alarming.

Such problems may be a consequence of more general sleep disruption. Researchers have shown that sleep paralysis experiences can be induced in lab settings when subjects are repeatedly woken from deep sleep. Researchers believe that 50 percent of people will experience at least one episode in their lifetimes.
Why would a person's mind act in such a strange fashion? One theory is that sleeping might serve to ‘consolidate’ memories from our waking life. The brain is de-fragment its information just like a computer software program corrects disjointed stored files. 

In 2000, a team of scientists at Harvard Medical School reported that participants who played the video game Tetris would continually report seeing game-like imagery, the iconic falling blocks, just before falling asleep. Similar results have been obtained using other types of video games.  This evidence has been used to support the idea that sleeping might serve to ‘consolidate’ memories from our waking life - consolidation is term that refers to the process of reinforcing and strengthening newly created memories. Experiments have demonstrated that people who are given memory-based tasks will perform better if they’re given the opportunity to sleep after learning. It seems as though after we’ve been engaged in a learning task, our minds might be using sleep as a sort of rehearsal space to practice problems.

But the sleep disturbances occur when the normal sleep process (and its mental sorting process) goes out of whack.

There is an old saying that you should never wake up a sleepwalker. It would be too traumatic for them to wake away from their resting place. People have had actual conversations with sleepwalkers. The idea that a person can be living in two "different states," awake and asleep is part of the issue with the LOST mythology paradoxes.

Were the main characters always awake? They were rarely shown sleeping - - - or was that purposeful to mimic the projection of a dream state. Why were clues such as "Illusion" on the name of a boat so clear at major story points? Why were Egyptian symbols of the dead used so often?

It begs the question of whether the characters were in some sort of "in-between" state of existence: partially awake (which accesses their personality traits) and partially asleep (which accesses their memories, fears, desires, emotions, etc.). Science research is beginning to think that there is such a place in daily human life.

DAYDREAMS OR NIGHTMARES

A Japanese proverb states, "Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare."

Modern people are caught in a cruel dilemma. Cultures impose upon individuals a sense of what is expected of them during their lifetime. Families also impose certain structures, values and goals upon their children which may or may not be realistic. Early experiences shape future actions more than people realize, especially the psychological underpinnings of self-esteem, self-worth, shyness, openness or personal anxieties.

The biggest governor in a person's life is the hard wired defense mechanism that a person does not want to get hurt. Hurt, being physical or emotional. As we grow older, the emotional buffer grows stronger because the mental pain of rejection hits deeper.

This post will not get into whether LOST was a daydream or nightmare premise of some character(s).

It is interesting to look deeper into the proverb's claim.

The hardest thing a person has do mentally is set forth action to overcome a difficult thought.

The classic example of this is a young man getting the courage and inner strength to ask his crush for a date.  The ramifications for him are huge. If she says yes, then the weight of the world melts from his shoulders. She likes him. OK. That is the start he was looking for (nervous success to follow). But if she says no, then the young man is crushed. He let himself be venerable by asking the question with the high expectation of a "yes" answer. This experience of pain can haunt him, especially the next time a similar situation happens in his life.

Everyone's mind is a set of dominoes of these types of experiences. One may set off a chain reaction of withdrawal from society. One may set off a relief valve of wayward expectations being corralled into common sense. It is how people work out and balance the fear factor to the potential reward is how one can live a meaningful and happy life.

A happy life is not necessarily what other people give you. A happy life is what you make of yourself.

But if you are leading an unfulfilled  life, one may get more and more caught up in the daydream of a better life. In your mind, the perfect world can be created to insulate yourself from the pain, fear and pressures of interacting with real people. When a daydream takes over a person's focus and bleeds into their daily routine, the person becomes their own anti-social island. Within the confines of their dream island, nothing can go wrong or hurt them because they control the outcome.

But in real life, you don't control the outcome of events. It may be random chance, hard work or a factor of opportunity over latent skill that leads to variable results. You can do the same thing over and over again to get variable results. There are infinite possibilities even in finite situations.

But if the insulated daydream takes over you to the point of not being able to cope in normal, real world situations (which makes your work suffer, your family estranged, or become a shut-in without friends), you create your own island prison of self-contempt.

It is tough to reverse that course because a person builds up layers of defenses to keep from feeling any bad memory pain. The more the defenses, the more difficult it is to open up your mind to gauge reality from fiction.

Hurley is probably the best example of this daydream-nightmare dynamic. His parental abandonment led to deep seated pain and anxiety about his self-worth. He was depressed to the point of changing his appearance to keep people away. He became secretive. He became a wall flower. When he had the courage to ask the record store girl to go out with him, he was on top of the world until his one best friend turned on him - - - after he kept his lottery winnings to himself. Hurley lost the girl and his friend. He retreated more into his fantasy world (creating imaginary friend, Dave, to take the place of everyone who had hurt him).  But it was actually Dave's last appearance on the island that was the path for Hurley to break free of his daydream nightmare. He had to leap off the cliff of self-delusion in order to "wake up" to the reality that he is a good, nice person who had a place in the real world. People would like him. He could find new friends. He could find a good job. He could find a girl and be happy.

But Libby, his dream girl, stopped Hurley from making that great mental leap. And that is the pull of the dream world - - - it keeps one in a safe illusion of happiness even though you are hurting your chances to find real happiness.

Hurley is symbolic of the average person caught between the expectations of others and their own personal issues or demons. You want to be accepted by your peers. You want to make your parents proud. You want to enjoy what you do. But the voice in your head keeps telling you that if you take that action, you will be sorry.

The greatest regrets in life are those "what if" moments of inaction. If you act and fail, then chalk it up to experience. If you don't act (and don't get a positive or negative result), then you are stuck in personal quicksand and that opportunity is lost.

As you can tell, many LOST themes are woven into this situation, including illusion, island, regret, depression, mental issues, and friendship. The idea of self-growth being self-directed is the base line coda of human life. You cannot wait for someone to come by to make you instantly happy. It never happens that way - - - even in the movies.

HEADING DOWN THE ROAD

As October creeps toward Halloween, with scores of creepy clowns popping up along the roadsides of America, the season gets us back to one element of LOST - - - dream theories.

But in this holiday season, nightmares.

One can broadly classify dreamers into two categories:

1. The upbeat, positive daydreamer who fantasizes about a better life for him or her self.

2. The depressed, anxiety ridden, negative sleeper who tosses and turns at night with ghastly visions of danger and horror.

Many scientists believe that dreams during sleep have major conscious contributions to a person's life. They believe that dreams are the mind's computer running simulations of potential events to gauge how the person (sleeper) will react if the simulation comes true. This is part of a probable ancient self-protection mechanism to teach instinct and survival skills.

The human mind is a complex thing which probably has hard wired in itself self-preservation.

So, one could presume that people who have happy dreams are living happy waking lives.

The counter part to that presumption is that people who have nightmares are living unhappy lives.

There is probably a gray area of people who lead mixed waking lives (people who are caught in a rut, dream of better things, or at times fear the worst.)

When you look at the scope of LOST's story lines, most center upon what would consider a negative path. The drama that incorporates danger, death and violence is easier to comprehend and compel viewership.

Each of the main characters on the show had deep seeded concerns about their lives. There were more negative emotions driving character actions than happy-go-lucky personalities.

Many characters had deep, unresolved emotional issues such as abandonment, abuse, social anxiety disorders and irrational fears. Many characters were heading down the road to nervous breakdowns, anti-social behavior or addiction/retreat from society.

So it is no wonder that these characters "wound up" together in the same place.

The place (and what it represents) is a matter for another discussion. But the series may have been an attempt to work through the characters underlying secrets, unresolved conflicts and personal angsts in the form of living island nightmares (real and imagined).

BEN'S RAGE

We know this is not true: LOST was not about Ben.

Or was it? We know in reality that Ben was going to be a throw-away character; a leader of the villain clan who would have been killed by the survivors as they marched toward Lord of the Flies madness. But Michael Emerson's strong acting performance soon made Ben a fan favorite, and a new story engine for the series.

People have theorized that the LOST mythology centers around Jack, or Hurley but in the beginning we know from the preproduction notes that Kate was supposed to be the focal point for the series. But again, that changed when Jack in the pilot became the instance face of the series. Instead of killing off Jack to "bump up the island drama," Jack became the leader of the survivors instead of Kate.

So the show has a history of changing course in mid-stream.

You can apply just about any centrist theory onto Ben.

It can lead to a compelling case that the workings of the show were in Ben's head.

For example, Ben has spinal cancer. He dreams/prays/desires a miracle surgeon. And right away, a great surgeon literally falls out of the sky to save his life. How does that happen?

Considering that Ben had the means, opportunity and wealth to leave the island and do whatever the hell he pleased, why he was stuck on the island waiting for fate to take his life was odd. There are a few explanations for this behavior. One, he was scared of living the island because he may not be able to return. Two, he was the embodiment of the island's power, like Jacob, so he would be naturally healed because he was the island's native leader. Three, he really did not have cancer - - - it was a myth or phobia or a nightmare.

By putting the context of the show into the mental state of Ben could explain many contradictory aspects of the story lines.

We know Ben was an insecure child. He was raised by a drunken father. He was blamed for his mother's death. He was quiet and introverted, he made no real friends. Everything we saw and heard could have been the transcript of a lonely child's imagination.

A telling point is when Hurley invites Ben into the church reunion to "move on" to the next plane of existence. However, Ben passes on the opportunity. He has personal things to work on. Again, why would Ben even show up in the main characters' purgatory reunion world?

The sideways world appears to be one made for "second chances." In it, Ben is a lowly school teacher. He is taking care of his ill father. He does not have any friends, only colleagues at work. He is meek and naive. But there is a part of him that is a dreamer. He thinks he can help other people, that he can be a strong leader, and that he can find happiness (maybe as a step dad to Alex). But in this alternative universe, nice guys still seem to finish last.

But if you view the island world as a prequel to the sideways fantasy world, it could make some sense. Ben dreamed of being a powerful and wealthy man. He dreamed of the island fantasy because in his "real" life (which the sideways world is based upon) is so dull. When Ben dreams of being special, his mind races to create nightmares based upon his anxieties such as falling in love with women he could never have (Juliet and Kate were island examples.)

Each of the main characters could represent the problems in Ben's life. Hurley could represent the unlucky lottery winner. Locke could represent the trapped personality in both career and personal life. Kate could represent either women who don't find him attractive or his need to escape his routine. Jack could represent his fear of success. Desmond could represent his fear of failure. As he tries to figure out how to change himself, his dreams attempt to try to change these fictional characters into better, stronger people.

As we have discussed, researchers do believe that the purpose of dreams is to allow a person's mind to make calculations and "what if" variable runs to find solutions to waking problems. The variables in Ben's life could be represented by the main characters and how they are trying to cope with the various hard-wired problems in Ben's persona: including rage, desire, needs, fears. It seems that Ben's biggest problem is that he feels that he is not acknowledged or recognized as being a good person. He is merely a background player in the sideways school. Only one of his students finds him approachable and helpful. His colleagues dismiss his talk as being merely fiction or a wild dream. He is a dog without a bark or a bite.

So, the show is a series of dreamscapes showing Ben how he could be more like Jack, Locke, Kate or Hurley. How can he find love. How can he be more open and confident. How can he get people to listen to him. How can he get people to follow his lead. How he can lead a better life.

But it is Ben's pent-up rage that feeds a long pattern of nightmares. His mind is sidetracked by personal failure that he envisions himself as a diabolical tyrant who acts like a god-like figure over stronger willed people. Perhaps by the time he has the sideways church conversation with Hurley, Ben has learned that he has to let go of his inner rage - - - and to also let go of all the imaginary characters that he created to help him cope with his miserable real life.

Ben has to "wake up" from living in a fantasy world in order to "move on" in his real life. The sideways world was closer to reality than we thought; it was really the last act in Ben's elaborate self-examination. He decided that he no longer needed the main characters to help him figure things out in the real world. He decided to let them go (and symbolically be erased by the white light at the end of episode).

From that point forward, Ben had the mind-set of cleaning up his act. To begin to work on how mend his fences with his father (as Locke had done in the sideways world),  and to work on finding true companionship with Rousseau and Alex.

DO COMA PATIENTS DREAM?

Science is trying to figure out how the conscious and subconscious mind works. Several studies have tried to use EEG monitors to pinpoint brain activity in normal resting individuals, sleeping individuals and people in a coma. The results have been inconclusive. Brain activity is hard to measure on a quantitative level.

People in comas are, to the best of our knowledge (at least in most cases) incapable of entering REM sleep, and very likely are not going to have any kind of dream or nightmare. This is because the brain system required to have a dream are in fact the same systems required while you're awake - to the point that your visual cortex will light up in an FMRI during a dream - it does not light up during a coma. Now, in contrast, there are some patients who aren't in a coma but rather an immobile state (imagine the computer's on, but the monitor's disconnected) - these patients have brain activity and can even, for instance, picture a tennis game if it's described to them. This state would likely allow for dreams, and if so, nightmares. However, if they did, they would likely dream just like we do.

It is also incorrect to assume that we only end nightmares by waking up. The sudden shock of awakening makes us remember the dream more clearly. Most dreams are finite because the neurological triggers for them are transient. We dream, research indicates, to solve problems. To walk through the aspects of our day that were unresolved or had left incomplete traces that needed to be handled. Nightmares similarly give us a chance to practice at our fears - however, our brain is unlikely to keep giving us practice after a certain amount of time.

In our non-waking state, there are two factors at work: dreams to solve problems and nightmares to practice facing our fears.

That seems to be a mission statement for LOST.

Take Hurley for example. He had a fear of rejection, including from his father and later with women. He also had an active imagination to try to solve his problems such as money, work and body imagine. In the complexity of Hurley's semi-conscious sleep state, he could have had both problem solving dreams and fear nightmares overlapping to create his island adventure.

Because what happens when Hurley "awakens" from his island time? He is in the sideways world with a lovely woman, Libby, and his friends.  This could still be part of his dream-nightmare resolution. For Hurley learns through his island time to be responsible, to not blame curses or bad luck for his issues with his parents, work or love life, and that by just being himself he can attain his goals of a romantic life and lasting friendships.

If that is the message of LOST, it is a good one.