During the first ten minutes of class, write a summary of Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal, Night Story chapter in your notebooks. These are some questions to help you with your summary: What does Gottschall mean by “night story?” What is the significance of Jouvet’s cats? What kinds of dreams do you remember most vividly? Do you remember your dreams from last night?
Remember to type up your summary and post it to OpenLab as a comment to this blog post before our next meeting.
It’s funny that this is the chapter we had to read, because I had a crazy dream Monday night about my boyfriend Antwone. When I woke up on Tuesday all I could do was wonder what that dream meant and that I should tell him about it before I forgot since that’s usually what happens. Usually after I dream I wake up and cannot remember a single detail from the dream. I started to analyze it myself and I got stumped. I like how the stories always somehow relate to my everyday life. I actually did not know what Gottschall meant by night story. I always really remember the dreams that scare me.
According to Gottschall’s “Night Story” chapter, Dreams are highly emotional. This means, that our brain is not resting at all, because of all the drama we feel during off state. Since dreams are so intense, I think that by saying “Night Story” Gottschall means that our imagination travels with our day experiences ending up as hallucination. In addition, we typically remember dreams right before we wake up, because the brain want to make sense of everything. In my mind, thats why Gottschall connects every chapter with the brain expanding its information as we advance reading. Also in this chapter, there are interesting topics such as “Jouvet’s Cats”: a french scientist Michael Jouvet who find out that animals experience REM sleep. For example, after REM sleep Jouvet’s Cats were acting out their dreams. Therefore, dreams about specific things like animals struggle to survive is the significance of Jouvet’s Cats. Most vividly, I remember nightmares and from last night I remember I dreamed about being in a situation where I was scared but I wasn’t sure about the setting and why I was so frightened even after I wake up. Finally, I conclude that dreams depend in our emotions, because when I dream about happy things I wake up happy. As one can see, our emotional states are a series of thoughts.
It is amazing how the brain is designed to stay awake. Our brain never rests even when we are sleeping, the brain will try to remember what we learned during the day while our other body parts are asleep. Something I found interesting is that dreams are highly emotion and I believe that it is true. Because sometimes when we dream, the dream can feel real that it wakes us up. Also, dreams can help us file new experience in the correct bins of short and long term memory.
There was one dream I can never forget. I had this about a year ago, and u remember it as clear as the daytime. The dream sucked, it was nothing colourful or happy, just very gloomy. There were explosions in the distance and everything was decimated, something hit me and I felt cold, I was basically dying. I wake up to see the window was broken its interesting how the physical world can affect your dreams. I can never really remember my dreams from the night before, maybe some flashes that last like a couple seconds but then it’s like they were erased and I forget all about it. Dreaming shows that our brain is never resting even though our body is. The Brain is always sending signals to our body to lower or heart rate, slow our breathing and it’s very interesting because even though we should be reading our brains aren’t.
Before reading The Storytelling Animal, Night Story chapter, I would have thought that the term “Night Story referred to a story that one can tell another at nights. Also, that dreams were things we would have experienced during our sleep. However, while I was reading The Storytelling Animal, Night Story by Gottschall, I discovered that Night Story is referring to the dreams we get while we are asleep.
According to Gottschall, Night Story is a mystery. He believes that every night in our sleeping lives, we wander through an alternate dimension of reality and that in our dreams we feel intense fear sorrow, joy, rage, and lust. Also, he thinks that we commit atrocities, we suffer tragedies, sometimes we fly, and sometimes we die. Moreover, he explains that while the body lies dormant, the restless brain improvises original drama in the theaters of our minds.
I must say that I believe everything that Gottschall thinks about dreams, except for the part when he says, “the restless brain improvises original drama in the theaters of our mind, while the body lies dormant.” I believe that this world that we are living in is a spirit taking world and that all dreams have some kind of meaning, even though we may not recall most of them the next day. I say this because I had many dreams before and the one that I remembered the next day had some significance behind it. As an example: a few years ago in, Guyana. While I was asleep one night, in my dream, an old white woman appeared to me; she was wearing a white dress and she gave me five numbers to play the lottery. The next morning after I woke, for some reason I could not remembered the last digit of the set of numbers she gave me. I had the last digit mixed up. Nevertheless, I played the the lottery with the same numbers and I used one other number. As a result, I missed winning the lottery by the same last digit I mixed up. At the end, I got four numbers out of the five numbers correct, because of the woman in my dream. If I did not had the last digit mixed up, I would have won the lottery.
In Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal, Night Story I found this chapter to be very interesting because it actually open my mind more to know what are really dreams and how and why we dream.
In my own words I believe that what Gottschall meant by night story was a dream you have had that you were able to remember because not everybody can remember dreams. I have had very crazy dreams, dreams that till this day I keep having, but not as much as before, the dream that I am talking about is more like a nightmare. I dreamt my self awake I can see everything in my room perfectly and I can hear thing too but for some strange reason I cant move and sometime in that dream I feel like a strange pressure pushing me down or in a way pulling me up while pushing me down. the latest dream I had witch was today was about my father and witch is crazy because today is is birthday too.
This chapter opened my eyes on a lot of things I did not know about my brain. First fact I learn is that our brain is never resting. Not even while we sleep. Gottschall explains how our brain is always telling stories, and wiring everything we learned during that day to specific places in our brain. Second fact it’s that no one knows why dreaming even exists but Gottachall tell us some of the most popular reasons people think we dream. Dreams can help us file new experiences in the correct bins of short and long term memory. This connects to what I said earlier about the wiring works our minds do while we sleep. Another theory people believe it’s that dreams are messages from saints and gods. I have personally heard that a lot of times and it’s always old people. Another fact I learn while reading this chapter it’s that dreams are highly emotional. When we dream our minds doesn’t know it’s dreaming. Due to our brain not knowing it’s dreaming while it’s dreaming, we tent to talk, thrown punches, feel fear, orgasm and more while we sleep. This chapter taught me a lot more but this is just the basics of our sleep lives & no I don’t remember any of my dreams.
In this chapter, Gottschall explains about dreams in general and describes some perspectives some perspectives about dreams such as the RAT theory (random activate theory) which basically tell us that dreams have no purpose what so ever in our life and people dream because that is just the process in which the brain organizes, collects, and synthetize all the information that people gather in the morning. On the other hand, Gottschall mentions that some great psychologist such as Sigmund Froyd tried to recodifies encrypted messages that probably the brain is trying to communicate to us during on our sleep time. Moreover, the author mentions that dreams in overall are just bizarre and probably has no message at all. In addition, this is connected about what Gottschall expounds about the Jouvet’s cat experiment in which consisted in that Jouvet took several cats and put them to sleep, connect and modified with some kind of special surgery the brain with their muscles, so when the cats were in the REM sleep, the cats were moving while they sleep. The results were fantastic because not only demonstrate that cats sleep, moreover, they sleep about specific topics, specifically, about cats problems and worries. In the same way, human beings dream about their problems and dreaming are just a simulation in order to survive in the real life, in other words, sometimes dreaming help humans to train in order to survive since in sleeping we are so vulnerable.
Every night of our sleeping lives, we wander through an alternate dimension of reality. In our dreams we feel fear, sorrow, joy and lust. While we are resting our brain improvise original drama in our minds. Dreams are referred as night stories and they usually focus on the dreamer who struggles to achieve desires. Night story is a mystery. Many researchers believe that dreams may be the form of autotherapy, helping us to cope with the anxieties of lives, while some believe dreams have no purpose whatsoever. I think dreams has no purpose because many times I have dreamed about me being in some strange place which is impossible in reality or I am the king of seven kingdom and I torture many people. Many times my dreams doesn’t makes any sense in real life. Although we in Brain Rules Medina told that Mendeleev came up with an idea of Mendeleev periodic table at his dream. There are different kinds of dream one of them is nightmare. And strangely studies shows that we remember such bizarre nightmares better than any other dreams. Gottschall says that we dream just as a reminder to do things right. Like he says his desert dream was a way of priming him to better care of what is most important thing to him; his daughter.
Zahirah Hutton
ENG 1101
March 18th 2015
Summary: Night Story
In this chapter of the book I got a lot of questions answered as well as new questions about the human ability to dream. For one I thought that when the body is sleep so is the brain which would make sense because it is constantly working. Unbeknown to be the brain is actually help you it’s self remember and put into perspective what went on that day. Now dreams have very different purposes sometimes dreams help us to escape from what is reality it gives us a sense of isolation from our problems. Gottschall believes that through our sleeping night that our bodies enter a new realm of some sort and we go through this emotional roller coaster to an alternate dimension. To me our dreams for some prepare us as humans for what may happen in our awaken lives and gives us a chance to have some sort of control over it because like in our dreams we have no immediate control of what we may dream up.
When Gottschall says “night story” he is referring to the imaginary story we experience while we are sleeping. Dreaming is a very emotional activity and with that be said our brains are always active whether we know it or not. Many of us cannot recall our dreams but sometimes we do. But that does not necessarily mean that we did not have a dream the night before. It’s safe to say that our dreams depend on our emotions. Dream’s mean more than we think, it’s important to take the time out and try to analyze our dreams. Everyone has had a dream that they can recall even if it was a years ago that they had the dream.
Gottschall’s “Night Story” chapter from The Storytelling Animal book kept me very engrossed. In this chapter, the author talked very fluently about the topic and that is why I consider it as another nice chapter. Also, people feel very attracted about night stories, dreams and those mysterious things because is something that happen to everybody and they want to know why and how the happen. When he talks about “Night Story”, he refers to the things we dream, the stories we create while we are sleeping and how they directly affect us. Gottschall assert that every night of our sleeping lives we feel so many different things as if they were real. We wander through an alternate dimension of reality. When we are dreaming, we feel intense fear, sorrow, joy, rage and lust. We commit atrocities; we suffer tragedies, and sometimes we die, etc. While I was reading this, I remembered all the times I have woken up crying because I dreamed that someone I love have die, that is one of the worst feelings because you get to think is real. The stories we dream, focus on a protagonist, usually the dreamer, who struggles to achieve desires but those dreams have their own functions. The help us to file new experiences in the correct bins of short and long term memory and as Francis Crick proposed, dreams helps us weed useless information out of the mind. In addition, the author talks about RAT (random activation theory), which is based on the idea that brain has serious work to do at night, especially during REM sleep. It expresses that dreams are highly emotional because the limbic system and the amygdala happen to be aroused during REM sleep. In this chapter, Gottschall talks about Jouvet’s cats too. This topic is called as Jouvet’s cats because its researcher Michael Jouvet and the fact that he experimented with cats. He knew that many animals experience REM sleep and atonia. With his experiments with cats, he found out that cats DO dream. They go far away in dreamland, totally oblivious to the waking world. The kinds of dreams people remember most vividly are the ones that mark them, that really mean something for them, they could be nightmares or something that makes them very happy. Personally, I do not think I could be able to forget a dream that marked me.
Justin Echevarria
As I continue to read The Story Telling Animal I continuously fail to predict what the chapter is about. Reading “The Night Story” chapter i assumed it would’ve been about the human brain creating nightmares due to exotic imagination(s). As every chapter I was wrong and was really about dreaming in general. I guess nightmares is a type of dream we as people become afraid and labeled it as a “nightmare”, but overall it is just a dream. According to Gottschall he believes dreams happen due to everyday experience and its a creative reflection on what could have or what should have been done. The term Deja vu (when one feels as if a they already lived the moment) came to mind while reading, although deja vu is caused by memory I believe its due to an alternate reality. I believe they are more than one dimension(s) and while in the dream state ones mind can possibly visual the another dimension.
While reading this chapter I also started to remember lucid dreaming and the movie “Inception”. The mind is a very power thing and yet it is quite simple to fool it.
In this chapter, Gottschall speaks on the topic of dreaming once again. However, in this chapter he discusses how we go through a different dimension of reality. When dream, we feel things and it affects our real life bodies. We can feel fear if we are having a nightmare, we may feel depression, lust, and so on. Gottschall also mentions that we use RAT, which is how our brains are active at night.
When Gottshall is talking about night stories he talks about dreamsUsually dreamers – who struggles to achieve desires.
Night story is a mystery. Dreams can have multiple functions. Some dreams can help us to file new experience.
Also the author is talking about RAT (random activation theory), based on idea that the brain has serious work to do at night, especially during REM sleep. So the brain can finish all the thinking activities it had during the day.
Talking about Jouvet’s cats, the author described an experiment of the French scientist Michael Jouvet who watched work of cat’s brain during their sleep. They were acting out their dreams. Experiment showed not only that cats dream but also they dream about very specific things like hunting, dreams of snarling dogs, as long as people are dreaming about their daily activities, fears, wishes, etc.