Dreaming, Dementia and Hallucinations
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, 05-19-2011 at 10:40 AM (64504 Views)
In dreams, our mind pulls information from a variety of sources - what someone said the other day, a segment from a TV show or movie, past experience, something we read and so forth. In our dream, this all seems to flow and make sense. Yet when we awaken, as real as the dream seemed at the time – we know it was only a dream.
How do we know what is real?
My mother had a stroke, and often when we hear or think about stokes, we think about the type which leaves the person paralyzed on one side. A stroke can affect any part of the brain and in my mom's case, it damaged a segment of her temporal lobe. Her ability to walk and speak were unaffected but she left the hospital with significant (vascular) dementia.
The aspect of the dementia that I'm going to talk about today is what has happened to her memory and her conscious thoughts and how similar they are to what we experience in dreams.
I don't know if this is a unique case or if this sort of thing happens in other cases of dementia or this angle has even been considered before.
Our memories tend to organized in a linear fashion. We have a pretty good grasp on whether an event happened recently or a long time ago. For some memories, we can remember a specific date of the incident. In my mom's case, it was as if someone had taken the filing cabinets that contained her memories, dumped them on the floor, mixed them up and put them back. Her history as we knew it and as she once knew it has been replaced with a different set of events, some that actually happened and others that have been created by fragments of "other" (thoughts, feelings, memory segments).
In our dreams, even the strangest connection of events seem normal or reasonable. In remembering out dreams, we find ourselves a little surprised about how some of the incidents in the dream fit together and that they did make sense to us at the time.
The veil between conscious reality and dream state has thinned and is even transparent in my mom's new world. Sometimes she sees images that are not really there. Sometimes she has conversations with memories of my father (making him and his memory two different people). Most of it doesn't happen in the moment, while we are there, but is told to me later as if it did happen (memory). What is real to her – is not necessarily real to us.
While writing this blog, I'm thinking about other circumstances where hallucination happens and we lose our ability to distinguish between reality and imagination. Hallucination is actually a common phenomena that we experience daily. We though we saw our keys on the table and they are not there or they are there and we don't see them. We mistake a branch in the distance for an animal and so forth. What differs our hallucinations from a diagnosis of dementia or schizophrenia is that our hallucinations are minor and usually have to do with perceptual mistakes and not abnormal reasoning about what we thought we saw, heard or felt. We don't think we see a dragon in the distance, we may think we see a bear. With mental illness, what is perceived is real and no other explanation is accepted.
I've read that with hallucinatory illnesses such as schizophrenia, too much dopamine in the system is responsible for the hallucinations. I don't know if anyone has ever tested dementia patients for dopamine levels? It would be interesting to know if there is a connection. I also wonder if our dopamine levels are higher while we dream or if they spike when we hallucinate or experience an ASC (altered state of consciousness)?
It would also be interesting to know the EEG readings on my mom when she is "remembering" something or while a schizophrenic is having an episode or … . I suspect Theta Delta being in appropriating dominant. I guess I'll have to look into this further.