by Doris E. Cohen, PhD, author, Dreaming on Both Sides of the Brain

The frontal lobes of the brain—the neo-cortex—are where we think consciously, where we make adult decisions. Although these areas do not develop fully until we are between twenty-three and twenty-five years old, they start developing more fully at the age of thirteen—an age at which many cultures celebrate a coming of age. This is just one instance of how spirituality, intuition, and science often synchronize with and affirm one another. When you dream, the prefrontal cortex shuts down. That is, your consciousness, your decisions, your choices shut down. What comes alive during dreaming is the midbrain—the limbic system—which controls emotion and memory.

The midbrain is where you experience the fight-or-flight response, aggression, and desire. It is interesting that our sense of smell, the oldest sense in terms of evolution, is the only sense with a direct connection to the hypothalamus, the emotional center. This is why scents can provoke such powerful memories and responses. Remember, the upper regions of the brain shut down when you dream, because they are where you make rational, conscious decisions—logical decisions and choices in conscious time. This is what allows you to enter the amazing world of the unconscious, a world in which the limbic system and unfiltered emotions are activated.

When you dream, it enhances your learning and memory. And, of course, infants and children have much to learn—everything from language to a sense of self. Extensive research has been done to determine the best way to learn things and these studies have affirmed the value of dreaming to the learning process. In some studies, subjects learned very irrelevant, trivial bits of information (random numbers and details, simple instructions for performing a task, etc.), then fell asleep. When they awoke, they were asked to recall the information. Those who dreamed invariably remembered the information better than those who did not dream—even when the dreams in question had absolutely nothing to do with the information they had learned.

Dreams have other interesting effects on your brain centers as well. For instance, if you dream about pillaging, or plundering, or something terrifying and destructive, your body wants to act on this. But if you were to act, it could be very dangerous. So your brain actually shuts down certain areas to keep you from physically expressing what you are experiencing in your dream. Discharging this energy in a dream is much safer and easier than doing so while you are awake.

This is what happens in sleep paralysis, which occurs when you emerge from a dream but are not yet fully awake. That is, your brain is trying to wake up, but your body is still obeying instructions, telling it to remain paralyzed so that you can continue dreaming. A disconnect, a disharmony, occurs because you are beginning to become aware. Your brain is moving into the theta and alpha phases, moving from an unconscious to a conscious state. Your mind, your consciousness and awareness, may be in an alpha state, but your body is still being governed by the unconscious, unable to act on physical impulses. You may feel as if you are paralyzed, but it’s simply a matter of your mind moving too swiftly from one state to another and your body not having caught up yet.

Sleep paralysis should happen infrequently, although there are emotional issues that may trigger it to occur more often—a feeling of paralysis in waking life, a feeling of being constrained or locked up. Metaphorically, you are aware that you are awake, but you feel completely paralyzed in your life. So, you experience both a conscious and an unconscious state—and your body responds to both.

The neocortex, the frontal lobe, is also the center of your episodic memory. It is the center of your waking, adult life, where you remember things and experience cognition, judgment, and choices. When you dream, you set aside conscious choices, decisions, and rational judgments, because you are moving into the unconscious, where everything is based on and communicated through symbols. This allows you to travel into the reality of your dreams, the unconscious reality, where anything is possible and messages can be conveyed in images that defy logic. I can meet the president; you can leap like a gazelle. These things could not take place in the upper regions of the brain where you think rationally as an adult, where everything is based in common sense and logical expression. But when those areas shut down, the unconscious can communicate using the language of symbols without being limited by what is or is not possible, what does or does not make sense, in waking life.

The unconscious world where dreams occur is a place without time or limits, where the lingua franca is the language of symbols. In the next chapter, we’ll explore this rich and profound language and learn how it can become a powerful influence on your everyday waking life.