Movies The Science Of Sleep

The movie The Science of Sleep is about how dreams are a result of the thoughts you had when you were awake. They are not just a message but also an aesthetic activity.

The Science of Sleep  presents an effect called parallel synchronized randomness, which contains the idea that the human brain can create a rather complex loop. It is not brains that communicate by telepathizing, but rather the fact that we all move in the same direction with every step we take.

The Science of Sleep  is a film about the surreal and exciting world of dreams. It describes the misfortunes experienced by Stephane (Gael Garcia Bernal), a young graphic artist whose brain broadcasts a television program that takes place in a relentless competition to his own reality.

For 3,000 years, man has been preoccupied with their dreams and considers them impossible to explain. They seem magical and maybe even full of meaning, which is hard to decipher.

Sometimes you experience such violent dreams that you feel you have to come out with them. You want to talk about them. Therefore, you make an effort to remember them and put words to them (Guardiola, 1993).

In this act of remembering and formulating them, a process of inevitable confusion begins. Thus, you always have a feeling that there was something more there. Something that was deeper and harder to explain, since you experienced it while you slept.

The Science of Sleep

Where do the dreams come from? The scientific community is completely unaware of this process. But there are a number of interpretations, such as the one we are also presented with in  The Science of Sleep.

This film won the Audience Award at the Sitges Film Festival. The key to understanding it lies in its particular theory of daydreams and in the delicate combination of complex ingredients.

Take the random thoughts first. Then you add a bunch of memories from your day and mix it with some memories from your past. Love, friendship, boyfriends and all the words and songs you have heard during the day, along with all the things you saw and something personal. Then you mix it all up.

After tackling dreams in a surreal and somewhat irrational way, let’s try to analyze them from a more pragmatic and scientific angle.

What are daydreams?

These are conscious experiences that take place in a kind of narrative during sleep. They are usually involuntary dramatic representations. In addition, they contain and connect mental states and emotions, perceptions, cognitive, affective, and motor processes (Guardiola, 1993).

Although daydreams usually have a particular kind of strange thing and lack of continuity, they are still a representation of your personal reality. They provide material for you, which can be a contrast of memories new and old (Guardiola, 1993).

Daydreams can hide in your memory and adapt to future events and circumstances. You can imagine a journey that you want to embark on, the risks it can contain and the benefits you want from it.

Daydreams have a high probability of becoming real in the future, giving dreams a pseudo-predictive character (Guardiola, 1993).

Dreams and science

When neuroscience and psychiatry examine the mechanisms and functions that attention, insomnia, drowsiness, and sleep contain, then it is relatively new. In fact, the physiological measurements that can be linked to mental activity and consciousness could not be made until sometime in the middle of the last century.

Modern research in dreams highlights the importance of the content of our dreams as they relate to a person’s mental structures. In other words, their thoughts while awake, their patterns and worries (Lombardo and Foschi, 2009).

Neurolinguistics shows that the process by which you approach the meaning of a word can be schematized with a module. The principle of forming this module lies in the behavior that patients with brain injuries have when they selectively affect the yield and content of their vocabulary.

When one is sleepless, a word can trigger a series of images and patterns with similar characteristics to those that come when you daydream. You can see common cognitive elements with the structure that dreams during sleep have through the method of free association. (Lombardo and Foschi, 2009).