Complexity and Psychic Life
The concepts of allostasis and Polystasis do not make our psychic life less complex. Neither do the concepts of anticipation and T.O.T.E. We are operating as a multi-tiered, always processing and adjusting organization. It is hard to imagine getting any sleep given all the balls we are bouncing off a pool table and the commotion being made by the ideational train when it chugs by our unconscious mind as we are trying to fall asleep. It is hard to imagine making any sense of our dreams when many sources from our daytime and our nighttime are making their contributions.
Aric Prather (2022, p. 92) suggests that things regarding this nighttime world are even more challenging:
“When it comes to falling asleep at night, we have a lot working against us. We live in a busy culture. We value performance and productivity over health and well-being-often ignoring the fact that those two things are, in fact, deeply linked. We feel guilty for taking time to relax, and so we de-prioritize rest. We have an entrenched belief that our time awake should be “used” productively. We understand that sleep is essential for our health in the long term, yet we de-prioritize it in the short term, day after day. We expect that if we’re tired enough, sleep will just happen. We expect to be able to think ourselves to sleep, or will ourselves to sleep.”
Help! How do we survive all of this. It is a miracle that we can achieve any quality of sleep. And how can we ever dream when faced with all the challenges associated with just falling asleep.
Fortunately, nature comes just in time, to rescue us from sleepless nights. Aric Prather (2022, pp. 92-93) lets us know that we also have a lot working for us when we are lying in our bed, trying to fall asleep after a stressful day:
“Powerful biological forces are at work twenty-four hours a day: circadian rhythm is pushing us toward sleep. Our homeostatic sleep drive, that sleep “pressure” that’s been building up all day, is pressing on us.”
And if we add in my proposal that we are operating with an allostatic sleep drive that adjusts for the changing conditions we face every day, then the potential for sleep is even greater. Prather (2022, p. 93) adds other factors that lead to a good night of sleep. Many of these are among the pathways to sleep I have identified:
“All the various zeitgebers throughout the day, like when we eat or exercise, go to work and come home, are all being gathered up by our body, data points that assist with the dispensing of cortisol or melatonin and rising adenosine, the hormones that either keep us alert or lull us toward sleep. These are all happening, no matter what else we’re doing. So a lot of the time, what we really need is to learn how to get out of our own way. And that means setting aside, and then ferociously protecting, the time it takes to transition from awake to asleep.”
All of this suggests that while it is valuable to understand what is going on when we attempt to fall asleep and stay asleep, it is also useful, as Irving Berlin suggests in Annie Get Your Gun, to “do what comes naturally”.
Conclusions
Regarding both sleep and dreams, we should first and foremost appreciate the truly remarkable gift that we (and apparently many other mammals) have been given. This gift enables us to restore our body and mind when we fall asleep. Our sleeping brain enables us to rearrange and sort through the memories we have accumulated during the day.
