The dream journal of Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who discovered neurons (2015)

“The majority of dreams,” he writes, “consists of scraps of ideas, unconnected or weirdly assembled, somewhat like an absurd monster without proportions, harmony or reason.” He theorized that dreaming happens in unused areas of the cerebral cortex: “The fallow lands of the brain, that is, the cells in which unconscious images are recorded, stay awake and become excited, rejuvenating themselves with the exercise they did behind the back of the conscious mind.”

I find a lot of truth behind this declaration. My dreams tend to be unconnected to daily routine but evinced from age old memories. My dreams to me appear to be located in the deep time of myself, whether from childhood or puberty or decades ago. Speaking as a person in their 40s, my dreams plot a sense of emotional exploration and sublimated desire. It is uncanny how my dreams engender an aspect of selfhood that is unrealized in daily experience.

For those interested, I wrote a paper on how the fall of norepinephrine (the adrenaline of the brain) during REM dreaming relates to dream content, in terms of the situation you find yourself in and your behaviour in the dream: https://psyarxiv.com/k6trz (Dreaming Is the Inverse of Anxious Mind-Wandering).

This was the HN thread with further discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590

One of the greatest minds of the past century, often times unjustly forgotten. He always reminds me of Miguel Servet, alto a pioneer in the medical science field.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Servetus