Clean Your Brain.
Waking up this morning disrupted one of the more interesting dreams that I’ve had of late. In this dream, which mixed generations of people who had never met in real life, Tipper and I were going to the movies on a Sunday afternoon. Tipper was seeing an animated film about a futuristic robot. I was watching a biopic about a composer, with the added benefit of a seminar with said composer following the film. Anchoring the mall in which the movies were being shown was a massive library, which really isn’t a bad idea, in my opinion. My dream never showed either film, but both had a somewhat disturbing thread connecting them: Communism.
The composer, whose name I don’t remember, was famously autistic and legitimately didn’t give a shit about anyone’s opinion of him. Divorced several times, he was known to pick up his paper and pens and disappear, not telling anyone where he was for weeks at a time. The color of ink he used on his manuscripts varied from day to day: green, blue, red, black, and orange. There was no particular reason for his choice of color beyond how he was feeling on a given day.
Among those seated around me at long banquet tables were composers from earlier times in my life, not necessarily Communist composers, but still influential to my education. Nancy Hill Cobb. Alan Bush. Dmitry Kabelevsky. We all chatted as if we’d been long-time friends, which is possible only in dreamland. Dr. Cobb was the only one in the group I’ve known in real life, and I’ve not seen her in over 40 years. Conversations swirled around problems such as uncooperative conductors, lack of respect or interest on the part of audiences, and the seeming futility of attempting to educate a new generation.
The cats woke me before I ‘saw’ the movie. I looked out the window to a yard just as full of snow this morning as it was Tuesday morning. Once again, an arctic blast is forecasted to send temps below 0 by Wednesday morning. A sad fact is that I don’t think anyone is living especially comfortably at the moment. Either one is cold and roads are slick, or one’s house is on fire. The fact that insurance companies dropped fire coverage on thousands of California homes just before the fires began magnifies just how incompetent late-stage capitalism is in addressing the needs of people. There is no ‘up’ side to this past week.
What we did learn this week is that our brains clean themselves while we sleep. The good news is that you don’t have to be in deep REM sleep for this to happen. In fact, the good stuff happens outside of REM areas. The bad news is that sleep-inducing drugs such as Ambien inhibit the brain’s ability to flush out the day’s toxins. I’m taking this to mean that I must have one of the cleanest brains on the planet, or that the toxicity level of my brain is so severe that frequent naps are necessary to keep the damn thing operating. I suppose it’s possible that both are true.
My next question, one not answered in this study, is to what degree, if any, the pulsating cleaning movement affects our dreams. How are our minds getting any rest if our brains are spending our sleep time scrubbing away the bad stuff? Perhaps this might explain how it is possible to sleep all night and still wake up feeling tired. That’s probably not the case, but it’s one of the many questions I’d love for science to answer.
The dogs don’t seem to be in any hurry to go outside this morning. Despite the cats demanding that I wake up and get moving, the pups still haven’t asked to go out. In fact, Hamilton is lying here snoring rather hard. I’m a little jealous. Sleeping sounds like a very good way to spend the day.
Along with finishing this pot of coffee.