Self Comes to Mind

reluctant to accept this, the most convincing instances may come from dreams that deal with plain life-regulation issues. A case in point: the person who dreams elaborately about fresh water and thirst after having had a dinner of very salty food. Ah, but wait!, I can hear the reader saying, what can you possibly mean when you say that the dream mind is “unassisted by consciousness”? Is it not the case that if one can remember a dream, then one was conscious when it happened? Well, that is indeed the case, in many instances. During dreams some kind of nonstandard consciousness is going on, the term paradoxical being quite apt. But my point is that the imaginative process depicted in dreams is not guided by a regular, properly functioning self of the kind we deploy when we reflect and deliberate. (The exception is the situation of so-called lucid dreaming, during which trained dreamers manage to self-direct their dreams to a certain extent.) Our mind, conscious as well as not, is probably paced by the outside world, whose inputs assist with the organization of contents. Deprived of that external pacemaker, it would be easy for the mind to dream itself away. 9
    The matter of remembering dreams is a vexing issue. We dream profusely, several times a night, when we are in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, and we even dream, albeit far less so, when we are in slow-wave sleep, also known as non-REM (N-REM). But we seem to remember best the dreams that occur close to the return of consciousness as we ascend, gradually or not so gradually, to sea level.
    I try hard to remember my dreams, but unless I write them down, they vanish without a trace, always did. It’s not so surprising when we think that as we awaken, the memory-consolidation apparatus is barely on, like an oven in a bakery at first light.
    The only type of dream I used to remember a bit better, perhaps because it was so well exercised, was a recurrent soft nightmare that would come the night before I was supposed to give a lecture. The variations always had the same gist: I am late, desperately late, and something essential is missing. My shoes may have disappeared; or my five o’clock shadow is turning into a two-day beard and my shaver is nowhere to be found; or the airport has closed down with fog and I am grounded. I am tortured and sometimes embarrassed, as when (in my dream, of course) I actually walked onstage barefoot (but in an Armani suit). That is why, to this day, I never leave shoes to be shined outside a hotel room.

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Building a Conscious Mind
     
A Working Hypothesis
     
    It goes without saying that the construction of a conscious mind is a very complex process, the result of additions and deletions of brain mechanisms over millions of years of biological evolution. No single device or mechanism can account for the complexity of the conscious mind. The different parts of the consciousness puzzle have to be treated separately and given their due before we can attempt a comprehensive account.
    Still, it is helpful to start with a general hypothesis. The hypothesis comes in two parts. The first specifies that the brain constructs consciousness by generating a self process within an awake mind. The essence of the self is a focusing of the mind on the material organism that it inhabits. Wakefulness and mind are indispensable components of consciousness, but the self is the distinctive element.
    The second part of the hypothesis proposes that the self is built in stages. The simplest stage emerges from the part of the brain that stands for the organism (the protoself) and consists of a gathering of images that describe relatively stable aspects of the body and generate spontaneous feelings of the living body (primordial feelings). The second stage results from establishing a relationship between the organism (as represented by the protoself) and any part of the brain that represents an object-to-be-known . The result is the core self . The third stage allows multiple objects, previously recorded as lived experience or as anticipated future, to interact with the protoself and produce an abundance of core self pulses. The result is the autobiographical self . All three stages are constructed in separate but coordinated brain workspaces. These are the image spaces, the playground for the influence of both ongoing perception and of dispositions contained in convergence-divergence regions.
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Figure 8.1 : Three stages of self.
    By way of background