Sleep...its fantastic work: some notes
The book by Rosalind D. Cartwright, The Twenty-Four Hour Mind, "The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives", has fallen into my hands and has been a joy to read, as the author's clear narrative expresses deep and long-term research on the subject, delivering truths and phenomenons familiar to our lives and hugely critical to our physical, emotional, mental - even spiritual - health.
In reading the present chapter, I was reminded of how I, we, as parents, used denial in tending to our children's fears in sleep. How - maybe - they were made to feel insecure by our "See, there is nothing there!" - comes heavily and guiltily to mind.
Today, some of that was healed from my "conscience", and some of it was made "guilty" again. Page 129 in the chapter "Warnings from the Land of Nod" talks about "...a clear principle that comes out of this work is that the effects of trauma on sleep and dreaming depend on the nature of the threat. If direct action against the threat is irrelevant or impossible...(in the past)...then denial may be helpful in reducing stress so that the person can get on with living as best they can."
"However (here it comes..!), if the threat will be encountered over and over (such as with espousal abuse ) - and I add, any type of relational abuse - and direct action would be helpful in addressing the threat, then denial by avoiding thinking about the danger (which helps in the short term) will undermine problem-solving efforts and mastery in the long run."
"In other words, if nothing can be done, emotion-coping efforts to regulate the distress (dreaming) is a good strategy; but (!) if constructive actions can be taken, waking problem-solving action is more adaptive."
Whoaaaa!!!!
These statements are of utmost value. This last sentence is key, complex, so critical to daily living! The term "emotion-coping efforts" in its operative sense, was something I came across in Yoga Therapy (YT) curriculum. Of course, before that, I had a "head" understanding of the term, but in YT, it crystallized, it became real. In the silence of learning mindful breathing in the pranayama series, and in awareness meditation, facing the turns and twists, the itch, the 'burns' of a scared inner mind and its related vivid emotions, as I was obeying the newly learned teaching..."watch them", "let them burn away as you watch them", "they'll dissipate as you let them go by", this scenario looked very similar to the dream state, and brought back memories of the children's sleep-crying episodes. In their dreams, the children were in the beginnings of the process of regulating the distress, but had no prior references in their "archives" to digest the incidents being put forth across their vivid mental screens. I think that meditation is a similar, maybe parallel process to sleep, in the sense of having episodes of life come into our 'consciousness' and through our 'presence to them', with inaction, this attention digests their emotional potential - their attraction or aversion - and in doing so, they get "archived" in a 'no-longer-sticky-folder' in our magnificent brain-mind-heart-neurological library.
To this point, the next paragraph by Dr. Cartwright is supportive, and outlines crisply the function/s of sleep and dreams. This is magnificent, awesome! I have taken the liberty of splicing the functions into bullet points for - hopefully - highlighting them:
Wowwwwww! So, welcome!, and may sleep, and dreaming be blessed! During sleep we review experiences and match them with previous similar ones thus 'digesting' them, incorporating them into an "organized sense of self" with which we can practice new coping behaviors. Wow! i.e., a de-fused potentially explosive experience is assimilated and then a plan of future responses is put in the bag of tricks...? Neat!
Going back to the children instance - which applies to us, too: ..."Waking up may relieve the sleepers' negative emotion, temporarily. (i.e., "I am not about to be eaten by a monster. I am safe in my own bed.") But if the fear-invoking waking situation is ongoing, the nightmare itself will be no help in regulating emotions unless...tadááá!...unless and until new waking experiences occur that have successful outcomes...AND...that are then filed into long-term memory."(p.130).
This is huge!!! As we...(p.130)..."learn how to manage waking negative experiences by developing real coping skills for resolving those fears"...our dream life will be better and our waking life much better still! So that, our sleeping and dreaming - in a sense, these 'passive' moments in life (which obviously they aren't!) coupled with 'active' practice of coping skills results in a strong emotional structure that allows us to avoid reactivity and implement more adaptive, healthy behaviors in a context of internal fortitude and peace.
!!!...Phewww! I am going to sleep more!
Here is a link to a short reference of the author and book: [https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/08/13/the-twenty-four-hour-mind-rosalind-cartwright/]
This brings memories, again, of the yoga field and experiences within it. For example, a phrase from Patanjali: “Subdue causes of suffering by tracing them back to their inception”. Akin to the 'digestion' process above - not to rumination, analyzing, re-thinking, etc. Just tracing them back to their inception...facing them...letting their 'burn' extinguish, if you will. Or put another way, from a Stephen Cope quote: "The Tibetan meditation tradition exhorts us to “stare into” the bare experience of discomfort. By training our awareness enough to acknowledge sensations as they arise, to experience them fully and to bear them, we would no longer be bound by our conditioned responses." [The Wisdom of Yoga, a Seeker’s Guide to Extraordinary Living, Stephen Cope: pp 107 - 108]
Easy. So easy we do it in our sleep!
In reading the present chapter, I was reminded of how I, we, as parents, used denial in tending to our children's fears in sleep. How - maybe - they were made to feel insecure by our "See, there is nothing there!" - comes heavily and guiltily to mind.
Today, some of that was healed from my "conscience", and some of it was made "guilty" again. Page 129 in the chapter "Warnings from the Land of Nod" talks about "...a clear principle that comes out of this work is that the effects of trauma on sleep and dreaming depend on the nature of the threat. If direct action against the threat is irrelevant or impossible...(in the past)...then denial may be helpful in reducing stress so that the person can get on with living as best they can."
"However (here it comes..!), if the threat will be encountered over and over (such as with espousal abuse ) - and I add, any type of relational abuse - and direct action would be helpful in addressing the threat, then denial by avoiding thinking about the danger (which helps in the short term) will undermine problem-solving efforts and mastery in the long run."
"In other words, if nothing can be done, emotion-coping efforts to regulate the distress (dreaming) is a good strategy; but (!) if constructive actions can be taken, waking problem-solving action is more adaptive."
Whoaaaa!!!!
These statements are of utmost value. This last sentence is key, complex, so critical to daily living! The term "emotion-coping efforts" in its operative sense, was something I came across in Yoga Therapy (YT) curriculum. Of course, before that, I had a "head" understanding of the term, but in YT, it crystallized, it became real. In the silence of learning mindful breathing in the pranayama series, and in awareness meditation, facing the turns and twists, the itch, the 'burns' of a scared inner mind and its related vivid emotions, as I was obeying the newly learned teaching..."watch them", "let them burn away as you watch them", "they'll dissipate as you let them go by", this scenario looked very similar to the dream state, and brought back memories of the children's sleep-crying episodes. In their dreams, the children were in the beginnings of the process of regulating the distress, but had no prior references in their "archives" to digest the incidents being put forth across their vivid mental screens. I think that meditation is a similar, maybe parallel process to sleep, in the sense of having episodes of life come into our 'consciousness' and through our 'presence to them', with inaction, this attention digests their emotional potential - their attraction or aversion - and in doing so, they get "archived" in a 'no-longer-sticky-folder' in our magnificent brain-mind-heart-neurological library. To this point, the next paragraph by Dr. Cartwright is supportive, and outlines crisply the function/s of sleep and dreams. This is magnificent, awesome! I have taken the liberty of splicing the functions into bullet points for - hopefully - highlighting them:
- "If we are right that the mind is continuously active throughout sleep...
- reviewing emotion-evoking new experiences from the day...
- scanning memory networks for similar experiences (which will defuse immediate emotional impact), ...
- revising by updating our organized sense of ourselves, ...
- and rehearsing new coping behaviors - ...
(wow!, isn't that a fantastic restorative process?!)
- (then) nightmares are an exception and fail to perform these functions."
Wowwwwww! So, welcome!, and may sleep, and dreaming be blessed! During sleep we review experiences and match them with previous similar ones thus 'digesting' them, incorporating them into an "organized sense of self" with which we can practice new coping behaviors. Wow! i.e., a de-fused potentially explosive experience is assimilated and then a plan of future responses is put in the bag of tricks...? Neat!
Going back to the children instance - which applies to us, too: ..."Waking up may relieve the sleepers' negative emotion, temporarily. (i.e., "I am not about to be eaten by a monster. I am safe in my own bed.") But if the fear-invoking waking situation is ongoing, the nightmare itself will be no help in regulating emotions unless...tadááá!...unless and until new waking experiences occur that have successful outcomes...AND...that are then filed into long-term memory."(p.130).
This is huge!!! As we...(p.130)..."learn how to manage waking negative experiences by developing real coping skills for resolving those fears"...our dream life will be better and our waking life much better still! So that, our sleeping and dreaming - in a sense, these 'passive' moments in life (which obviously they aren't!) coupled with 'active' practice of coping skills results in a strong emotional structure that allows us to avoid reactivity and implement more adaptive, healthy behaviors in a context of internal fortitude and peace.
!!!...Phewww! I am going to sleep more!
Here is a link to a short reference of the author and book: [https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/08/13/the-twenty-four-hour-mind-rosalind-cartwright/]
This brings memories, again, of the yoga field and experiences within it. For example, a phrase from Patanjali: “Subdue causes of suffering by tracing them back to their inception”. Akin to the 'digestion' process above - not to rumination, analyzing, re-thinking, etc. Just tracing them back to their inception...facing them...letting their 'burn' extinguish, if you will. Or put another way, from a Stephen Cope quote: "The Tibetan meditation tradition exhorts us to “stare into” the bare experience of discomfort. By training our awareness enough to acknowledge sensations as they arise, to experience them fully and to bear them, we would no longer be bound by our conditioned responses." [The Wisdom of Yoga, a Seeker’s Guide to Extraordinary Living, Stephen Cope: pp 107 - 108]
Easy. So easy we do it in our sleep!
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