[Carl Sagan, in The Dragons of Eden, maintains that reptiles, whose brain we have as inherited as the most basic, primitive layer of our primate, three-layered brain, exists full time in a dream state (Sagan, 160). If we had the conscious use of the reptilian part of our brain (the R-complex) during the day, we would be walking around in a state of perpetual dreaming. Nice. I think I might like that.]

We don't coincidentally dream because we happen to need sleep for other reasons, although it's easy to see how we might come to this conclusion, since we feel we need rest and as we rest, mostly unconscious, we continue thought patterns at a base level. Rather, we fall into sleep, which is a very strange state if you think about it, an unconsciousness imposed upon our minds by our bodies, so that we may experience a state of mind different to the advanced, mostly rational, or at least highly programmed one that we are locked into during our waking state. There is no reason why the body should have to pass into this unconscious state in order to rest. Our bodies can sit or lie down and get all the rest they need, and even if we would choose not to do it, eventually we would collapse from pure physical exhaustion, and yet there is still no reason why we should then become comatose--except that our conscious minds will interfere with the processes of the more primitive state of thought that our physiologies need to express.

This is especially true of the more A-type personalities among us. For these people, and for all of us, the body, in its genetic wisdom, shuts us down, so that we may experience a more primitive mode where our minds are not so cluttered with the more advanced thought processes, when we may "think" as we once did before we became the great minds that we are today. This is a process analogous (or maybe even identical) to the reptilian and limbic regions of the brain being overlaid with the more advanced neocortex. Yes, we are humans, a higher form of animal, but we are nevertheless animals, and our brains reveal this fact by their layered nature. And our dreams reveal this fact also: we were once less evolved in our thought processes. Thought and feeling ran together with much less compartmentalization, and this is revealed in dreams, and we must experience this, or we remain cut off from our greater selves, which causes problems of adaptation. [Neurotics (anal retentives), for example, struggle to maintain total conscious control. They may even strive obsessively to dominate the contents of their dreams, in such ways as maintaining a dream journal and engaging in an ongoing practice of dream interpretation.]

We dream so that we may adapt to a world which is continually throwing new information at us. We reorient ourselves in sleep, becoming more unified with a world we are a part of, but often feel, by virtue of our higher minds, that we are separate from. Our dreams are our core way of thinking, our base self expressing itself. The fact that we choose most often to ignore them is a sign that we need them all the more. Our advanced selves ignore our lower level selves, and so basic physiology continually attempts to restore us to the more undivided self we have departed from via advanced thought.

It is said that there are yogis who do not need sleep--because they have attuned themselves to the natural universe, thus eliminating the need of a periodic re-coordination between the waking and the "inner" selves. (There is no inner self; modern science has shown us that we are all one continuum, which yogis train themselves to experience more fully.) All these yogis need, then, is physical rest. This is the state of meditation. As it is perfected, sleep becomes unnecessary, because dreaming becomes a waking state flowing without interference from minds that continually attempt to advance beyond their limitations. This is not a criticism of advanced thought, which is a wonderful process. (It allows me to do what I am doing now.) It is merely a statement of fact. We are mentally limited, but experientially, we are everything, when we do not deny it. So, where is the mystery of dreams? In the minds of those of us who have forgotten who we really are. We are our dreams, forgotten. The mystery is our own selves.

In fairness to Sagan, he looks at this rationale for sleeping and dreaming a bit differently, sort of from the other side. He takes the natural selection perspective that we dream because it is the state of mind (state of the brain) of reptiles, who slept at night because it was safer for them to remain motionless and thus not become some larger predator's meal; and so nature selected those who remained most motionless (Sagan, 142).

It happens to be our (mis)fortune that we evolved from reptiles and inherited their brain as the basis of our own; and with it we inherited its physiological propensity to sleep. And dreaming just happens to be the reptile's normal consciousness, which is, then, the reptile awakening to a temporary consciousness of his environment in the night.

I agree with this selection viewpoint, but I see a higher-level function operating, even higher than the mammalian limbic and neo-cortical add-ons that Sagan defines; that is, the unification theory mentioned above, that we need to reunite our divided mind and even our sense of universal self, where everyone is everyone, flowing among each other's psyches freely, experiencing each other's thoughts and feelings in a way that animals have [and perhaps still do; to wit, dogs and cats who seem to be able to predict an owners' comings and goings ahead of time, finding their way home when lost hundreds of miles away, etc.], utilizing a synesthesia of all senses and perceptions beyond the senses, a less evolved, more affective/intuitive state experienced before the higher faculties developed and began to interfere with that universal perception of the unity of all things.

Integration Machine