What are nightmares?
While we know that dreams are used by the brain as part of the process of sorting and consolidating the threads that make up memories, nightmares or 'negative dreams' appear to serve no such purpose.
Instead, they are typically considered negative experiences overall and unlike dreams, few want to remember them.
They don't appear to serve any direct purpose and, with some exceptions, it is hard to see how they would contribute directly to the survival of the species. Of course, if this was true, nightmares surely would never have come about.
Perhaps the answer lies in the heritage of our species- if nightmares serve no function now, perhaps they served one in the past?
Humans, like any other species, evolved with a number of instincts. Some of these are still available to the subconscious mind, even those that are no longer as useful.
At the very deepest level of subconscience there exists the most basic instinct. It takes the form of a shared subconscience with other close creatures.
As humans developed in other areas, the shared subconscience became less and less important. It mostly lies dormant in the modern human.
However, in the deepest depths of the subconscience... where the mind is most vulnerable, traces of it still exist.
The nightmare. The template left over from our creation as a species. An evolutionary strategy used to prolong the survival of the species in its earliest days.
Now, what is the shared subconscience? The idea can be most easily understood in 'simpler' creatures, like ants and bees, that are able to instinctually work out roles without the invention of speech.
While the invention of speech and language may seem to be a great communicator, it is in fact something far more extraordinary than that. The concept of language is in fact a key part of the concept of self-identification.
This can be seen in deaf/blind patients who, before being taught by a specialised tutor, have no concept of language and do not feel a sense of 'self'- they often report that it felt like life just started with the learning of language.
However, these individuals can still function even before learning a language. It's not like humans were useless before language, they were simply different.
Another key trait of language is that the idea of 'self' correlates with a drop in the idea of unity. When you see yourself as more of an individual, you place yourself in those terms instead of those of the others around you.
More clearly, this correlates with the lessening of the influence of the 'shared subconscience' on your behaviour.
Going back to the ants, they use their shared subconscience to communicate, in a broader sense, 'ideas' to the rest of the population. These are quickly propagated and in essence a species-wide 'voting mechanism' is used to determine a cause of action.
This makes the ants far more capable -as a species- than they would be as individuals.
Due to deficiencies in their structure, ants will never be the same 'individual creators' as humans are. Technology itself would be completely beyond their grasp. Hence, ants would be entirely useless with the concepts of language and self. These are therefore traits that will never evolve in ants as they are weak.
However, the concept of 'self' is not weak in all species. Humans, on throwing away their shared subconscience, gained something greater. The concept of 'self' which has lead to great innovation without evolution. Humans as a species have transformed far faster than evolution could possibly manage.
Hence, there has not been time for the shared subconscience to disappear entirely. It has simply withdrawn its main role, similar to vestigial structures such as the vermiform appendix left over as human development outpaced evolution.
That said, just because the shared subconscience is unused does not mean it is useless. There have been studies, to different levels of depth and with different levels of scientific merit, on the existence of the human shared subconscience.
A good example of one of the less scientific ones is the idea of the Web Bot Project that claimed to have harnessed the power of social media indexing to read part of the human collective subconscience. It has claimed a number of predictions but has mostly made misses.
Arthur C Clarke once famously stated, on the topic of finding other living creatures in outer space, that "we will find apes or angels, but not men." - the idea that the creatures we self-identify as - humans - are a fleeting evolutionary stage.
A way of looking at the idea of apes and angels is that they are on different sides of the period of time where humans abandoned the collective subconscience and embraced the idea of 'self'- returning to the collective subconscience could therefore bring about a socialist utopia of perfect role assignment.
The advancements humanity has made through the idea of 'self' have brought about far greater standards of living and have generally make the species far more 'fit' to survive, evolutionarily speaking.
This only works to a point- if the concept of a singularity is real, reaching it will effectively spell the end of progress. Some researchers have theorised that, as of 2100, the singularity has already been reached and humanity is at a standstill.
This might leave the only way forward being a return to the collective subconscience, to allow us, having reached our maximum potential as individuals, reach even greater heights as a collective.
Of course, this may never happen by itself, simply due to our strong sense of individuality as unique humans.
Many - in fact most - will simply not want to abandon the idea of self, even if it is to reach greater levels of standard of living, scientific discovery and evolutionary fitness.
In fact, it seems incredibly likely that our minds themselves would strongly resist the shared collective under normal situations.
Our evolutionary fitness is already at an all-time high and most of the things that form a threat to humanity are things that could instantly wipe us out, granting no opportunity for acclimatisation.
So, what are nightmares? They're a manifestation of the collective subconscience, but why are they profoundly negative in nature?
The answer may once again exist in the nature of our heritage. While 'higher' emotions like love, satisfaction and solace can propel humans to do great things, these emotions didn't always exist. Indeed, they have been shown to not exist in many other creatures at lesser stages of evolution.
On the other hand, the more base emotions, like fear and sexual desire, are indeed present in nearly all species. They form important instincts necessary for early survival. While they are not completely understood, it is believed that they are also manifest from the collective subconscience whereas higher emotions come from the idea of self.
While it is weak and largely only manifest in these instinctual emotions in more advanced animals like mammals, the collective subconscience exists in its strongest form in the simplest of creatures that have not developed even emotions.
Studies performed with the most accurate of timing equipment have shown how extraordinary the collective subconscience ants and other simple creatures have is. Updated information about food and danger can be transmitted far faster than through communication.
In fact, ants transmit and can begin to act on new information so quickly measurements confirmed that they don't even obey the normal rules of distance, time and causality.
This has lead many in the field to believe that the collective subconscience is something far more fundamental than merely something created by the matter that makes up creatures.
It may even be considered a defining part of 'life'; something that makes 'life' possible.
After all, is the idea that the first, simplest organisms on this planet from which all life was created managed to evolve a form of quantum entanglement to communicate so extraordinary compared to everything else?
This could mean that the concept of sexual reproduction helped to vastly accelerate evolution not only through mixing more of the gene pool but through creating more links.
This allowing the information network that is the shared subconscience to propagate further (as children are born with 'links' to two parents) and even faster.
Of course, how could this be all harnessed? This can only be considered by moving deeper into highly theoretical territory.
If nightmares are the source of all transcendent thought, they must be shared somehow. This is something that's a little hard to grasp as we tend to view nightmares as very individual things as they often seem to be the product of our own subconscious fears and anxieties. But are they?
Some pseudoscientific studies have purported to find links between the dreams of different individuals, especially if they are closely related (even moreso in the case of twins.) Yet these studies lack scientific rigour and their results are at best questionable.
The answer lies in the previous concept explored in the case of ants with a voting mechanism for propagating thought. But what if we're looking at this the wrong way?
Instead of collective thought coming about from a freak combination of matter and superstring theory, what if it was the other way round? We can only observe the world through our senses and if they are mislead, or serve a different function than we think, we would have no way of telling the difference.
The idea of existence itself, it seems, is based on collective transcendent thought, information propagation and a selection mechanism. We see the world in a particular light and the other people around us agree- or seem to. This is not solipsism as even the subconscience can feel surprise, particularly when information it sees as true is quickly invalidated by newer information.
Nightmares provide a key vector for exploring this concept of information distribution as they are so close to the shared subconscience and therefore so close to the truth.
If, theoretically, we could manipulate the brain chemistry of one individual in order to feed senses and emotions information so blatantly false and contradictory the unconscious mind has to reject it, it could well retreat into a state of permanent nightmares until the interference stops.
During this period, a nightmare could very well reflect on itself and explore the idea of nightmares. This would uncover a huge amount of new information that would be propagated over the network of transcendent thought like everything else, but it would be so convincing and backed up with so much proof that other minds would be forced to work out ways of accepting it.
People affected would soon have trouble distinguishing nightmare from reality and things from our nightmares would spill over into things we regard as safe from them.
Rather than a revelation of introspective thought, it is likely the collective humanity would immediately interpret this incident as a great catastrophe befalling mankind. It would create concepts to better understand it, such as seeing the manifest collective nightmare as a 'gate' and seek to stop it.
If humanity is successful, the transcendent thought information propagation network would take effect and dispel this nightmare, likely rendering the original 'seed' mind unable to cope. Humanity would then be free to continue on the same path it was on before as strong, individual minds working both for and against each other.
If humanity failed at this, the transcendent thought information propagation network would take effect and propagate the nightmare further over all of humanity. This would eventually conclude in the concept of individuality vanishing and collective thought taking over, leading humanity into a utopia of transcendent thought.
We would no longer be men- we would become angels instead.
