How Does Protoconsciousness Theory Mesh with Your Model of Dream Emotion?

Abstract

The role of sleep and dreaming in maintaining emotional stability represents a very tangible and practical example of protoconsciousness as a mental state that supports the proper functioning of normal waking consciousness. Normal sleep has been shown to promote basic mammalian mechanisms of emotion regulation such as habituation, extinction and physiological homeostasis (Pace-Schott et al. 2009a, b; McEwen 2006). Sleep deprivation experiments suggest that sleep is also essential to cognitively based emotion regulatory functions such as accurate identification of facial emotion (van der Helm et al. 2010). Dreaming has been widely hypothesized to take part in this emotion regulatory process. For example, Rosalind Cartwright has suggested that negative affect is progressively ameliorated across dreams elicited from successive REM periods of a night in mildly depressed college students (Cartwright et al. 1998a). Similarly, she has linked a pattern of progression from negative early dreams to positive late dreams across the night with remission at 1 year in persons meeting Beck Depression Inventory criteria for depression (Cartwright et al. 1998b). The pattern of brain activation across sleep stages revealed by PET studies, which show global de-activation in NREM followed by selective re-activation of limbic structures that include core elements of the brain’s fear and reward processing networks, suggest that both positive and negative emotional extremes could be moderated during REM and that REM sleep dreaming may reflect a subjective experience of this process (Pace-Schott 2010). Indeed, Tore Nielsen and Ross Levin have suggested that these REM-activated limbic structures regulate emotion during REM sleep via extinction processes, and that, in PTSD, this process is disrupted resulting in both nightmares and impaired daytime emotion regulation (Levin and Nielsen 2007). Therefore, functionality in terms of emotional homeostasis has been attributed not only to the selectively activated physiology of REM itself but also to its subjective manifestation, REM sleep dreaming. Protoconsciousness theory posits “A primordial state of brain organization that is a building block for consciousness” (Hobson 2009). Hobson (2009) suggests that this primordial state of consciousness is prominent prenatally and in infancy when it supports the developing “secondary consciousness” of later childhood and adulthood. Hobson posits further that protoconsciousness then continues throughout life, especially during REM sleep dreaming, functioning in support of waking consciousness. If consciousness can be profitably described and compared between brain states in terms of its component formal domains, as suggested in Hobson’s first lecture of the current series, then certainly the emotional domain is one in which support of waking function is ongoing and essential given the lifelong nature of stressors and other challenges to proper functioning of the emotional domain. And, as most clearly seen during acute stress or in the disorders of emotion (affective and anxiety), disregulation in the emotional domain has innumerable knock-on effects on all other realms of adult waking secondary consciousness impacting higher cognitive functions such as selective attention, ability to reason and ability to plan prospectively. Therefore, the nightly support of waking consciousness, whether as a function of a protoconscious REM state or the physiological processes of sleep itself, represents an undeniable and essential function of sleep.