The dream: a wonderful function

1990/11/01 Agirre, Jabier - Medikua eta OEEko kidea Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Osasuna

The dream situation, its diversity or plurality, indicates that the biological conception of sleep (period) is not a uniform thing.

The dream or dream situation, its diversity or plurality indicates that the biological conception of sleep (aldi) is not a uniform thing. Apart from any anomaly and pathology (which we will analyze in another study) we can consider physiological sleep as a periodic event of inactivity and non-reactivity. Periodic event, h.d. the one that appears periodically (normally every 24 hours in the human being, adapted to the nictemeral rhythm, to the alternation night/day and that works for periods of 8 hours or turns).

On a scale of values of our needs we would first put oxygen, then water, then sleep, and finally everything else.

Oxygen is the first food in the cell. It is used continuously as a generation of ATP energy. The amounts of ATP generated in the Krebs cycle are very small and most of them are produced in the oxygenation after the hydrogen atoms released during the first phases of glucose unfolding.

During sleep, anabolic processes predominate. The cells are charged with energy (ATP). It is a reconstructive process. Therefore, during the look (when we are awake, said otherwise) the catabolic processes or crushers predominate.

Oxygen is used especially in the production of energy necessary to move and think during the look. During these complex metabolic processes, the release of a series of catabolites occurs, some of them known as hypnotoxins. These hypnotic toxins accumulate in the blood until they reach a level capable of stimulating the "center of sleep". These levels are different and specific for each person and are controlled according to another series of factors.

These other factors are:

• State of excitation of the cerebral cortex
• Action of inhibiting substances from the sleep center
• Action of stimulating substances
• Other factors not well delimited

The center of sleep is in the brain, in the mesencephalic and protuberancial part of reticular formation. This location is well demonstrated because the deep sleep that occurs from tumors, hemorrhages or inflammations (encephalitis and/or sleep diseases) in this area gives us clinical evidence.

After stimulating the center of sleep, and with the sleeping person, oxygen participates in a metabolism that destroys loative catabolites or hypnotoxins, since during sleep the energy needs are almost insignificant, so there is no muscle effort or work of thinking.

A person of great physical activity (children, athletes, of certain professions), as well as of great intellectual activity, accumulates a large number of hypnotoxins, so he needs a deep and reformed sleep to reduce his hypnotoxins to normal levels. The person of low physical and intellectual activity, as it usually happens in elderly people, takes a long time to get the levels that will work in the center of sleep and it is not surprising that they are people who sleep little and badly.

1971, E. The psychiatrist Hartman formulated a theory: while people sleeping little would be open, self-confident and psychologically stable, the other group, that of the timid, depressive and timid people, would be made up of timid, creative, original and independent people. However, subsequent studies have not confirmed this research by Hartman.

There is no doubt that in the dream intervene many factors and that there are different nervous pathways in the game. Some of the hypnotoxins mentioned above are known. Thus, in conditions of low oxygenation, the hydrogen ions accumulate, which causes an acidosis that is clinically configured as a box of drowsiness. Throughout the day and in normal physiological conditions other substances are accumulated, in addition to hydrogen ions, that is, hypnotoxins.

Sleep has been associated with a detoxification process. Laboratory experimentation has helped to understand some clinical facts (pathological, in other words). The hypnotoxic action of blood serum, cefaracylic fluid, and brain substance in insomnia animals is widely accepted. Once injected one of these substances has been observed somnolence in dogs and cell alterations.

But these effects are not immediate, but require a season. At about 65ºC only a small alteration of the hypnotic effect is observed, but from 65ºC the hypnotic action disappears. Therefore, it can be said that hypnotoxins are termolabate, since at those temperatures they are destroyed.

Oxygen also eliminates hypnotic effects. Therefore it has been possible to implement a theory: the reticular activator system (SAE) would be stimulated, which would increase the activity of the brain skin, thus closing the circle, once excited, maintaining the SAE permanently stimulated. But this theory also has its gaps, since the different lengths of the REM phases (rapid eye movements Rapid Eyes Movements) and not REM that alternate during sleep cannot be explained at all.

Following the theory of hypnotoxins, as it gets into deep sleep the body is metabolizing these toxins, and when it comes to a moment the action of these hypnotoxins is not so hard: it is then when rapid eye movements (REM) appear, which raises the level of hypnotoxins, returning to immerse in deep sleep. The cycle is repeated 3-4 times in 8 hours, but the REM sleep is becoming longer and longer (up to 30-40 minutes) and the hypnotoxins are decreasing and the time comes to wake up.

The REM dream would play the role of observer. According to experiments conducted in the United States, it seems that when sleep is reduced in a few days less than 5 hours, serious alterations appear from the fifth day (although Napoleon says: 4 hours for man and 5 for woman, only cretines should sleep longer).

During sleep, as we have seen, hypnotoxin levels decrease. Because the activity of cortical neurons would begin below a certain level, like dreams. These sleep situations occur in the previous phases when awakening in sleep.

This knowledge is of great importance in medicine, and especially in some of its branches (Medicine of the Work, for example), to evaluate and know better the low yields and the risk of accidents that occur in people who work shifts and modifying schedules. Knowing and isolating hypnotoxic substances will be fundamental to normalize the look/dream/eye rhythms. The isolation and obtaining of these substances correspond to physiologists, biochemists and biologists. In this field, research has only begun.