Having my Brain Tickled by a Wolf

I will keep this brief, but that is only due to not having a background neuroscience in which to properly explain this experience to any reasonable degree. And since it involves a dream, I also don’t feel especially competent to go much deeper than describing the raw sensation itself. It was simply a very cool experience that I want to document.

What I’m referring to there is that I was dreaming, or to be more precise, I “caught” myself dreaming, meaning that I was partially awake. We all know this state as being a “waking dream, or “lucid” dreaming. We’ve all experienced this at one time or another, where we seem to be standing on the precipitous, or threshold of being asleep and awake simultaneously. That was the terrain I found myself occupying this morning.

Of course, we likely all dream a bit different I suppose. Some claim they dream in color, while others in black and white. Some may be more prone to grand mythical style narratives, while others experience a mashup of wild abstractions, with unknown people and places dropping in and out incoherently. I’ve even listened to people who claim that a particular dream felt “absolutely real” to them, no different their waking state, but I think that’s nothing more than emotional embellishments. At no point in my life have I ever mistaken a dream for reality, and don’t believe it would even be possible. My dreams, presumably like everyone else, lurch from image to image, like a progression of individual snapshots that have a type of stop-motion quality to it, or perhaps to be more accurate, like a comic book in which dialog and scenes transition from one image to the next.

Whatever the case may be for others, this morning I abruptly found myself in one, and it occurred in an instant. I suddenly became aware that I was in a dream, without any memory of why I was there. I could sense no backstory to it at all, nothing that informed me of its context. All I recall is that I found myself in a house, in a neighborhood, and feeling the urge to look out the window to the street beyond my driveway. When I got to the window and looked out, I saw a black Wolf sitting on his haunches, staring directly at me from across the street. At that moment, I felt a wave of adrenaline rush through my brain….. and it felt incredible.

Then another scene appeared where I was cutting my grass, and looked up only to see the same wolf, this time staring at me from a neighbor’s yard, and again a wave of adrenaline rushed through me. It was at this point that I was able to pause for a moment and realized that I was awake enough to understand what was happening and also realized the opportunity that presented itself. So, I initiated a new scene in order to reproduce the effect. In this one I was in the garage preparing to leave for work, and while sitting in my car I opened the garage door and looked in the rearview mirror, and there he was, this time sitting at the end of drive, and once again…… whoosh, adrenaline poured through my mind.

Now here is the interesting point I want to make, because I had helped orchestrate this later scene and knew what would follow, so I was able to sit back, observe, and simply awaited the sensation. And because there was nothing to distract my attention, I felt it as purely as possible. I vividly recall the sensation beginning at a spot in the middle of my brain, at the mid-forehead level and flowed downward like syrup pouring over pancakes. It enveloped my whole brain in all directions, and passed down through my neck and dissipated as it reached my chest. The rush was intensely warm, but not hot, and felt to encompass every fiber of muscle it passed through. To be honest, it was so overwhelming that it felt orgasmic in nature. In fact, it was such an intense sensation that I was in a state of rapture while it lasted and purposely initiated other scenes in order to feel it all over again.

So, what was it? Well, nothing but a few millions years of evolution, that’s all. At some point in our distant past, we develop the need for emotional responses to our environment, not only a type of psychological “love potion” that would encourage social cohesion, but also the necessity to “feel” fear, and to feel it viscerally. Just imagine yourself as an early Homosapiens, cautiously scrounging for food on the African savannah while knowing that you were most definitely on the menu for a host of predators just out of sight. How far do you believe our evolutionary line would have lasted had we not been able to sense danger and physically react to it instantly?

Then with this existential need in high demand, through tens of thousands of generations evolution spawned the Amygdala, the processing center for our emotions lives. Among many other things, it will secrete either dopamine for pleasure (for love and social cohesion), or adrenaline that triggers our fight-or-flight response, which draws in other brain regions, especially memories, learning and a heightened awareness of our senses. For instance, there is not a “black wolf” coded to produce fear in the Amygdala but is simply my emotional response to it is based on the context that I have for Black wolves. I wasn’t born with this fear but simply learned through our culture. Had I seen a similar sized Black Puddle, my Amygdala would have yawned at the implication.

So, what was this all about, in retrospect? Well, I got a peek under the hood of my mind, even into the engine bay. Not only that, but inside the fuel pump, as it were. I was literary tickling my brain by manipulating a part of our evolutionary machinery simply for the thrill of it….. and had a front role seat.