The Secret of Secrets (Robert Langdon, #6)

by Dan Brown

Incredibly, her experiments had revealed that a dreaming brain was similar to a dying brain. In both instances, GABA levels plummeted, thus lowering the brain’s filters, opening the door to wider bandwidths of information. The influx of unfiltered data was the reason dreams manifested as such illogical jumbles of images and ideas. Furthermore, it explained why, within seconds after waking, even the most vivid dreams began to fade despite our desperate attempts to remember them. The brain reset, GABA levels increased, and filters reengaged…purging the information and once again regulating our perception of reality. Dying felt a lot like dreaming, she had explained, describing how in dreams we often perceived ourselves as weightless, massless beings, with the ability to move through obstacles, fly through the air, or shift locations—in essence, we became a consciousness without a physical form. The bardo body, Langdon thought, recalling its description from The Tibetan Book of the Dead. In many cultures, the dream body was held sacred for its perceived ability to pass back and forth between the realms of life and death. As consciousness becomes untethered, our powers of perception grow.