I had a dream this week where I underwent a number of adventures in a spooky and sinister town. It seemed quite real with time progressing. Like the movie Stalker I remember the dream being tense, but nothing actually happened. The weirdest part of the dream was the end. The dream ended with me getting into bed at the end of my dream day and ended as my alarm went off, waking me up to reality. My first thought on waking was, "My heavens! I just lay down. Did I get any sleep?" It was then that I remembered / realized that I had experienced a rather life-like dream. That got me thinking about dreams, what causes them and how they effect us.
Most people know that we sleep in cycles, moving through different kinds of sleep and that dreams occur in the final stage, Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep. While REM sleep doesn't last very long (18 to 23 minutes on average of a 90 min sleep cycle) the images and sounds we experience seem very real. Our bodies are actually paralyzed (by our mind) to prevent us from acting out our dreams. As we shift between sleep cycles, just like shifting gears in a car, we occasionally slip and not make the full transition. This can cause us to act out our dreams, to wake partially but still be paralyzed, to have our dreams superimposed on our awake vision, and various other things. While there is a whole host of sleeping disorders, dissociations in sleep, and parasomnia, but that's not what I am looking at here. I just want to look at dreams.
As an article I found in Psychology Today starts, Freud was well known for his thoughts on dreams - presenting them as "poems we tell ourselves at night in order to experience our unconscious wishes as real." The article goes on to say that Freud was only partially right and then presents five theories currently held today. A search on Google of "Why we dream" will pull up a variety of different theories. As the article I start this paragraph with includes theories put forth by many other sites and sources, I'll stick with it. The long and the short of it is that we still don't know everything about dreams. the theories (and that is exactly what they are) propose in a nut shell that dreams are the brain processing information from the day. Whether it's to sort it, locate the important stuff, or "defrag our hard drive" dreams are often heavily influenced by the activities, thoughts, and emotions from the day. But just because you have a particular dream doesn't mean that you experienced a specific sequence of stimuli that codified your dream. Dream interpretation is, at best, "metaphor mongering," posing the most plausible symbolic and / or rational reason for the cause of the dream. There are plenty of people that think that dreams have no specific purpose but are simply a natural part of our brain.
Interestingly, we often talk about our deepest desires, fantastic ideals, or things aspire towards as our "dreams." This may be because we often live out our fantasies in our dreams, particularly when we have what are referred to as lucid dreams. A lucid dream is one that we know that it is a dream and knowing that we are dreaming often allows us to take control of the dream and use the broken physics and logic of our imagination to do what we want. My father has told me that his favorite dreams are when he is falling - because he quickly realizes that it's a dream and that lets him fly.
One of my favorite lines in Voyages of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis is when they rescue a man from a sinister isle. He tells them to get away as fast as they can. When questioned why he responds, "It's where dreams come true." When the crew starts exclaiming what a great place it must be, he clarifies, "not those dreams." Nightmares are a classic icon of terror, suspense, and anxiety. But people have given them a more realized image as well. In Piers Anthony's Xanth books (where all things are literal - literally) nightmares are black female horses which bring bad dreams to people. I found it fun that a similar image was used used in the recent Rise of the Guardians movie from Dreamworks. However, upon waking up from a nightmare there is little that is entertaining. Because dreams are often emotionally driven our nightmares don't feel fake.
Dreams may never be understood. There are certainly parts of them that are, but enough that is not to make it still puzzling. Here's hoping for sweet dreams for all who read this.
Most people know that we sleep in cycles, moving through different kinds of sleep and that dreams occur in the final stage, Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep. While REM sleep doesn't last very long (18 to 23 minutes on average of a 90 min sleep cycle) the images and sounds we experience seem very real. Our bodies are actually paralyzed (by our mind) to prevent us from acting out our dreams. As we shift between sleep cycles, just like shifting gears in a car, we occasionally slip and not make the full transition. This can cause us to act out our dreams, to wake partially but still be paralyzed, to have our dreams superimposed on our awake vision, and various other things. While there is a whole host of sleeping disorders, dissociations in sleep, and parasomnia, but that's not what I am looking at here. I just want to look at dreams.
As an article I found in Psychology Today starts, Freud was well known for his thoughts on dreams - presenting them as "poems we tell ourselves at night in order to experience our unconscious wishes as real." The article goes on to say that Freud was only partially right and then presents five theories currently held today. A search on Google of "Why we dream" will pull up a variety of different theories. As the article I start this paragraph with includes theories put forth by many other sites and sources, I'll stick with it. The long and the short of it is that we still don't know everything about dreams. the theories (and that is exactly what they are) propose in a nut shell that dreams are the brain processing information from the day. Whether it's to sort it, locate the important stuff, or "defrag our hard drive" dreams are often heavily influenced by the activities, thoughts, and emotions from the day. But just because you have a particular dream doesn't mean that you experienced a specific sequence of stimuli that codified your dream. Dream interpretation is, at best, "metaphor mongering," posing the most plausible symbolic and / or rational reason for the cause of the dream. There are plenty of people that think that dreams have no specific purpose but are simply a natural part of our brain.
Interestingly, we often talk about our deepest desires, fantastic ideals, or things aspire towards as our "dreams." This may be because we often live out our fantasies in our dreams, particularly when we have what are referred to as lucid dreams. A lucid dream is one that we know that it is a dream and knowing that we are dreaming often allows us to take control of the dream and use the broken physics and logic of our imagination to do what we want. My father has told me that his favorite dreams are when he is falling - because he quickly realizes that it's a dream and that lets him fly.
One of my favorite lines in Voyages of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis is when they rescue a man from a sinister isle. He tells them to get away as fast as they can. When questioned why he responds, "It's where dreams come true." When the crew starts exclaiming what a great place it must be, he clarifies, "not those dreams." Nightmares are a classic icon of terror, suspense, and anxiety. But people have given them a more realized image as well. In Piers Anthony's Xanth books (where all things are literal - literally) nightmares are black female horses which bring bad dreams to people. I found it fun that a similar image was used used in the recent Rise of the Guardians movie from Dreamworks. However, upon waking up from a nightmare there is little that is entertaining. Because dreams are often emotionally driven our nightmares don't feel fake.
Dreams may never be understood. There are certainly parts of them that are, but enough that is not to make it still puzzling. Here's hoping for sweet dreams for all who read this.
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