Dreams, What They Are and Why We See Them.
“And I saw the stars and the sea, a rising sun and a dying moon, mountain evaporating into mist, the mist making clouds that hover above a field; all while I was lying on this damn sickbed.”
Dreams are fascinating and mysterious and have been a topic of curiosity for mankind since ancient time. In the 19th century, neurologist Sigmund Feud helped to draw attention to dreams in the field of neurology and psychology.
Some fundamental questions regarding dreams are, what they truly are and why we see them in our sleep.
what are dreams?
Dreams are compilation of thoughts, images, feelings that we experience in our sleep. The nature of dreams can differ from person to person as for some, they can involve all senses, some people dream in color while some see black and white film, some dreams include memories of the past while some are completely foreign even fantastical in nature sometimes.
Studies have revealed that dreams are usually seen in first person perspective, they tend to be involuntary and often include illogical and not coherent content. Regardless, our dreams are made up of parts of our real life. Dreams, in most cases, invoke strong emotion. They make is feel happiness, joy, sadness and even sometimes fear.
One can dream at any stage of their sleep, but the most vivid dreams are found typically during rapid eye movement sleep, or REM sleep. That is the period of sleep when your brain is highly active, your eyes move rapidly behind their closed lid, and you have temporary loss of muscle tone.
The sad truth is that often we don’t have any recollection of the dreams we see in our sleep. This is what makes it harder to analyze for researchers while it makes dreams all the more mysterious to us.
Why do we see them?
Doctors have several theories regarding why we dream. Dreaming usually involves important cognitive functions for the brain.
In one way, while dreaming our brain is building its memories, stacking and restacking the shelves full of our recollection of incidents. Remember when in school, teachers used to say that one should revise the chapter before sleep instead of surfing YouTube? Well, the scientific reason behind it was that our dreams help to strengthen memory and to recall information received throughout the day as our conscious mind rests.
Dreams are also nature’s way of managing emotions. It helps to engage with rehearsed feelings while creating different imaginary context. Dreams are also our brain’s way of preparing us for the bad as people who have gone through trauma often find themselves reliving different versions of that same horror in their dreams. So, it is wiser to see more optimistic content to create that an inertia effect to drag the same feeling of optimism in our dreams. As somebody who had high levels of stage fright, I remember how I used to see dreams of embarrassing myself on stage often, especially if I had to give a presentation or a speech on stage.
Dreams are also where our brain decides to replay and analyze the events that have occurred to us throughout the entire day.
Does everybody see dream?
More or less, yes. Even those of us who believe we don’t because we can recall nothing of what we saw in our sleep. It is common to have dreams unless you have had a stroke that damaged your focal brain and now all you see in your sleep is darkness. Just kidding, but damage in focal brain is one of the main reasons behind dreamless nights; apart from that, maybe your sleep scedule is a bit unhealthy, quality wise or quantity wise.
Most of us dream, even if we feel like we don’t and I know it would put a lot of non dreamers at ease because I have also been having several dreamless nights in a row since last month which lead me to search more on this topic and here I am, sharing what I learned.
Dreams can be abstract, illogical or too random to be fully comprehended. Is there a meaning behind them? well, sometimes there is and sometimes it is too tough to analyze and dig up a meaning. What truly matters is how our dreams make us feel and what emotions would we assign to them. In the end of the day, our dreams too, contribute to the growth of our personality and help to mould us into who we are.
Like always,
thank you for reading.
