The secret behind how our experiences affect our dreams.
Dreams, being “wibbly- wobbly", “bumpy-wimpy
stuff" in our craniums, has always
been an interesting topic for scientists, philosophers, and every other human.
There are so many routes that no one gets tired pondering about it. Are our
brains trying to tell us something or trying to organize the information it
has, or none of it has any sense to it what so ever?
To even start to
investigate dreams, we need to know how sleep works. As soon as the lights go
off and the head hits the hay; the brain starts giving off theta waves; thus
starting stage one of the five stages of
sleep. In this state, the body and mind are relaxing but not sleeping
yet. After ten- fifteen minutes is the second stage, it lasts for twenty
minutes in which the temperature and heart rate decrease. The third stage
submerges with the fourth stage. During these stages the brain gives out delta waves.
This is where deep sleep occurs, and the body truly gets rest. It’s not a line
that progresses, it’s a cycle from one to two then three, four, back to three,
two, and after the Non- REM cycle comes the REM in which we dream. On average
we enter REM sleep after the first ninety minutes.
Now moving on to the
actual topic of dreams. What are those little crazy movies going on in our
heads when we are trying to get some rest in our busy lives? A dream can be
images, thoughts and/or emotions that are experienced during sleep. They can be
anywhere on the scale of vividness or vagueness; any range of emotions.
Some like Ernest
Hoffman, director of the Sleep Disorders Center at Newton Wellesley Hospital in
Boston, Mass., think “a possible
function" could be to knit “new material into the memory system" of
our brains, which are constantly looking for way to organize the mess in our
craniums and can help us “cope with stressful events".
The psychoanalytic
community, Sigmund Freud’s followers, believe that dreams are a portrayal of
the unconscious desires, thoughts, and motivations. In his book The
Interpretation of Dreams, Freud
described the two different basics of dreams: manifest and latent content.
Manifest content is made up of the actual images, thoughts and content
contained within the dream; the latent content, on the other hand, represents
the hidden psychological meaning of the dream.
Then there’s the
activation-synthesis theory, introduced by J. Allan Hobson and Robert McClarley
in 1977, which proposes areas of the limbic system, which run the emotions,
sensations, and memories, that become active. This makes the brain think it
needs to find a meaning to the signals, thus projecting a movie using the
insides of our eyelids as the screen. While this theory says that dreams are
signals coming from parts of our brain, it doesn’t mean our dreams are
meaningless. In fact, even Hobson thought that dreams aren’t a waste of time.
G. William Domhoff,
a dream researcher, believes that dreams mirror the thoughts and concerns of
our waking life.
Carl Jung thought
that dreams were a combination of experiences of our waking life and
unconscious yearnings.
Who knows? Maybe
dreams are a batter of all these ingredients and it bakes in the oven of our
minds; the hardness controlled by our luck and experiences.
Our experiences
definitely do shape our desires and dreams and our personalities which are
shown in dreams more than we may think; and our emotions are more channeled
than we may like. Many remember what they felt, as opposed to what they
actually dreamt about. That’s also why people can be a little jumpy or cautious
during the rest of their day.
Sometimes dreams become so intense that it can
wake us up, like many nightmares. The three emotions that get intensified by
dreams are anxiety, fear, and surprise.
Now you say, “But i don’t dream. Why don’t I dream?"
Scientists say, “Hush child, everyone dreams." Well, they might not say
exactly that but close enough. It is true everyone does dream, four to six
dreams a night actually. It’s just that some don’t remember them as well as
others; along with the fact that we forget ninety- five percent of our dreams
in the first few minutes of waking up. It’s sad really, but scientists are
working on ways to get into our dreams more every day and even record them!
It’s safe to say
that everyone has had their fair share of bizarre dreams, but no one has any
idea how their brain could pull it off. Well, it’s troubling to know that no
one knows for sure, but scientists are moving forward, finding out the mystery
by sleep studies and technology that tracks your sleep. In the meanwhile, we
can try to solve it by ourselves or just enjoy the cake…or throw it away.
By: Hooria Eva Tariq
Check out her blogs!
http://queen-tantalizer.tumblr.com/
http://reality-absurd-lie.tumblr.com/
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