DREAMS

 

                                        

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on”

(The Tempest by  William Shakespeare)

Humans have always seen dreams as mystical or as some kind of window into our deeper selves. They’ve reportedly inspired great literature like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, scientific breakthroughs like the arrangement of the periodic table of elements, hits like the Rolling Stones’ “( I can’t get no) satisfaction” and art like Salvador Dalì’s  painting “Dream caused by the flight of a bee around a pomegranate a second before waking”.

But, why do we dream? Do our dreams have any meaning or serve any purpose?

We dream because in our brain electrical impulses happen, indeed before we fall asleep our brains are a mess of chattering neurons and all that electrical activity creates chaotic electromagnetic waves, but when we fall asleep and as we lose consciousness, activity all across the brain decreases dramatically. Then, an hour and a half later, the brain roars back to life and our brain waves look exactly like we’re awake.

The pons, a tiny area of our brain stem, stop us from moving around while we’re sleeping. Our bodies are temporarily paralyzed, except for our eyes, this moment is called: REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. When the pons doesn’t work well, we have sleep disorders like sleepwalking and night terror. In these moments we aren’t conscious and we could exchange the dream for reality or vice versa, to oppose these disorders you should be able to realize that you are dreaming, this is called “lucid dream”. During a lucid dream, the dreamer can realize that he’s in a dream because there are bizarre details and may gain some amount of control over the dream characters, narrative, and environment.

But why are our dreams strange?

Our dreams are so bizarre and don’t make any sense because one area of the brain that’s off is the logical judgement filter and the entire emotional part of the brain lights up like a fire.

Most things people dream come from memories of their waking lives. Although everybody know that our dreams relate strongly to the events that happened during the day, our brain’s created story from our own memories and our own emotions.

For Sigmund Freud dream images were “disguised representations” of our innermost desires and Carl Jung believed that dreams contained characters that represented aspect of our inner lives. 

Your dreams may be ways of confronting emotional dramas in your life, indeed when we’re in that hazy dream-state, unbound by reason or consequences, it might be the perfect time to lay the groundwork for insights and breakthroughs.

Silvia