You feel extremely annoyed at that point when your delightful dream is thwarted by your alarm clock. And it gets even more frustrating when you can’t remember the dream!
We all experience dreams. Let’s find answers to some questions you might have had about dreams.
Sigmund Freud said in his Dream Psychology: Psychoanalysis for Beginners that:
“dreams may be thus stated: They are concealed realizations of repressed desires.”
1. Where Do Dreams Happen?
Dreams don’t start until you reach a state called REM (rapid eye movement) sleep which occurs roughly 90 minutes after you set to sleep.
Nowadays using brain scans it is possible to see the brain’s activity.
The prefrontal cortex lies at the very front of the brain; it is who you are. This brain region associates with personality expression, decision making, and moderating social behaviour.
The orbitofrontal cortex sits just above the eye sockets. It is where your conscience is.
‘The amygdala is a collection of cells near the base of the brain’. And this governs fear and emotions.
“Now we understand the physiology of the dreaming process. And we realize that it comes at the back of the brain, the very primitive part of the brain and that certain parts of the brain are shut off when you dream.”
Says the American theoretical physicist, futurist, and popularizer of science Dr. Michio Kaku.
The other parts of the brain except Amygdala - the emotional brain is shut off when you dream.
2. Why Do We Dream?
Scientists are still researching on it. But there are some interesting theories on this matter.
- We dream to fulfill our wishes.
Sigmund Freud said that: “The dream is the (disguised) fulfillment of a (suppressed, repressed) wish.”
He proposed that all our dreams, nightmares are a collection of images from our daily conscious lives and they symbolize our urges and desires.
We dream to remember and to forget.
In order to increase our performance on certain mental tasks sleeping good but researchers proved on certain experiments that dreaming while sleeping is better.
In our brain there are about 10,000 trillion neural connections which are created on the course of our actions and thought processes. Mostly during REM sleep cycles, your neocortex reviews these neural connections and dumps the unnecessary ones refreshing your brain.
We dream to heal.
‘Stress neurotransmitters in the brain are much less active during the REM stage of sleep, even during dreams of traumatic experiences, leading some researchers to theorize that one purpose of dreaming is to take the edge off painful experiences to allow for psychological healing’. Said educator Amy Adkins.
We dream to rehearse.
You often have dreams where a dog or someone is chasing you or you are bravely fighting off a villain. Actually these dreams are helping you practice your fight or flight instincts.
We dream to solve problems.
You might have experienced yourself solving problems on the previous day of your exams.
Your mind creates these infinite scenarios in order to help you grasp problems and solve problems which you might not formulate while you are awake.
3. Can We Control Our Dreams?
Do you want to dream all sorts of fantastic things – reviving your cherished memories, meeting your favorite person, eating mountain of chocolate? You can be inside a dream and know that you're dreaming. Well, sleep experts say yes! Only after you realize you are actually dreaming. This is known as ‘Lucid-dreaming’. It is a brain state between REM sleep and being awake. But achieving this state isn’t that easy.
4. Why Do We Remember Some Dreams but Not Others?
There are 2 sleep cycles:
The non-REM sleep that occurs at the initial stage of sleep
Then the REM sleep that occurs in your deep sleep (the later part of night and early morning).
Jennifer Butler, M.D., a sleep medicine physician and pulmonologist at Piedmont said to piedmont healthcare that:
“If you wake up during REM sleep, you may be more likely to remember your dream’s content, People also tend to remember dreams that have more negative content or negative emotions versus pleasant or benign content.”
5. Do Animals Too Dream?
You might have seen your pet cat (obviously they are sleeping all the time) or dog jerking their limbs or making expressions while they sleep.
Since the 1950s, scientists have found some substantial, although indirect, proof that many other mammals and birds do indeed dream.
Increasing evidence has demonstrated that animals other than birds and mammals, such as reptiles, fish, cuttlefish and now octopuses’ brains follow the same series of sleeping states as ours do.
One study found that rats chart out navigational routes to get food during REM sleep.
A couple of years ago an octopus named Heidi was filmed changing colours as she slept.
Written by - Afra Meera Ahamed
Edited by - Gunika Manchanda
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