Dreams are a series of thoughts, images, and sensations occurring in a person's mind during sleep. Dreams can be vivid, make you feel happy, sad, or scared. They may seem confusing or perfectly rational. Dreams can occur anytime during sleep, but most vivid dreams occur during deep, REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, when the brain is most active. Some experts say we dream at least four to six times per night. During REM sleep many of our muscles relax completely and this prevents us acting out our dreams. If this system doesn’t work properly we may try to act out our dreams, especially if the dreams involve strong emotions. When we are awake the frontal cortex controls how we make sense of the world. This shuts down during dreaming. Because of this, the dreaming brain puts together ideas that normally do not go together. About two thirds of dreams are mainly visual, with fewer that involve sounds, movement, taste or smell. Color is only in about a third of all dreams. It has been said that when we are awake we think in ideas, but when asleep we think in images. Blind people can dream. People who became blind after birth can see images in their dreams and those who were born blind dream as vividly, however, instead of seeing images, they use their other senses such as smell, sound, touch etc. to dream.There's a time limit to how much you can remember about your dream. Only within five minutes since you are up from your sleep, an average person's dream is forgotten and in just 10 minutes, 90 percent of the dream is gone with the wind. However, if awakened at the REM stage, that person is more likely to remember the dream.Our mind is not inventing faces in our dreams we see real faces of real people that we have seen during our life but may not know or remember. We have all seen hundreds of thousands of faces throughout our lives, so we have an endless supply of characters for our brain to utilize during our dreams. Studies have been done on many different animals, and they all show the same brain waves during dreaming sleep as humans. Watch a dog sleeping sometime. The paws move like they are running and they make sounds as if they are chasing something in a dream. Men tend to dream more about other men. Around 70% of the characters in a man’s dream are other men. On the other hand, a woman’s dream contains almost an equal number of men and women. Aside from that, men generally have more aggressive emotions in their dreams than the female lot.
There are many theories on why we dream. One theory is that we dream to practice responses to threatening situations. In dreams, we often find ourselves naked in public, or being chased, or fighting an enemy, or sinking in quicksand. Antti Revonsuo, a Finnish cognitive scientist, has shown that our amygdala fires more than normal when we're in REM sleep. In REM sleep, the brain fires in similar ways as it does when it's specifically threatened for survival. In addition to that, the part of the brain that practices motor activity fires increasingly during REM sleep, even though the limbs are still. In other words, Revonsuo and other evolutionary theorists argue that in dreams, we are actually rehearsing fight-and-flight responses, even though the legs and arms are not actually moving. They say that dreams are an evolutionary adaptation: We dream in order to rehearse behaviors of self-defense in the safety of nighttime isolation. In turn, get better at fight-or-flight in the real world. Another theory is that dreams create wisdom. Dreams sort through memories, to determine which ones to retain and which to lose. Matt Wilson, at MIT's Center for Learning and Memory, put rats in mazes during the day, and recorded what neurons fired in what patterns as the rats negotiated the maze. When he watched the rats enter REM sleep, he saw that the same neuron patterns fired that had fired at choice turning points in the maze. He saw that the rats were dreaming of important tasks in their day. He argues that sleep is the process through which we separate the memories worth encoding in long-term memory from those worth losing. Sleep turns a mass amount of daily information into what we call wisdom. The next theory is that dreaming is like defragmenting your hard drive. Francis Crick (who co-discovered the structure of DNA) and Graeme Mitchison put forth a famously controversial theory about dreams in 1983 when they wrote that "we dream in order to forget." They meant that the brain is like a machine that gets in the groove of connecting its data in certain ways, such as obsessing, defending or retaining, and that those thinking pathways might not be the most useful for us. But, when we sleep, the brain fires much more randomly. And it is this random scouring for new connections that allows us to loosen certain pathways and create new, potentially useful, ones. Dreaming is a shuffling of old connections that allows us to keep the important connections and erase the inefficient links. Another popular theory is that dreams are like psychotherapy. Ernest Hartmann, a doctor at Tufts, focuses on the emotional learning that happens in dreams. He has developed the theory that dreaming puts our difficult emotions into pictures. In dreams, we deal with emotional content in a safe place, making connections that we would not make if left to our more critical or defensive brains. In this sense, dreaming is like therapy on the couch: We think through emotional stuff in a less rational and defensive frame of mind. Through that process, we come to accept truths we might otherwise repress. The absence of theory is where others believe that there is no meaning to dreams.They believe that they are the random firings of the brain that don't happen to be conscious at that time.
The emerging view in neuroscience is that dreams are related to memory consolidation happening in the brain during sleep. This may include reorganizing and re-coding memories in relation to emotional drives as well as transferring memories between brain regions. During the day, episodic memories are stored in the hippocampus, a region of the brain specialized for long-term memory that learns particularly quickly. At night, memories from this region appear to be transferred to the cerebral cortex, the region specialized for information processing, cognition, and knowledge. Studies in animals have found that during sleep, the neural activity of the hippocampus replays the events of the day. This replay happens faster than real-time, and sometimes happens in reverse. The activity replay is correlated with neural activity patterns in both the visual cortex (responsible for visual experience) and the prefrontal cortex (responsible for strategy, goals, and planning). The memory replay occurs during REM sleep and dreaming. No one part of the brain "generates" dreams. Dreams are best viewed as a whole brain phenomenon. The stages of sleep are controlled by an interconnected cluster of neurons in the base of the brain and brainstem.
Lucid dreaming is your chance to play around with the extraordinary abilities buried in unused parts of your brain. Regardless of whether your are superhuman in real life or not, lucid dreaming is a way for you to put the deepest areas of your brain to good use while you’re sleeping. All the obstacles of reality can be set aside, you are able to control everything and do whatever you want in a lucid dream. Even though the term "lucid" means clear, lucid dreaming is more than just having a clear dream. To have a lucid dream you must know that it’s a dream while you’re dreaming. It doesn't require that you can control anything in your dream, though control is what beginning lucid dreamers often aim at. People get attracted to lucid dreaming because they want to be able to do things they could never do in waking reality, for example, taste fire or fly to the sun. More and more experienced lucid dreamers are realizing the benefits of lucid dreaming. You can use it to explore the boundaries of your own agency and the limits of the universe.
A nightmare is a dream occurring during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep that results in feelings of strong terror, fear, distress or extreme anxiety. This phenomenon tends to occur in the latter part of the night and oftentimes awakens the sleeper, who is likely to recall the content of the dream. Most nightmares may be a normal reaction to stress, and some clinicians believe they aid people in working through traumatic events. Frequent occurrence of nightmares becomes a disorder when it impairs social, occupational and other important areas of functioning. At this point, it may be referred to as Nightmare Disorder or repeated nightmares. Repeated nightmares are a series of nightmares with a recurring theme. Nightmares usually begin in childhood before age 10 and are considered normal unless they significantly interfere with sleep, development or psychosocial development. They tend to be more common in girls than boys, and they may continue into adulthood. Adult nightmares are often associated with outside stressors or exist alongside another mental disorder. Nightmares might be associated with anxiety and trauma.
We typically spend more than two hours each night dreaming. Scientists do not know much about how or why we dream. Sigmund Freud, a major influence in psychology, believed dreaming was a "safety valve" for unconscious desires. Only after 1953, when researchers first described REM in sleeping infants, did scientists begin studying sleeping and dreaming carefully. They soon discovered that the strange, illogical experiences we call dreams almost always occur during the REM part of sleep. While most mammals and birds show signs of REM sleep, reptiles and other cold-blooded animals do not. REM sleep begins with signals from the pons, an area at the base of the brain. These signals travel to a region called the thalamus, which relays them to the cerebral cortex-the outer layer of the brain responsible for learning, thinking and organizing information. The pons sends signals that shut off neurons in the spinal cord, causing temporary paralysis of limb muscles. If something interferes with this paralysis, people will begin to physically act out their dreams-a rare, dangerous problem called REM sleep behavior disorder. For example, a person dreaming about a baseball game may run into furniture or inadvertently strike a person sleeping nearby while trying to catch a ball in the dream. REM sleep stimulates the brain regions used in learning, which may be important for normal brain development during infancy. This would explain why infants spend much more time in REM sleep than adults. Like deep sleep, REM sleep is associated with increased production of proteins. One study determined that REM sleep affects learning certain mental skills. People taught a skill and then deprived of non-REM sleep were able to recall what they had learned after sleeping, while people deprived of REM sleep were not. Some scientists believe dreams are the cortex's attempt to find meaning in the random signals received during REM sleep. The cortex is the part of the brain that interprets and organizes information from the environment during consciousness. One theory suggests that, given random signals from the pons during REM sleep, the cortex, attempting to interpret these signals, creates a "story" out of fragmented brain activity.
Recurrent dreams are often comprised of typical dream themes. What differs about recurrent dreams is that they are experienced frequently and repetitively in one individual’s life, whereas typical dream themes refer to the universal or inter-individual commonness of dream themes. Recurrent dreams occur in between 60% and 75% of adults, and more often in women than men. The common themes include: being attacked or chased, falling, being stuck, being late, missing or failing an exam, and even losing control of a car. Theoretically, recurrent dreams are assumed to reveal the presence of unresolved conflicts or stressors in an individual’s life. This is corroborated by findings that recurrent dreams are usually accompanied by negative dream content, and that they are associated with lower psychological well-being. (Zadra, 1996)
The illicit recreational drugs cocaine, ecstasy and marijuana have pronounced effects upon sleep. Administration of cocaine increases wakefulness and suppresses REM sleep. Cocaine withdrawal is often associated with sleep disturbances and unpleasant dreams. Studies have revealed that polysomnographically assessed sleep parameters deteriorate even further during sustained abstinence, although patients report that sleep quality remains unchanged or improves. This deterioration of objective sleep measures is associated with a worsening in sleep-related cognitive performance. Like cocaine, MDMA is a substance with arousing properties. Heavy MDMA consumption is often associated with persistent sleep disturbances. Polysomnography (PSG) studies have demonstrated altered sleep architecture in abstinent heavy MDMA users. THC reduces REM sleep. Moreover, acute administration of cannabis appears to facilitate falling asleep and to increase Stage 4 sleep. Difficulty sleeping and strange dreams are among the most consistently reported symptoms of acute and subacute cannabis withdrawal. Longer sleep onset latency, reduced slow wave sleep and a REM rebound can be observed. Prospective studies are needed in order to verify whether sleep disturbances during cocaine and cannabis withdrawal predict treatment outcome.
Dream analysis, also referred to as dream interpretation, hinges on the idea that you can attach meaning to your dreams. This process has been used in a wide variety of settings, including ancient civilizations, a variety of religions, including Christianity, and can be noted to today by going to a bookstore and picking up a book that will help you interpret your own dreams. According to Freud, dreams are a way to look into our soul, to unlock our unconscious. Our unconscious holds childhood wishes and desires that are deemed undesirable. Dreams are a way for us to fulfill these unconscious desires and wishes. Much of our struggle as humans is between these forbidden desires and trying to repress them. Freud felt that through the analysis of dreams, we could discover the root cause of our problems, through analyzing the symbols and feelings that we experienced during the dreams.Some of the scientific hypotheses that attempt to explain dreams state that dreaming is a method by which the brain is attempting to disconnect the cortex from any additional sensory input. This would allow the cortex to rest. These hypotheses can also explain the lack of critical thinking skills and poor decisions that people make when they do not get the right amount of sleep. One claim of dream interpretation is that they can be prophetic of nature. However, these dreams may be explained coincidence or even out-and-out lying. But since we fall victim to methods of illogical thinking and lack of understanding, we fall prey to these interpretations. Today’s skeptic considers dream interpretation to be a false science, especially with today’s evidence indicating that dream interpretation is false. Even so, though they are armed with science and data on their side, there are still people out there who believe in this pseudoscience.