Dreaming
A question from everyone that begs answers is “Why do we dream?” What allows our brains to fabricate dreams to keep our consciousness entertained, and slip little details from real life into our dream that allows us to believe that our dream is completely rational? No matter how unearthly or unrealistic our dreams can be, somehow they feel right to exist.
So, what is a dream? Well, it is a universal human experience that has fascinated philosophers and scientists for thousands of years. Dreams can elicit specific emotions from the dreamer that can feel as if they are in their current reality: feeling anything from sadness to love. To be more specific, it is a state of consciousness characterized by internally-generated sensory, cognitive, and emotional experiences during sleep. The emotional features in dreams are related to the activation of the amygdalar complexes, the orbitofrontal cortex, and the anterior cingulate cortex. The activation of our mesial-temporal areas accounts for our memories found in dreams, which offers that sense of rationale. According to neuroscientist Pierre Maquet from the University of Liege Belgium, dreams mainly occur in the REM phase of sleep, where our eyes make rapid movements and our brain’s activity is very high, paralleling that of being awake. Found in a study to show the correlation, researchers surveyed 182 commuters at Boston train station on flight scenarios and inquired what they would do in those allotted events. Under the scenario of a national threat level that indicated a high risk of a terrorist attack; they consciously thought of the plane crashing and subsequently dreamed about crashing or a plane crash occurring while en route. The dream and data from an actual crash had relatively similar levels of anxiety to each other.
Have you ever wondered why your actual reality could end up being incorporated into your dreams? Well, a study by Yvette M. Graveline and Erin J. Wamsley of the University of Massachusetts and Furman University took into account that it is a mechanism of memory processing both recent and old memories. People who walked past you and you look at them for a split second may be in your dreams. The mind’s ability to turn pure information into a dynamic multidimensional reality is truly an inexplicable wonder.
Since dreams could be an extension of our waking experiences, then how does our behavior influence our dreams? For that matter, suppressing thoughts before sleep can lead to dreaming of that thought, or, as found by the National Library of Medicine, even suppression of thoughts under cognitive load can lead to greater dream rebound. The waking stream of thought is now controlled by your inner subconscious mind. It no longer uses just words but is also using images, experiences, and emotions. Your thoughts have turned into dreams and often lead to much interpretation as to the “meaning” of that dream. But what about how a dream can rather influence our own decision-making? Dreams have helped produce many things like art, music, novels, films, mathematical proofs, and more. Thinking in another neurophysiological state has aided in solving problems that awake minds could not, as high brain activity in areas associated with vivid visualizations personified by dreams allows us to isolate ourselves from the constricts of our reality.
With over 1,260,000,000 typed search results on Google from people trying to ascertain the message of their dreams, it presents the belief that dreams might reveal something within ourselves that we could not deduce while awake, or even a yearning to know something more. This is understandable, as there must be an explanation for the bounds of reality that dreams reject. Sigmund Freud's theory of dreams suggests that dreams represent unconscious desires and thoughts. Followed by a study conducted by Michael Norton, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, an overwhelming majority of students from different cultures believed that their dreams reveal something about themselves and the world around them. In another study done by Norton, 270 men and women across the US were asked to fill out a survey on a dream they had about someone they knew. Participants tended to associate pleasant dreams about someone they liked with more significance than ones about someone they disliked. However, they did consider unpleasant dreams about someone they disliked meaningful; suggesting people might associate their dreams with what already reassures their current views.
The beauteous nature of our subconscious makes us question our metaphysical reality and amplifies that natural urge of humans to explain the unknown. It opens the windows into a world of our own minds where the 100% subjectivity of dreams eradicates the defining objectivity of truths in science.