Dreams and psychology

We human beings sometimes try to convince ourselves that we are experts in things we don’t really understand. Our thirst for new knowledge is insatiable, as is our fear of the unknown. Maybe that's why we want to solve the mysteries too quickly. This is what happens with dreams. We narrate them, we interpret them, we want to give them a meaning that is very far from their reality.

Why we dream is one of the behavioral sciences' greatest unanswered questions. Researchers have offered many theories—memory consolidation, emotional regulation, threat simulation—but a unified one remains, well, a pipe dream. | Source

When we dream, not only our brain comes into action but also our feelings and even our muscles. Fear, happiness and uncertainty govern us. We can wake up all sweaty or breathing rapidly. But, most of the time the dreams simple end up disappearing completely when we open your eyes or hear the sound of the alarm clock, and remembering them is not always easy.

Dreams are capable of making us wonder about the reasons behind them, it has not been possible to figure out all the purposes our dreams have. However, it can be explained why we dream. Throughout history the human being has tried to discover the meaning of dreams, both from psychoanalysis and esoteric means.

What is the current understanding of dreams?

Dreams are “Defined as a series of thoughts, visions or feelings, dreams arise several times per night during sleep” | Source. They are narratives that we visualize, experience and feel in the deep phase of our sleep, also known as REM state.

During that phase of our sleep, we are unconscious but our brain and our entire organism continue to work to keep us alive. In the same way that our lungs continue to inspire and expire and our heart pumps, in our brain, emotional and creative processes occur in order to help us learn from our experiences and develop ourselves to become better.

The brainstem then sends images, sounds and sensations to the brain in a random way, depending on the people we see the most, or the ones we think about the most, or the ones we most worry about.

Then, the brain (the neocortex, to be precise) tries to interpret all these images and build a coherent narrative. Since we are asleep, we can create everything in our minds without limits, so dreams are like a child's imagination, creative, strange, full of possibilities, they go beyond the physical limits of our material world.

How our dreams can help us?

One of the main reasons we sleep may be to allow the brain to consolidate and organize our memories. Much like computers must periodically optimize their hard disks, our brains must continuously consolidate the memories we have stored. | Source

Sleep helps us to regulate our organism, so we can take proper rest, recharge our energy and moderate it. Dreaming, on the other hand, is useful to assimilate our learning and manage our emotions by feeling during our sleep what we do not allow ourselves to feel during the time we are awake and must either way be felt in order for us to live the complete experience of our lives and the impact impact that each situation we are going through has in us.

While we sleep the new information we acquired during the day is assimilated. In one way or another, we put them into practice when we dream (who has never dreamed about an important test when in college). Dreams are important for the consolidation of our memory and our learning. They are one of the main tools that our mind has to compose and handle new knowledge. Thus, if we learn something just before going to bed, we will remember it more easily than otherwise.

Dreams can also be considered as a kind of special place in which we are able to figure out the solution to certain problems more efficiently than when we are awake, this is caused by the faster connections the dreaming mind is able to make compared with the awakened mind.

When we dream we can face problems in a more straight and sensitive way, so we have to make quick decisions since dreams are capable of projecting threatening situations so that when we confront them on a day to day basis, we are familiar with the sensations they produce on us and we can find a much more accurate reaction to them, in other words, dreams can also function as a training ground for real life.

During the sleep phase (REM) we move our eyes under the eyelids. At that exact moment, we are dreaming, and the physiological stimuli that we receive stimulate the narration that we are experiencing in our mind. That is why, when other person touches us, we feel those sensations in the dream, or if they put a finger in water, we can feel that we drown, the most popular of these examples is when we are at the edge of our bed and in the dream we feel like we are going to fall.

Conclusion

Dreams are just a result to what we tend to think and experience in our daily lives. If we are angry and repress this anger, it is usual to dream of violence, or that we face some of our loved ones. Dreams are just that, a reflection of our thoughts.

We might recall situations from the past that had a special impact in ourselves, or we dream about circumstances that repeat themselves, witnessing our own personal patterns and perhaps some of our beliefs that still need some work and time to properly develop. In short, the meaning and interpretation of our dreams is that these dreams are a great example of our fears, desires, obsessions and longings.

Only we can interpret our own dreams. Perhaps the most rational thing is to not interpret them, to just feel them and answer the question: what can I learn from my dreams?