Why Dreams Feel So Real Sometimes
What does the dream mean to us? So how come some of us dream of something so wild and vivid while others dream about the past or nothing at all? And what could be the meaning of dreams in our everyday life?
Scientists say the more vivid dreams happen while we are in the REM phase — deep rapid-eye-movement, your brain basically goes bananas and thinks it’s awake but not really, and it’s just going *oof* for a while. It is a paradoxical process for the brain, and that’s when all the more vivid dreams come to happen in our sleep.
For years and years, we have been trying to sit down and say, “okay, so this is the meaning of dreams,” but the only sure thing we have about that discussion it’s that we don’t have any solid answer. In Jungian psychology, dreams are how the unconscious tries to communicate to the conscious part of ourselves. For Sigmund Freud, it’s something similar in that dreams are our deepest desires, anxieties, or thoughts represented in the subconscious. And even in the ESP (extra-sensory perception) field, the more psychic part, dreams are projections of what we want, spiritually to find answers of what we need.
New Study Suggest Dreams Might Prepare You for What’s Next
However, according to Erin Wamsley, Ph.D., an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Furman University in Greenville, SC, her findings suggest that dreams can prepare the mind for future situations it will encounter. This is contrary to previous research and evidence that dreams use fragments of past experiences, Wamsley noted. While studying dreams, she found that the mind uses select fragments of past experiences to prepare for an expected upcoming event. A new paper published in the journal Patterns states that dreaming is the brain’s effort to generalize our experiences, much like how chaos and randomness are used to program computers to recognize real-world data. The paper also proposes ways to test it.
If that’s true, we can leave the debate if dreams have to mean anything to rest, maybe? I want to think about art and how some people may consider something “artsy,” while others may see a blank wall. Once I dreamt about a broken piece of glass on the floor, and all the possible meanings it led me to was so exhausting. A friend of mine told me about one of her craziest dreams, and it involved finding an old sweet dessert from her childhood in an airport. And in her dream, the goal was to eat 20'000 of that old sweet dessert just for the sake of eating something a long time ago that made her feel safe.
What are we scared of? Monsters? Or the idea of monsters in our life? Nightmares are the bad boys of dreams; they’re so cool and yet are one of the most common ways to experience fear. Am I afraid of losing my teeth, or am I fearful of the upcoming test to pass my class? Am I afraid of a monster chasing me, or I’m just really, really lonely at night?
A year ago, I lived alone away from my home. Late at night, I couldn’t sleep very well, so I rolled in my sheets. After some time of hearing the faraway cars passing by the highway, I started dreaming. But, the dream was the same as the reality, and I was trying to sleep in that room, all alone. The door creaked, and something heavy entered the room; I couldn’t — I didn’t want to see what it was, so I kept hiding in my sheets. It came closer to me, and I could feel its coldness behind me. I started shaking slowly, fear overcame me, yet I couldn’t scream a single word. His hand crept to my shoulder, and it was a delicate touch, very pointy fingers. That was the worst part; I felt his breath in my neck, cold as ice like it was trying to tell me something, something important. And then I woke up, I could hear the cars passing by, and I was just all by myself again.
How Can You Put Yourself in Lucid Dreams
Oh, but wait, what about the times where I realize I’m in a dream. Those times the absurd goes full absurd, and you know that “oh my god, I must be dreaming.” And I have to be honest with you, and it’s a shaky ground most of the time having to come to that revelation when dreaming, cause when the dream falls apart, and I wake up, all the rush and vivid emotions end because it’s all a dream.
Who wouldn’t want to date their crush in their dream or travel to exotic destinations? The sky is the limit! There are many ways you can try to lucid dream —although it just happens naturally, and a recent report came out where a lot of people stated that sleeping on your back all night long can actually increase your chances of lucid dreaming. This can’t be true! We know people who try to force the dream by visualizing what they want before they fall asleep. A piece of advice is to keep a dream journal known to stimulate your upcoming dreaming adventures.
It’s a very human thing to do, to give meaning to every little thing it happens in our lives. It can provide us with a sense of continuity, a sense of progress, that we are going somewhere, not exactly sure where to, but somewhere, and we’ll arrive eventually; so giving meaning to our dreams is a very normal thing to do, even if it means nothing at all. As I said earlier, one can look at a broken piece of glass on the floor and give it all the meaning in the world because we need to. One can dream about how one’s teeth are falling and say that it’s because of anxiety, yet it can mean a whole of other things, but the one we need at that moment it’s the one that makes the most sense to us. Isn’t that interesting? How and what makes sense to us in life. And a significant factor of what we feel is our emotions and how we process them.
Good night and don’t be afraid; they’re just dreams.
