Why do we dream?
Getting down to the nitty-gritty of dreams
It’s one of those busy mornings and you’re rushing to your workplace. The office is in the top floor and the escalator awaits you, but your health conscious mind asks you to take the stairs instead. And then, you start running upstairs to reach before it’s late, when you suddenly miss a step and then fall down the stairs. And then you keep rolling and rolling and still rolling until the alarm rings sharply in your ears.
Good heavens! It was just a dream. Every one of us at some or the other time would have experienced something like this in our dreams.
So what exactly are dreams and why do they occur?
Okay, let’s not make it complex, there’s no great definition for a dream, they are something which our mind imagines while in sleep.
As simple as that.
They can be frightening, eye-opening, mysterious, bewildering, entertaining, disturbing and sometimes bizarre. We may not know but everybody is thought to dream 3 to 5 times per night, and most of them last between 5 to 20 minutes. They occur during the rapid-eye-movement (REM) that occurs during sleep. It’s very rare that we remember what we dreamt of last night. Most of the dreams are forgotten by the time one gets out of bed. We often associate sleeping with tranquility and as inactive state of the mind, but our brains are equally active during sleep, as they are during the day. That’s why we have dreams.
There are several suppositions about why one dreams.
Some say it’s our unconscious desires and wishes while some others say it’s the processing of information gathered during the day. What goes on in our minds right before we fall asleep could affect the content of our dreams.
For example, you have been thinking about going to a place all day or have watched a horror film right before going to bed, then it surely would have made its way into your dreams as well. Is it not? And the characters that appear in the dreams are more or less known to us. In most of the cases it’s the people or things we move around or along with daily. Whatever be the reason, we all are bound to have them. Not only humans, animals dream too.
And have you ever thought what do the blind see in their dreams?
Now there are two cases.
One in which someone loses sight at some later part of their life. These people can dream visually since they have seen the world earlier. The other case in which somebody is born blind, this isn’t possible because they don’t have visual memories at all. But they still dream, and their dreams are just as intense and interesting like others, but they involve the other senses besides sight. A research found that as time passes, a blind person is less likely to dream in pictures. It also says that those born blind have more nightmares than those with vision.
Well, all dreams are not one and the same; there are different types of them one of them being the nightmares. The word in itself leaves us in chills for a while. They are those disturbing dreams which one never wishes for. We wake up feeling anxious and startled.
They may occur due to our refusal to accept particular life situations and are an indication of a fear that needs to be acknowledged and confronted. Another type of dreams is lucid dreams. It is when the dreamer is aware that they are dreaming. They turn into active participant in their dreams and sometimes make decisions influencing the dream’s outcomes without awakening. The other type of dreams is prophetic dreams. Also known as psychic or precognitive dreams are those dreams that seemingly foretell the future. To put it in simple terms, our mind observes different bits of information or occurrences in our lives and sums them together to form assumptions about something that may occur in near future. Premonition dreams are those involving instances where people actually dreamt about things which happened to them later, in the same way they dreamt about earlier. In short they get a glimpse of the future.
This is something interesting and strange indeed. If you have watched the movie — The Final Destination then you must know about premonition. Some famous premonition dreams are: Abraham Lincoln’s dream of his assassination, dreams about the Titanic catastrophe, and many victims of 9/11 had dreams warning them of the annihilation. So the next time you get any such dream, keep a watch over it.
There are some interesting facts which most of us are unaware of regarding dreams. Did you know that you can’t read while dreaming? Try reading anything and if you’re unable to, then surely you must be dreaming. The same goes for time. While dreaming, every time you look at the clock it will tell you a different time.
Dreams can work as inspirations too.
That was what happened when Larry page dreamt of Google or Tesla about alternating current generator. Their dreams ultimately led to miraculous inventions. And not all of us dream in color, some of us dream in black and white too. Many may claim that they never dreamed anything, but everybody does, its only that they don’t remember. And most of the dreams are negative rather than positive. Emotions such as fear, anger and sadness are more prominent than happy feelings. Men and women dream differently as well. Beyond everything, dreams are as simple or as complicated as the dreamer.
They are the best part of life which let you feel and become anything and everything, maybe not in reality but at least while in sleep!
