by Stacy Narine
When in doubt, consult Freud for all your dream questions.
Sigmund Freud captivated the world of psychology with his theory of dream interpretation.
Although science has come a long way with the use of
technology to monitor people in REM sleep, in order to track the process
of dreaming, we're still left with two major questions about dreaming:
Why do we dream and what are our dreams trying to tell us?
With an overview on the subject done by
Medical Daily, we can come up with basic answers to help you satisfy your dream curiosity.
If we take a page from Freud, then we all have a basic understanding that dreams
are product of keeping our thoughts to ourselves. Followers of Freud
strongly uphold the free-association technique, or lying down on a
fainting couch while saying the first thing that comes to mind.
However, modern scientists are inclined to believe that dreams
"actually don't exist at all." Say what?! Yeah, like Channing Tatum
giving me a lap dance didn't seep into my consciousness while sleeping? Come on.
But scientists do have a theory (sigh): the "
activation-synthesis hypothesis," which
says that "dreams are merely electrical brain impulses that pull random
thoughts and imagery from our memories, and humans construct these
impulses as dreams when we awake in an effort to make sense of the
confusion."
Dreams have been observed as useful indicators of what's on a
person's mind. For example, a recent survey from the Dream Education
group DreamsCloud found
that those with higher levels of education tended to dream more about
work-related situations, such as getting a promotion or dreaming about a
co-worker, than less educated people.
"We dream about what concerns us most," Dr. Angel Morgan, who headed the study, explained to
The Huffington Post.
"When you look at education level, what concerns us most is going to be
reflected and influenced in our dreams ... It just makes sense."
It's also been shown that "frequent lucid dreamers solve significantly more insight problems overall than non-lucid dreamers,"
Dr. Patrick Bourke explained. The more you can remember, the better you're able to solve or admit to problems in your waking state.
The vivid images we remember in our dreams can be
representations of our personality traits, too. Although dream
dictionaries don't always nail it on the head with their definitions,
their attempts to provide them is warranted.
Ever dreamed that you killed your boss?
As
Medical Daily notes, "According to
LiveScience,
researchers from Germany's Central Institute of Mental Health [found
that] individuals who report dreams in which they commit murder tended
to be more introverted, yet also more aggressive, in real life."
Although there are some nay-sayers, the link to the human
consciousness and dreams is a fine one worth looking into, especially to
help diagnose mental illness.
As Dr. Sander van der Linden,
a doctoral researcher in social experimental psychology, wrote, "Dreams
seem to help us process emotions by encoding and constructing memories
of them. What we see and experience in our dreams might not necessarily
be real, but the emotions attached to these experiences certainly are."
Because of dreams, we're able to recall memories of emotions without
remembering the actual situation that first produced it. Therefore, we
can recall feelings of love and pain without having to remember our jerk of a first love, who later gave us the experience of a broken heart.
No matter the different dream theories, whether fun or complicated,
the importance of decoding them remains, and needs to be, in constant
conversation.
