When was the last time you created something colorful, possibly magical, that you didn’t intend to create? You can’t quite make sense of it, even though you created it? What if I told you that when you created this thing, you were asleep. The creation, of course, is your dream. What do your dreams really mean? Do they warn you of impending danger? Do they help you sleep better? Or are your dreams meaningless, indicating they tell you nothing in particular?
I have a reoccurring dream about my teeth falling out. I can never remember what I was doing at the time. All I can remember is that one minute I’m fine, and the next minute I begin talking, my teeth start to fall out, I swallow some of them, and I immediately start to regurgitate them back up! Phew! I get anxious just thinking about it! That’s a pretty scary dream.
Dream Interpretation
Dreams have been a fascination since the beginning of time. Many people wonder about the meaning of dreams. We all have dreams, but it isn’t easy to know whether our dreams mean anything. Or are dreams just random stories that our brain tells us?
People have been interpreting dreams for thousands of years, dating as far back as 3000-4000 B.C., where people documented the interpretations on clay tablets. Primitive societies often could not distinguish between dreams and reality. Greeks and Romans saw dreams as messages from gods or messages from beyond the grave. Some philosophers believed that dreams helped diagnose illness and predict disease. Some pretty powerful stuff!
Dream Theories
Let’s move from thousands of years ago to more modern, 19th, and 20th-century psychology theories. Psychologists like Freud and Jung proposed their own dream theories. In his landmark work, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud stated that dreams symbolize unconscious wishes and that analyzing dreams could uncover our hidden desires. Freud also believed that we dream to protect our sleep. According to Freud, if we did not dream, we would be awakened several times throughout the night due to fighting back our sexual and aggressive desires.
Carl Jung thought that dreams functioned as a bridge between the conscious and unconscious mind. In this way, he argued against Freud’s suggestion of dreams being repressed thoughts and desires. Instead, he felt dreams were problem-solving tools.
Do your Dreams Really Mean Anything?
Dreammoods.com says that dreams of falling or crumbling teeth are the most common dreams they receive. Dreaming about one’s teeth reflects vanity and anxiety about others’ perceptions of you. Dreams about teeth also supposedly reflect fears about getting older and feeling unattractive and undesirable.
So, apparently, I am a vain old woman who cares way too much about what other people think of me! How awful is that?
Why do we Sleep?
If we believe Freuds’ theory, then dreams do serve a purpose and are triggered by unconscious desires. Other psychologists, however, say that the initial trigger to dreams is psychologically meaningless. But first, let’s talk about why we sleep.
Sleep is an altered state of consciousness, a natural state of rest. We sleep to conserve energy, restore our bodies, reduce stress, and sleep is important to brain functioning. When we sleep, our body is mostly at rest, but our brain is highly active. In fact, If someone recorded an EEG of your brain waves while you were awake and again while you were in REM sleep, the brain wave patterns would be very similar. During this time of activation, our brain is consolidating memories and processing the day’s activities. Research shows that if you’re having difficulty recalling something, you should sleep on it!
In 1952, a graduate student named Eugene Aserinsky discovered what we now know to be REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. Dreams typically occur during REM sleep, but there are times when you might experience daydreams or dreams during NREM (Non-REM) sleep.
Considering how active the brain is during REM sleep, it makes sense that the brain might produce images (ACTIVATION) it then combines into a story (SYNTHESIS). This the explanation of dreams behind J. Allan Hobson and colleagues’ activation-synthesis theory of dreams. The activation-synthesis theory claims that dreams are simply the brain’s way of making sense of random electrical signals it receives. A portion of the brain stem, the pons, randomly generates electrical signals and sends these signals, composed of fragments of memories, images, and emotions, to higher brain regions.
Because our instinct as humans is to make sense of meaningless things, the brain attempts to make the signals meaningful. This theory might help explain why our dreams are sometimes so strange and weird! The strangeness is a result of your brain trying to make sense of useless activity or neural signals. You might think that Hobson is saying that our dreams are meaningless. He’s not. What he is saying is that the answer to decoding dreams doesn’t lie in interpreting the symbols. It lies in how the dreamer makes sense of the progression of the disorganized content of the dream images once they are awake.
Comparing Dreams to Waking Thought
The neurocognitive theory of dreaming focuses on comparisons between dreaming and waking thought. Dream expert William Domhoff says that dreams are not a “cognitive mishmash” of random fragments of memories and emotions generated by the lower brain. They are imaginative, mostly realistic simulations of waking life. He insists that dreams not only occur in REM sleep, but they also happen at the onset of sleep as well as during NREM sleep. In other words, dreams are not foreign to our waking experience as the activation-synthesis theory claims.
Dreams are very similar to normal thought processes. They just happen to occur during an altered state of consciousness, sleep!
So What’s Up with Dreams?
There is no one answer to why dreams are such a mystery. And although we all have had our share of bizarre, out-of-this-world dreams, we often dream of mundane things that typically reflect our daily waking activity. It’s as if your brain is saying to you, “Move along, there’s nothing to see here!”
Consider these words said by pioneering sleep researcher William Dement, “Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.”
Sweet dreams everyone!
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