Written By: Shraddha Rupavate | Updated : August 28, 2014 12:05 PM IST
Why do we dream? Why we are able to remember only a few of them? What happens in the brain during the dreaming process?Here are some facts about dreams explained by our expert counselling psychologist.
Fact 1: Dream is the voice of the unconscious mind:
Dreams have been described as a temporary refusal to face the outside world. Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, considered dreams as the main area where the unconscious mind manifests itself and becomes accessible to research. He explained that sleep begins with the wish to move away from reality. And it is only with this wish that the individual regresses to primitive modes of activity and the controlling forces of the conscious are more and more reduced. It is only then that the mind is open to the voice of the unconscious to the dream.
Fact 2: Dreams represent demands originating from the unconscious mind
Often your demands arise from your daily activities you perform while you're awake. These demands are actually pressures coming up against the conscious part of personality, which represses the unconscious wishes.
Fact 3: Dreams are meaningful but requires skillful interpretation
Dream interpretation is a difficult art for many reasons. The symbols our brain uses in our dreams have highly personal meanings, though analyst believes that we use certain common symbols to stand for particular ideas. And, there are some parts of dreams that seem illogical or confusing. Moreover, some dreams are completely forgotten. Also, a person may try to correct these 'faults' while reporting the dream and cause distortion of the dream. A skillful analyst, however, can turn these problems to advantage. By figuring out where distortions and forgetting occur, the analyst can judge what urges are strong, and what conflicts so disturbing, that they must be defended against even in dreams. Moreover, the confusing and seemingly illogical events of a dream can become grist for the analyst's mill. As dreams analysis implies, the unconscious uses its own language. It is the grammarless language of illogic, where contradictory elements are applied and compromise is reached between mutually exclusive statements. Yes and no, true, false, reality, imagination are brought together in utter disregard for inner consistency.
Fact 4: Recurring dreams may indicate an unpleasant past or forbidden wishes
According to Freud, dreams were a peephole into our unconscious, which directs much of our lives and our dreams. The unconscious is made up of forbidden childhood wishes, intense impulses, and our strong needs for love. Dreams and forgetting (or repressing) are connected. Maybe, as Freud said, the connection is because dreams are laden with nasty sexual and aggressive drives, which our conscious mind wants to forget. Robert Cartwright and Lamberg (1992) have a very different notion on recurring dreams. They believed that our dreams reflect a major conscious emotional concern. In effect, our dreams underscore our current problems, rather than hide or erase them.
In addition, according to Cartwright and Lamberg, the dream content can be associated with things that are consciously bothering us. The mind supposedly searches our past to find a situation, or symbol that fits the feelings that are pressuring us during our sleep. It is as though bad dreams are telling us to pay attention to or resolve this problem.
Fact 5: Dreams often give solutions to our problems
Dreams are a means to find out solutions for important but repressed problems. Out conscious mind is always busy coping with problems and often passes on difficult emotional problems to the unconscious mind for solving. Dreams are a way for the unconscious mind to give us its wisdom about handling emotional situations. Thus, the conscious mind needs to discover what problem the unconscious mind is working on and then decipher the unconscious's solution. Dreams do reflect our concerns of the day and our memories. Also, our conscious speculation about why our cortex had the particular associations (resulting in a vivid, complex, fascinating dream) to the random signals may aid our self-understanding. Dream analysis could be for understanding our cortex trying to make sense of nonsense, instead of for understanding unconscious motives.
Fact 6: Dreams occur during the rapid eye movement (REM) phase of the sleep cycle
Dreams occur in a special phase of sleep where the brain wave activity returns from stage 2, 3 or 4 of non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep to low-voltage, fast activity. This activity is not the same activity in stage 1, even though the two states look somewhat alike in the EEG. It is a new stage the stage of paradoxical sleep. During paradoxical sleep, the muscle of the body go limp and something else happens. The eyes move rapidly from side to side. For this reason, paradoxical sleep is sometimes called rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. But perhaps the fact of greatest interest is that the paradoxical or REM stage is the period of dreams. About 80 to 90 percent of the time, when people awakened during or immediately after paradoxical sleep, they report that they were dreaming.
Fact 7: Every element in the dream symbolizes something
Psychologically, dreams apply symbols, usually pictorial. Some symbols are universal, such as house, which symbolises the human body. When it is smooth, it symbolises a man. When there are balconies and ledges, it represents the feminine body. Parents appear in dreams as kings and queens, siblings as little animals. Birth represents by water, death by a journey. A spider usually symbolises the aggressive, phallic mother and fear of a spider represents fear of incest. In symbolic meaning, a bridge may indicate birth or death, transitions from life to death or womb to birth. Our drives, emotions, early memories, daytime experiences, and associations influence our dreams.
You may also like to read:
For more such articles, visit our body-mind-soul section. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter for all the latest updates! For daily free health tips, sign up for our newsletter. And to join discussions on health topics of your choice, visit our forum.
