The dreams
Today we are going to talk a little about dreams.
Dreams are like movies in which we are the protagonists and owners of what we do or create in them.
They know no boundaries between young and old, rich and poor, races, religions and nationalities. In all cultures we find some version of «counting sheep» before making a decision.
Old cultures thought that dreams were messages from the gods or from the dead and that they had important messages as predictions of the future.
Why do dreams exist?
This question is still an unknown but there are things that we can know.
When we sleep we go through several stages, the dreams happen mainly during the phase of rapid eye movements called REM (Rapid Eye Movement), when you are at this stage to avoid hurting all our muscles are disconnected and there is almost total muscle relaxation, and a mental activity similar to the one we have when we are awake, if you wake up at this stage (REM) you will most likely remember that dream.
While we sleep, the body enters the state of anabolic reaction during which functions of construction and repair of organs and tissues such as muscles and bones are carried out, as well as the supply of the immune system.
Sleeping is important and essential for our health, our mind also nourishes and strengthens while we sleep.
Studies show that sleep plays a fundamental role in the formation of long-term memory, that is, during the night it is when the learning of what we live during our day is formed.
People who sleep well have better results in school or work, who spend a lot of time without sleep have changes in mood, problems concentrating, constant migraines, lack of memory, paranoia and hallucinations.
They also have a much higher risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and depression.
Although the exact mechanism has not been discovered, a hypothesis has been created that dreams are a way to maintain mental activity while performing all those repair processes in our brain.
All mammals dream, have you noticed it in your dog?, so do many birds and even reptiles.
But in the case of us, the dreams that mean?
The father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud proposed that dreams are manifestations of our deepest desires, as well as our unrecognized anxieties, the images, stories and emotions of dreams have symbols that represent desires or fears that if they were not codified would give us shame recognize.
Freud maintains that all dreams represent the realization of a wish on the part of the dreamer, even nightmare dreams. There are negative dreams of desires, where what appears is the breach of a desire. For this several explanations are given, among which is the satisfaction of a masochistic tendency. Nevertheless, Freud's general conclusion remains: dreams are realizations disguised as repressed desires. According to his theory, the "censorship" of dreams produces a distortion of their content. So what may seem to be a set of dreamed-out images without meaning can, through analysis and the "deciphering" method, be shown to be a set of coherent ideas. Freud proposes that the value of the analysis of dreams lies in the revelation of the subconscious activity of the mind.
Freud's theory of dream interpretation represents the first theories of this in relation to the nature of the psychology of unconscious dreams, the importance of childhood experiences, the "hieroglyphic" language of dreams and the method that the called "psychoanalysis"
Source
For example, if you hate someone in specific and he always wears red, you may dream that you always kick a monster dressed in red, so you relieve tension and you will not feel guilty for wanting to hit the person who you hate
Freud warned that symbols are not universal, if not personal, each person should interpret them according to their circumstances and not resort to those easy dictionaries of dreams.
With respect to Carl Gustav Jung
(disciple of S. Freud), dreams are a way to achieve greater personal and spiritual fulfillment because they help us to understand each other better and solve the problems we have.
With respect to Dr. Deirdre Barrett
From his perspective of Evolutionary Psychology, dreams fulfill a function that improves our chances of survival.
He carried out studies in which he asks a group of students to focus on a problem before going to sleep and upon awakening half of them found the solution.
There are many examples of scientists, mathematicians, artists and philosophers who have dreamed of ideas that have changed the world.
- Dmitri Mendeleev, Periodic table.
- Elias Howe, Sewing machine.
- S. Dalí, Persistence of Memory.
- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.
- Robert L. Stevenson, Jekyll y Hyde.
- August Kekulé, Benzene.
- A. Russel Wallace, Natural selection.
Once I read that dreams happen is in the small moment that we almost wake up, that is during the last 5 minutes of sleep. And sometimes we think we dream all night.
Pass the time flying, it is similar to when we postpone the alarm that rang at 6am and you feel that you closed your eyes 1s and suddenly it is 10am.
oh yes it's a pretty curious fact