Why do we dream?

Why Do We Dream? - Top Dream Theories

By Kendra Cherry , About.com Guide

THE POWER AND PURPOSE OF DREAMS

Deprive yourself of sleep, and you'll lose your dreams

Published on February 15, 2010 by Gayle Greene, PhD in Insomniac

There's been a lot of talk about sleep lately. When I wroteInsomniac, I felt like a lone voice decrying the dangers of sleep-deprivation, the toll sleep loss takes on our minds, bodies, moods. As any insomniac will tell you (and I interviewed dozens), there's nothing so crucial as sleep for our mental, physical, and social well being. It seems those of us who have the hardest time sleeping are the ones who most appreciate how sleep keeps us glued together.
So it's terrific sleep is getting this long overdue attention. But I'm wondering, what about dreams? I haven't heard much about dreams in the discussion.

When you wake to an early alarm, cutting off the last hour or two of sleep, the sleep you sacrifice is mainly REM, "rapid eye movement," the most dream-rich stage of sleep.  We dream in all stages of sleep, not just REM, but our most vivid and memorable and emotionally resonant dreams, those wild, phantasmagoric images and stories that play through our heads like films, occur mainly in the stretch of REM just before we wake up in the morning.

What does it mean, to lose our dreams? A normal sleeper, a good sleeper, spends about a quarter of sleep time in REM, so a person who lives 90 years will spend 6 or 7 years in REM. And when researchers deprive people of REM, there is REM rebound, an increase in amount and intensity of REM equivalent to the duration of the deprivation. So it seems dreams are there for something, have some purpose.

When researchers discovered REM in 1953, they were ecstatic to find that the eye movements were associated with dream recall. Most researchers studying the mind those days were Freudians, and Freudsaw dreams as "the royal road to the unconscious"-so researchers thought they'd found the route to the innermost recesses of the self.
It wasn't that simple, of course. Subsequent findings about the workings of the brain did not bear out Freud's ideas, and the focus of dream study shifted to the neurological bases of dreams, their physiological rather than psychological origins, the ebb and flow of neurotransmitters. At present, there is "precious little on which dream researchers agree," says Harvard sleep scientist Robert Stickgold, whose work suggests an association of dreaming with learning and the consolidation of memory.

I've been attending annual meetings of the Associated Professional Sleep Society (APSS) since 2002. These are conferences where sleep scientists, physicians, psychotherapists, and pharmaceutical researchers gather to share the latest in research and treatments. In the years I've been attending, I've heard breakthrough discoveries about sleep and the brain that have brought researchers closer to understanding disorders such as narcolepsy, restless leg syndrome, even insomnia. But I've heard few presentations about dreams.

At the 2009 meeting in Seattle, dreams were discussed in relation to post-traumatic stress syndrome, but- except for a talk by P.F. Pagel, University of Colorado Medical School-that was about all. Pagel commented wryly that he seemed to have moved into the study of dreams just as everybody else moved out, since his was the only presentation on dreams at this conference. He described a study he did with the Filmaking and Screenwriter Labs in Sundance that found a much higher recall and use of dreams among actors, writers, and directors than among participants from his sleep center: dream use increases, he concludes, in proportion to a person's interest in the creative process or product.

It figures that filmmakers have this kind of generative conversation with their dreams, since film is, of all human creations, probably the most dream-like. But I came away from Pagel's talk thinking, wait a minute: artistic types are the only ones who have use for their dreams? Doesn't everybody-teachers and software designers and politicians and psychotherapists- need to think creatively? Would you want a sleep-starved surgeon wielding a scalpel (and doctors are the most sleepstarved of professionals): what if something goes wrong? When sleep-deprived subjects are given tests that require flexibility, the ability to change strategy and generate new ideas and approaches, they respond poorly, tending to fall back on rote, rigid thinking.
Robert Stickgold finds that when people are awakened out of REM and given a word to associate to, their associations are more novel, more original than in other stages of sleep; they "ignore the obvious and put together things that make a kind of crazy unexpected kind of sense." Dreams, Stickgold says, are where we bring things together in fresh, often startling ways, drawing on stores of knowledge from the past, the present, the possible, to find new associations. Dreams may help us find new patterns and create combinations that break through well-worn ruts. "This is what creativity is," says Stickgold. Dreams, far from being idle fancies, are enablers of "the most sophisticated human cognitive functions."
There are, of course, highly creative and productive people who have little or no dream recall. But dreaming may still work behind the scenes. I swear, I write better when I awake out of one of those intense, thrashing-it-through dreams. Even a troubling dream, a dream that churns up stuff I'd rather shove under the carpet, even a dream barely remembered, much less understood, seems to provide some kind of fluency, dream energy, fuel for thought. Those are the days that the words and images come, tumble out so fast that my fingers on the keys can barely keep up. I don't know how it works, but it does seem to work.

And creativity isn't just for writers or artists, it's about basic survival, about finding new paths, figuring out what to do when something goes drastically wrong on the highway, in a marriage, in a work situation. We live in a complex world. We need our brains to be firing on all cylinders; we need to think creatively, flexibly, as we negotiate relationships with colleagues, co-workers, family, friends.

Are we a society that's losing its dreams, that's cutting short dreaming with "alarms"? Are we dumbing ourselves down with overwork, sleeping too little and working too much, undercutting the very efforts we make by working so hard? When you get up to an early alarm, you gotta ask, are you really gaining productivity with that time, or dulling the creative edge that might make you far more productive? Sleep has survival value not only for you as an individual but for a society whose vitality depends on individuals' thinking outside the box.
So, yes, let's sleep to get healthy, to get thin, to feel better, to get smarter- and remember that that extra hour of sleep is dreamtime that brings incalculable benefits.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/sleep-challenge-2010-wome_b_409973.html?&just_reloaded=1
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gayatri-devi-md/sleepless-in-seattle-the_b_417313.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cindi-leive/sleep-challenge-2010-the_b_449860.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/qanta-ahmed/be-your-own-sleep-special_b_442802.html
actors use their dreams
Sarah Kershaw, "The role of their dreams," NYT, May 7, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/fashion/07dreams.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print
Robert Stickgold on dreams
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/dreams/ask.html
Rebecca Cathcart, "Winding through ‘big dreams' are the threads of our lives,"
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/03/health/psychology/03dream.html

World Of Psycology

Why Dreaming is Believing

By JEREMY DEAN

We all live two mental lives. When we are awake it is mostly ordered, rational, linear and bounded by rules, both behavioral and physical. When we are asleep it is chaotic, nonlinear, without rules, often without sense.
According to some, dreams are nothing more than the byproduct of a brain disconnected from its normal sensory inputs, freewheeling its way through the night. To others, dreams denote night-time learning or problem-solving, even automatic sifting of the mind’s detritus – useless information to be skimmed off the surface and dumped like so much mental junk.
Amongst the general public, though, there are much stronger beliefs about the power of dreams. So strong that, according to recent research, people seem to believe that dreams can predict the future.

Freudians

To see how much meaning people ascribe to their dreams, Carey Morewedge and Michael Norton asked participants to compare four ways of thinking about dreams (Morewedge & Norton, 2009). Here are the options:

• Freudian: dreams reveal buried truths about the self.
• Problem-solving: dreams help us work through our problems while we sleep.
• Learning theory: dreams are how we process and sort out the day’s events.
• Random: dreams are vivid hallucinations that result from our brains trying to interpret random impulses.

Notice the last three theories all share the idea that, while dreaming may or may not have a psychological ‘purpose,’ the actual content of our dreams is still mental junk; sometimes entertaining, sometimes frightening, often weird, but with no real meaning in and of itself. The content only has a strong meaning in the Freudian approach.
Participants from the United States, South Korea and India were all more likely to endorse the Freudian view of dreams than the other three. In the US sample it was 56% Freudian, 8% problem-solving, 18% random and 18% learning.

Plane crash

Although 56% endorsing Freud might sound high, Morewedge and Norton thought it was still an underestimate of how much store people put by their dreams. So a second and third study asked both Freudians and non-Freudians to estimate the effect of their dreams on behavior.
Participants were asked to imagine they were taking a flight tomorrow when each of the following events happened the night before:

• They consciously thought about the plane crashing on the route they were going to take,
• They had a dream about the same thing,
• Or, it actually happened the night before!

They were then asked to put these in order of most to least likely to make them cancel their flight. My money was in the same place as I’d guess yours is: on the real plane crash being the most off-putting. For the Freudians in the group, though, we’d both be wrong. Incredibly, they thought the dream would be the greatest motivator to cancel the flight, even more so than an actual, real-life crash.
Non-Freudians rated the real-world event as more influential than the dream, but only just. Giving the lie to their non-Freudian stance, though, they still thought dreams would be more influential than thoughts they had while they were awake.
So the majority of people think their dreams will influence their waking life, often more so than a similar waking thought. But the experimenters wanted to push it further: what if a dream’s message conflicted with a person’s best interests?

Dream cheats

Morewedge and Norton’s next two experiments used a common dream in which someone we like does something nasty to us. In this case it was dreaming that a friend had betrayed us by kissing our partner.
What they found was that people who remembered a dream about their friend kissing their partner tended to think it was meaningless, but when the dream cheat was someone they didn’t like, it was filled with meaning. This suggests people only imply meaning into their dreams when the implications fit their motives.
In a final study experimenters pitted people’s dreams up against their religious beliefs. Again, participants demonstrated a motivational interpretation of their dreams. They were happy to endorse the meaningfulness of their dreams, unless it contradicted their religious beliefs, in which case they were meaningless.

Motivated interpretation

Part of the reason people sometimes place so much belief in dreams is because of the long cultural history of dream interpretation which we are regularly reminded about in books, films and on TV.
But it’s more than just that.
Morewedge and Norton argue that there is also a basic psychological process supporting people’s belief in dreams. We have random thoughts all the time, like day-dreaming about getting a raise at work. If the thought comes while awake, it can be consciously dismissed as wishful thinking. But when the same thought comes during a dream, people are less likely to dismiss it because dreams don’t feel like our own ideas; they seem to come from somewhere else.
So be careful what you dream, if it’s convenient, you might end up believing it.
Photo by Caroline

The Meaning of Dreams and Dream Predictions – Choosing Your Destiny

The Meaning of Dreams and Dream Predictions – Choosing Your Destiny

By Christina Sponias

Throughout the ages, people have attempted to predict the future through many ways. However, the mysterious essence of this phenomenon remains ignored.

Only the method of dream interpretation discovered by Carl Jung provides us with explanations that can be trusted. I continued Jung’s research proving that he really discovered the hidden meaning of dreams. I also simplified his complicated method. Today everyone can easily learn the dream language and understand the predictions they see in their dreams.

We are able to predict the future because the unconscious mind that produces our dreams protects our mental health from the attacks of the anti-conscience, which is our evil and wild conscience. The unconscious mind also protects us from the evilness of the world we live in.

Many scientific discoveries in many different fields, like biology, astronomy, neurology, and physics have already proved to the world that we indispensably need the existence of a creator. The nature of our world is very well organized, and all new organisms are hardwired to be able to survive before their birth. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have time to learn how to survive. This preparation indicates the necessity of a superior brain, since it cannot be the result of chance. It is the result of precise calculations, with specific intentions. Thus, we have already discovered scientific proof of God’s existence.

The guidance we receive in dreams proves this fact even more. The unconscious wisdom cannot be justified unless we admit the existence of a superior creature.

This is a truth you can verify by yourself. The unconscious psychotherapy works like a spiritual purification. As you eliminate your evil anti-conscience, you purify your spirit. This is why when you follow the unconscious guidance in your dreams, you follow a brilliant destiny.

Everyone has a destiny previously traced for them because everyone already inherits various characteristics in their personality. The Greek mythology had three ‘moiras’ who prepared the future destiny of the human being. This mythological representation has a symbolic meaning that fits with what we understand when we master the dream language. There are in fact three destinies available to all human beings:

* The destiny given by our human conscience, which is based on the repetition of the mistakes of our psychological personality type. When we follow our under-developed conscience, we suffer with the consequences of our mistakes. We may have a few pleasant moments in our lives, but we also pass through many tragic moments of despair.

* The destiny given by our evil and wild anti-conscience, which is based on the destruction of our human conscience. When we accept the absurd thoughts of the anti-conscience we become schizophrenic, psychotic, and so on. This is the destiny followed by a big percentage of our population, even though many cases are not diagnosed. Many mentally ill individuals are simply considered ‘extravagant’, and yet, hold powerful positions on Earth. They are tortured by the anti-conscience’s absurdity, and this is why they torture everyone around them.

* The destiny given by the saintly unconscious mind, which represents our salvation from the auto-destructive tendencies of our under-developed conscience and anti-conscience. When we obey the unconscious guidance, we are happy and constantly evolving into a greater human being. This is a destiny that only a few people in our world manage to follow by way of religion or, through dream translation.

Depending on your attitude in life, you will choose one destiny over another. Of course, you should choose the brilliant destiny prepared for you by the unconscious mind. You only have to eliminate the evilness and the craziness you have inherited in the biggest part of your brain through dream therapy

How to Interpret Dreams About Sex – Dream Translation and Analysis

How to Interpret Dreams About Sex – Dream Translation and Analysis

By Christina Sponias

Dreams about sex are showing you that you have a very close relationship with the person you are having a sexual relationship with, even if the relationship you have with this person is not sexually related. When you have sex with someone in dreams this means that you completely agree with this person.

However, all the people who appear in your dreams are parts of your own personality. Therefore, the information you have is not related to them, but related to your psychological reality. Only later, after having passed through a process of mind development through dream translation, will you have direct information about other people in your dreams.

Thus, when you see in a dream that you are making love to someone, this means that you totally agree with a certain part of your personality represented by this person. For example, if you are a woman and you see a dream in which you are making love with your father, this means that you completely agree with your one-sided conscience, which is represented by the image of your father.

Your parents always have a negative meaning in dreams because they represent your under-developed nature. You are basically a primate who must develop your intelligence through dream translation. Your father in dreams represents your ignorant conscience that keeps repeating the same mistakes. Your father can have a positive meaning only when the positive aspects of your personality are reflected in his behavior in a dream.

Your mother represents your wild conscience, the terrible anti-conscience that provokes mental illnesses within the human side of your conscience. Therefore, if you are a man and you see in a dream that you are making love with your mother, this means that you totally agree with the absurdity of your anti-conscience. This is a very dangerous attitude. You must stop following the evil and absurd suggestions of your anti-conscience because they will only lead you to craziness and despair.

Write down your dreams everyday in a dream journal. Even if you are not able to translate their meaning today, some day you will be able to understand everything if you follow my lessons.

Dreams about sex have another meaning when you are having a sexual relationship with your partner. The person you love doesn’t represent a part of your own personality like the other people who appear in your dreams. Everything that you see about him or her in a dream is true and related to your relationship with this person.

For example, you may dream that while you were making love, he or she was constantly avoiding you. This means that your partner is not feeling the same way you do when you are together. You must try to understand why your partner is not feeling happy with you. On the other hand, if you are having a sexual relationship with the person you love and feeling satisfied in a dream, this means that your relationship is healthy.

The translation and analysis of dreams about love depend on the dream’s context. The information you have is not given in a symbolic form, as happens in dreams that reflect your psychological problems. This information will help you understand if you are being cheated on, or how to fix a broken relationship. 

EARN A NEW WHILE WHILE DREAMING

Dream Interpretation Advantages – Learn Why Your Dreams Give You a New Life

By Christina Sponias

Many people believe that dreams have no meaning. Other people only give relative importance to the meaning of their dreams. However, the truth is that our dreams are essential for our psychological balance. They are also a source of objective information that we can absolutely trust.

Our dreams are produced by the wise unconscious mind that knows everything and protects our mental health. We can very easily lose our mental stability because we have inherited too much craziness in the wild side of our conscience.

Everything can lead us to mental illnesses when we are influenced by the anti-conscience, the wild and primitive side of our conscience, that didn’t evolve like our human side. The anti-conscience interferes in our thoughts by suggesting absurd solutions to our problems. However, these solutions are camouflaged within logical ideas. The anti-conscience can think and easily mislead our human conscience. If we follow its suggestions, we enter in the labyrinth of craziness.

The unconscious mind sends us many warnings when we are influenced by the anti-conscience. It shows us in dream images what will happen in the future to help us understand our mistakes. This way, we have the chance to prevent bad consequences.

We have many other advantages when we learn how to translate the meaning of our dreams according to the scientific method. First of all, our mind opens. We stop being one-sided and narrow-minded. We learn how to think without avoiding the points we dislike. In fact, we pay attention to what is bad. This is how we can avoid misfortunes, mental illnesses, accidents, physical diseases, and everything that is unpleasant and sad.

Most dream symbols work like warnings because we tend to make many mistakes in life. We are too ignorant and lazy. We prefer to do what is very simple without working hard, and we try to avoid suffering without caring about justice. This is why we are very easily misled by the tricky attempts of the anti-conscience to control our behavior.

The anti-conscience is evil and cruel; like a wild animal that doesn’t understand its victims’ suffering. It imposes absurd thoughts into our conscience because it tries to destroy our capacity to think logically.

The unconscious mind helps us escape from the anti-conscience’s traps. This is why the information we receive in dreams is very real. It saves our lives. Many times we are able to prevent catastrophes thanks to a dream warning. Other times, we are relieved from our fears and thus we acquire the self-confidence we need to go on.

Many people who have suffered all their lives find peace and happiness only when they learn the dream language. The unconscious mind shows to all dreamers that it is never too late to begin a new and meaningful life, even if they made many mistakes in the past. 

Christina Sponias continued Carl Jung’s research into the human psyche, discovering the cure for all mental illnesses, and simplifying the scientific method of dream interpretation that teaches you how to exactly translate the meaning of your dreams, so that you can find health, wisdom and happiness.
Learn more at: http://www.scientificdreaminterpretation.com
Click Here to download a Free Sample of the eBook Dream Interpretation as a Science (86 pages!).

UNDERSTAND YOURSELF USING DREAM ANALYSIS

How to Better Understand the Human Mind Using Dream Analysis

By Christina Sponias

Dream analysis based on a scientific translation of the meaning of your dreams will help you better understand the human mind. You’ll overcome all your psychological problems and learn how to develop your intelligence.

Many times your dreams seem to simply project scenes of your daily life. However, all dream images have a symbolic meaning and give you very important messages. They are the ‘words’ used by the unconscious mind that produces your dreams.

For example, you may dream that you were in a store and you met your cousin. You see an old friend in the same store. He is wiping up the floor. Then, you see a ghost, and you wake up; frightened.

This short dream is giving you important information about your mind. We have to know your life biography in order to properly translate this dream. Suppose you are a person who works very hard and has no time to do many of the things you like. You feel that your life is empty.

Without knowing the meaning of the dream language you could imagine that perhaps your dream was showing you that you work hard like the friend who was wiping up the floor. However, the meaning of your dreams doesn’t follow your conscious logic, but the logic of the unconscious mind. You must learn the symbolic dream language in order to accurately translate this dream.

Each person that appears in your dream is a part of your personality that has the same characteristics of the people you see.

Your cousin is a very shy person, who hardly speaks or shows any emotions.

Your friend is an old classmate who was a poor student. He had to repeat a class.

When you wipe up the floor in a dream, you are digging up the past and looking for answers to your problems in past situations.

A ghost in dreams represents a neurosis.

Now, let’s put everything together: When you go to a store in dreams, you are trying to buy things that will feed your psyche (and not your body). In other words, you are looking for solutions to your psychological problems.

You meet your cousin, who represents a part of your personality that is shy and fearful like him. Thus, you try to find solutions to your problems, but you meet a part of your personality that is very shy. This means that you have no courage to really solve your problems.

Your old classmate (who repeated a class) is a part of your personality who repeats the same mistakes, failing to learn life’s lessons. This part of your personality is looking for solutions to your problems in the past. This means that you are simply blaming past situations for the formation of your psychological problems, without analyzing your mistakes. Your life has no meaning because you have a negative attitude.

Stop acting like a coward (your cousin), and stop repeating the same mistakes (your classmate). You are blaming past situations for the formation of your psychological problems (wiping up the floor) without seriously analyzing your behavior. You have to understand your mistakes. Otherwise, you’ll become neurotic (ghost). 

Christina Sponias continued Carl Jung’s research into the human psyche, discovering the cure for all mental illnesses, and simplifying the scientific method of dream interpretation that teaches you how to exactly translate the meaning of your dreams, so that you can find health, wisdom and happiness. Learn more at: http://www.scientificdreaminterpretation.com

Click Here to download a Free Sample of the eBook Dream Interpretation as a Science (86 pages!).