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Why do we dream
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According to Oxford Dictionary dream is a series of images, ideas, emotions and
sensations that occur uncontrollably in the mind during specific stages of sleep. Many people
believe that dreams are basically meaningless and accidental. Do you know that there is a branch
of psychological science called Oneirology? It conducts survey about dreams through
experiments. The oneirologists found that dreams help to train human reaction to menacing
situations, gain wisdom, and make tragedies become something ordinary.
First and foremost, humans will be quite ready for a threatening situation by dreaming.
As stated by Levy (2103), the threatening simulation theory proposes that dreaming is not a
harmful technique but it is a save way for humans to practice how to compromise with
threatening situations. This statement is followed by theory that declares; dreams helped
mankind behave more productively during the day. People will practice the situations and the
way we would go through them in something like virtual reality simulator (p. 95). Virtual reality
simulator is a fake environment created by human so that people would experience like the real
environment. Same goes with this theory. For instance, being chased is a common dream among
people. When we are being chased by something, we will usually find a way out to escape from
that thing. This situation is what we called a virtual reality simulator, like stated above. In real
life, if we were being chased, it is something that we have gone through virtually in your dream
and we will automatically apply the situation. Hence, it is true that we will be prepared to face a
threatening-situation dreaming.
Next, by dreaming, we will gain wisdom. It sounds unbelievable but this is a theory that
is described by Matthew Wilson, Sherman Fairchild professor of neuroscience and Picower
Scholar at MIT Center of Learning and Memory. It is obviously that people cannot remember
every single detail like images, situations and stimulus during the day. How dreams help in order
to gain wisdom? Our dreams will analyze all of these situations and filter the things that should
be remembered. The unimportant things will be disposed so that our brains will not get stuck
with incidents (Morgan, 2013). We rarely remember the dreams we had but sometimes we will
suddenly remember about, a dream that makes you overwhelmed perhaps. If we were dreaming
about the circumstances that we go through along the day, and the next day we remember what
have we dreamt of, the things in our dream will be kept in our mind because as we know dreams
can be interesting, scary and sometimes it does not make sense. These things make our dream
more memorable and easier to remember. This explains how dream can help us in gaining
wisdom and strengthen our memory.
Dreaming is said to be a process which is affected by emotions. This could be explained by
looking at people who is having trauma. According to Hartmann (2006), dreaming symbolically
about the memory makes it hard to fade away. They may not dream exactly what happen but
instead they dream of other situation that lead to have the same painful feeling. As for example,
people who had just survived from a tsunami may dream about the heavy wave or maybe dream
being in a fire building which leads to the same painful feeling during the tsunami tragedy. With
time, the dream will continuously connect to images of other frightening experiences and it will
constantly return to its standard state. It will make connections with other parts of the memory
which abates the emotional disturbance. In short, dream process helps the memory system to
identify the traumatic material as something ordinary and the event will not be so traumatic.
In summarization of the above information, it does make sense that dreaming prepares us
for alarming position, helping in improving our memory and helping the traumatized people to
forget the misery in them. Dreams come in various types, it can be exciting or it can also be
terrifying. We should not take dreams too serious because at the end of the day, it is only just a
dream.
REFERENCES
Books
Levy, J. (2013). Why?:Answer To Everyday Scientific Questions.United States.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Morgan, K. O. (2013). The complete guide to interpreting you own dreams and what they mean
to you .Washington. Atlantic Publishing Company
Online Article
Why Do We Dream?. (2003, July 14). Retrieved from
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-do-we-dream
Dictionary
Dream. (n.d.). in Oxford Advance Learners Dictionary online. Retrieved from
https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/10/
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