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DREAMS

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INDEX

MEANING OF DREAM

NEUROBIOLOGY OF DREAMING

SLEEP AND ITS STAGES

VARIOUS THEORY ON DREAMING

Psychology of sleep and dreams

The Sleep Cycle

hypotheses on dreaming

Dream interpretation

Relationship with medical conditions

Dreaming and the "real world

WHY DO WE DREAM

Depression and dreaming

Incorporation of Waking Events Into Dreams

Memory and Dreams

Common dreams

Nightmare

Colour ,symbols and language- of dreamDream Weaver

Conclusions

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MEANING OF DREAM:

A dream is a succession of images, sounds or emotions that the mind experiences during sleep. The content and purpose of dreams are not fully understood, though they have been a topic of speculation and interest throughout recorded history. The scientific study of dreams is known as ONEIROLOGY.

Dreaming: the mental activity that takes place during sleep Everybody dreams, but most people are only able to recall a

few, if any, of their dreams In some cultures, dreams are highly valued and frequently

discussed so people will begin to remember them most mornings

Some sleep researchers will wake up participants at regular intervals during the night to ask them about their dreams

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The first few dreams are usually made up of left over thoughts from the day activities

As the night continues on, dreams become longer and more vivid and dramatic especially those during REM sleep

Because of the sleep cycle usually ends in REM sleep, the last dream is likely to be the longest and the one most people remember when they wake up

Dreams have fascinated people for centuries.

The reasons why dreams occur are still obscure. When something is not clear, there is always room for speculation.

Dream interpretation is still very popular.

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The cultural meaning of dreaming:Throughout history, people have sought meaning in dreams or divination through dreams . Dreams have been described

physiologically as a response to neural processes during sleep, psychologically as reflections of the subconscious, and spiritually as messages from gods, the deceased, predictions of the future or from the Soul, for symbology is the language of the Soul. Many cultures practice dream incubation, with the intention of cultivating dreams that were prophetic or contained messages from the divine.

Judaism has a traditional ceremony called Hatavat Halom – literally meaning "making the dream a good one." Through this rite disturbing dreams can be transformed to give a positive interpretation by a rabbi or a rabbinic court

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Neurobiology of dreaming:.

EEG showing brainwaves during REM sleep

There is no universally agreed upon biological definition of dreaming. In 1952, Eugene Aserinsky identified and defined rapid eye movement (REM) sleep while working in the surgery of his PhD advisor. Aserinsky noticed that the sleepers' eyes fluttered beneath their closed eyelids, later using a polygraph machine to record their brainwaves during these periods. In one session, he awakened a subject who was wailing and crying out during REM and confirmed his suspicion that dreaming was occurring. In 1953, Aserinsky and his advisor published the ground-breaking study in Science.

Accumulated observation shows that dreams are strongly associated with REM sleep, during which an electroencephalogram (EEG) shows brain activity to be most like wakefulness. Participant-non remembered dreams during NREM sleep are normally more mundane in comparison. During a typical lifespan, a human spends a total of about six years dreaming(which is about two hours each night).Most dreams last only 5 to 20 minutes. It is unknown where in the brain dreams originate, if there is a single origin for dreams or if multiple portions of the brain are involved, or what the purpose of dreaming is for the body or mind.

During REM sleep, the release of the neurotransmitters norepinephrine, serotonin and histamine is completely suppressed. As a result, motor neurons are not stimulated, a

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condition known as REM atoni a . This prevents dreams from resulting in dangerous movements of the body.

According to a report in the journal Neuron, rat brains show evidence of complex activity during sleep, including the activation in memory of long sequences of activity. Studies show that various species of mammals and birds experience REM during sleep and follow the same series of sleeping states as humans.

Despite their power to bewilder, arouse, frighten or amuse, dreams are often ignored in mainstream models of cognitive psychology. As methods of introspection were replaced with more self-consciously objective methods in the social sciences in 1930s and 1940s, dream studies dropped out of the scientific literature. Dreams were neither directly observable by an experimenter nor were subjects' dream reports reliable, being prey to the familiar problems of distortion due to delayed recall, if they were recalled at all. According to Sigmund Freud, dreams are more often forgotten entirely, perhaps due to their prohibited character. Altogether, these problems seemed to put them beyond the realm of science.

The discovery that dreams take place primarily during a distinctive electrophysiological state of sleep, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which can be identified by objective criteria, led to rebirth of interest in this phenomenon. When REM sleep episodes were timed for their duration and subjects woken to make reports before major editing or forgetting could take place, it was determined that subjects accurately matched the length of time they judged the dream narrative to be ongoing to the length of REM sleep that preceded the awakening. There is no "time dilation" effect; a five-minute dream takes roughly five minutes of real time to play out. This close correlation of REM sleep and dream experience was the basis of the first series of reports describing the nature of dreaming: that it is a regular nightly, rather than occasional, phenomenon, and a high-frequency activity within each sleep period occurring at predictable intervals of approximately every 60–90 minutes in all humans throughout the life span. REM sleep episodes and the dreams that accompany them lengthen progressively across the night, with the first

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episode being shortest, of approximately 10–12 minutes duration, and the second and third episodes increasing to 15–20 minutes. Dreams at the end of the night may last as long as 15 minutes, although these may be experienced as several distinct stories due to momentary arousals interrupting sleep as the night ends. Dream reports can be reported from normal subjects on 50% of the occasion when an awakening is made prior to the end of the first REM period. This rate of retrieval is increased to about 99% when awakenings are made from the last REM period of the night. This increase in the ability to recall appears to be related to intensification across the night in the vividness of dream imagery, colors and emotions.

SLEEP: How important is sleep?

– Sleep is vital to mental health

– If deprived of sleep for extended periods of time, people will begin to suffer psychological symptoms (Peter Tripp gives examples of some of the most extreme)

Sleep is a state of altered consciousness (a state of awareness) characterized by certain patterns of brain activity and inactivity

In 1959 New York disc jockey Peter Tripp stayed awake for 200 hours while trying to raise money for charity… After about 50 hours, he started having mild hallucinations, seeing cobwebs in his shoes when there were none there and thinking that specks of dirt were bugs; by 100 hours, he became delirious and saw a doctor’s tweed suit as a triangle of furry worms; at 120 he needed a stimulant to keep him awake. After 150 hours, he was disoriented, not knowing who or where he was, and he became paranoid– he backed against a wall, letting no one pass behind him; by 200 hours, his hallucinations had taken a sinister turn, and he thought a doctor trying to examine him was an undertaker come to bury him

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Sleep and Consciousness

Altered consciousness means that people can have different levels of awareness

Consciousness can range from alertness to nonalertness

Freud identified 3 levels of consciousness

– Conscious Level (Perceptions and Thoughts)

– Preconscious Level (Memories and Stored Knowledge)

– Unconscious Level (Selfish needs, fears, violent motives, irrational wishes, unacceptable desires, immoral urges)

Why do we sleep?

We are not for sure why people sleep but some suggested reasons include…

– Allows people to “recharge,” allowing your brain to recover from exhaustion and stress

– Rebuilds your immune system, restore muscles, and repair cells

– Clears out your mind of useless information

– May play a role in memory and learning (mental housekeeping)

Stages of Sleep

As you fall asleep your body temperature decreases, pulse drops, and your breathing becomes slow and even

Eventually your eyes will close and your brain will emit alpha waves, which are associated with the absence of concentrated thought with relaxation

Your body my twitch, your eyes roll, and brief visual images flash across your mind (even with your eyes shut)

You are then entering Stage 1, the lightest level of sleep

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Early Stages

Stage 1

– Your pulse slows a bit more, muscles relax, your breathing becomes uneven and brain waves become irregular

– If awakened during stage you would report that you were drifting.

Stage 2:

– Your eyes will roll from side to side

– Minor noises will not wake you

Stage 3:

– It will become more difficult to wake you

Later Stages

Stage IV:

– This stage is the deepest sleep

– If you are awakened by a loud noise or sudden movement, you may feel disoriented

– Talking in your sleep, sleepwalking and bedwetting will occur in this stage and will leave no memory

– This deep sleep is important to physical and psychological well being

Most people spend 75% of their sleep in Stages 1-4

Electroencephalogram (EEG)

Electrodes placed on the scalp provide a gross record of the electrical activity of the brain

EEG recordings are a rough index of psychological states

EEG Waves of Wakefulness

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Awake, but non-attentive - large, regular alpha waves

Awake and attentive - low amplitude, fast, irregular beta waves

Stages of Sleep

Sleep stage 1 - brief transition stage when first falling asleep

Stages 2 through 4 (slow-wave sleep) - successively deeper stages of sleep

Characterized by an increasing percentage of slow, irregular, high-amplitude delta waves

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Upon reaching stage 4 and after about 80 to 100 minutes of total sleep time, sleep lightens, returns through stages 3 and 2

REM sleep emerges, characterized by EEG patterns that resemble beta waves of alert wakefulness

muscles most relaxed

rapid eye movements occur

dreams occur

Four or five sleep cycles occur in a typical night’s sleep - less time is spent in slow-wave, more is spent in REM

Functions of Sleep

Restoration theory - body wears out during the day and sleep is necessary to put it back in shape

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Preservation and protection theory - sleep emerged in evolution to preserve energy and protect during the time of day when there is little value and considerable danger

Activation synthesis theory:

In 1976 J. Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley proposed a new theory that changed dream research, challenging the previously held Freudian view of dreams as subconscious dreamily wishes to be interpreted. Activation synthesis theory asserts that the sensory experiences are fabricated by the cortex as a means of interpreting chaotic signals from the pons. They propose that in REM sleep, the ascending cholinergic PGO (ponto-geniculo-occipital) waves stimulate higher midbrain and forebrain cortical structures, producing rapid eye movements. The activated forebrain then synthesizes the dream out of this internally generated information. They assume that the same structures that induce REM sleep also generate sensory information.

Hobson's 1976 research suggested that the signals interpreted as dreams originated in the brain stem during REM sleep. However, research by Mark Solms suggests that dreams are generated in the forebrain, and that REM sleep and dreaming are not directly related. While working in the neurosurgery department at hospitals in Johannesburg and London, Solms had access to patients with various brain injuries. He began to question patients about their dreams and confirmed that patients with damage to the parietal lobe stopped dreaming; this finding was in line with Hobson's 1977 theory. However, Solms did not encounter cases of loss of dreaming with patients having brain stem damage. This observation forced him to question Hobson's prevailing theory which marked the brain stem as the source of the signals

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interpreted as dreams. Solms viewed the idea of dreaming as a function of many complex brain structures as validating Freudian dream theory, an idea that drew criticism from Hobson. In 1978, Solms, along with partners William Kauffman and Edward Nadar, undertook a series of traumatic-injury impact studies using several different species of primates, particularly howler monkeys, in order to disprove Hobson's postulation that the brain stem played a significant role in dream pathology. Unfortunately, Solms' experiments proved inconclusive, as the high mortality rate associated with using a hydraulic impact pin to artificially induce brain damage in test subjects meant that his final candidate pool was too small to satisfy the requirements of the scientific method.

Continual-activation theory:

Combining Hobson's activation synthesis hypothesis with Solms' findings, the continual-activation theory of dreaming presented by Jie Zhang proposes that dreaming is a result of brain activation and synthesis; at the same time, dreaming and REM sleep are controlled by different brain mechanisms. Zhang hypothesizes that the function of sleep is to process, encode and transfer the data from the short-term memory to the long-term memory, though there is not much evidence backing up this so-called "consolidation." NREM sleep processes the conscious-related memory (declarative memory), and REM sleep processes the unconscious related memory (procedural memory).

Zhang assumes that during REM sleep, the unconscious part of a brain is busy processing the procedural memory; meanwhile, the level of activation in the conscious part of the brain will descend to

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a very low level as the inputs from the sensory are basically disconnected. This will trigger the "continual-activation" mechanism to generate a data stream from the memory stores to flow through the conscious part of the brain. Zhang suggests that this pulse-like brain activation is the inducer of each dream. He proposes that, with the involvement of the brain associative thinking system, dreaming is, thereafter, self-maintained with the dreamer's own thinking until the next pulse of memory insertion. This explains why dreams have both characteristics of continuity (within a dream) and sudden changes (between two dreams).

Dreams as excitations of long-term

memory:

Eugen Tarnow suggests that dreams are ever-present excitations of long-term memory, even during waking life. The strangeness of dreams is due to the format of long-term memory, reminiscent of Penfield & Rasmussen's findings that electrical excitations of the cortex give rise to experiences similar to dreams. During waking life an executive function interprets long-term memory consistent with reality checking. Tarnow's theory is a reworking of Freud's theory of dreams in which Freud's unconscious is replaced with the long-term memory system and Freud's "Dream Work" describes the structure of long-term memory.

Dreams for strengthening of semantic memories

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Location of hippocampus

A 2001 study showed evidence that illogical locations, characters, and dream flow may help the brain strengthen the linking and consolidation of semantic memories. These conditions may occur because, during REM sleep, the flow of information between the hippocampus and neocortex is reduced. Increasing levels of the stress hormone cortiso l late in sleep (often during REM sleep) cause this decreased communication. One stage of memory consolidation is the linking of distant but related memories. Payne and Nadal hypothesize that these memories are then consolidated into a smooth narrative, similar to a process that happens when memories are created under stress

Dreams for removing junk :

Robert (1886), a physician from Hamburg, was the first who suggested that dreams are a need and that they have the function to erase (a) sensory impressions which were not fully worked up and (b) ideas which were not fully developed during

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the day. By the dream work incomplete material will be either removed or deepened and included into memory. Robert's ideas were cited repeatedly by Freud in his Traumdeutung. Hughlings Jackson (1911) viewed that sleep serves to sweep away unnecessary memories and connections from the day. This was revised in 1983 by Crick and Mitchison's "reverse learning" theory, which states that dreams are like the cleaning-up operations of computers when they are off-line, removing parasitic nodes and other "junk" from the mind during sleep. However, the opposite view that dreaming has an information handling, memory-consolidating function (Hennevin and Leconte, 1971) is also common. Dreams are a result of the spontaneous firings of neural patterns while the brain is undergoing memory consolidation during sleep.

Dreams as resonance in neural circuits:

During sleep the eyes are closed, so that the brain to some degree becomes isolated from the outside world. Moreover all signals from the senses (except olfaction) must pass through the thalamus before they reach the brain cortex, and during sleep thalamic activity is suppressed. This means that the brain mainly works with signals from itself. A well-known phenomenon in dynamical physical systems where the level of input and output from the system is low is that oscillation makes spontaneous resonance patterns to occur. Hence, dreams may be the simple consequence of neural oscillation.

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Psychology of sleep and dreams

Brain Activity During Sleep:

To understand how dreams may be produced and their functions, it is important to understand how brain activity differs in wake and REM and non-REM sleep.

A series of positron emission tomography (PET) studies showed that most brain regions are inactive during slow wave sleep, entry into REM leads to reactivation of some regions, along with deactivation of others.

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This pattern in REM suggests a shift away from conscious executive control and towards hallucinatory (activation of sensory association cortices) and emotional (activation of amygdala, anterior cingulate, and medial orbitofrontal cortex) processing

Sleep and Memory Processing: Sleep has been shown to enhance prior learning of

perceptual and motor skills, paired word associates, and emotionally charged episodic memories.

In humans, positron emission tomography (PET) studies have shown that brain regions activated during learning a task were selectively reactivated during the next night’s REM sleep (Maquet P, et al, 2000.)

In rats, similar results were shown as well (Louie K, Wilson MA, 2001.)

Memory Consolidation

• Not all sleep is equal in relation to learning and memory consolidation.

• For example, improvement on a motor skill task has been reported to correlate with amounts of late night light (stage 2) Non-REM sleep (Walker et al, 2002), but improvement on a visual perception task to correlate with both late-night REM sleep and early-night slow-wave Non-REM sleep in separate studies (Stickgold R, 2000; Karni A et al, 1994.)

• If memory processing in sleep is differently activated during sleep stages, and dreaming at least parallels, and possibly contributes to these processes, then we would expect to see

changes in the dream content during different sleep states.

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• Simply put, this is exactly what is seen.

• In REM sleep, dreams are hallucinatory, emotional, narrative, and with frequent fictive movements. It is thought to facilitate consolidation of visual perceptual and emotional

memories.• Non-REM sleep is more thought-like and less hallucinatory,

and is implicated in in simple memorization (word pair lists experiments).

Memory and REM sleep

• One experiment focused on incorporation of waking events into the dream content (Fosse MJ, 2003.)

• Out of 299 dream reports, there were 364 waking dream elements.

• However, only 1-2% of these appeared as possible replay of waking events.

• Therefore, “we dream about what happened, but not what actually happened.” (Strickgold R, 2003.)

The Sleep Cycle

One sleep cycle comprises of four stages and lasts for about 90-120  minutes. However there are some books that list five stages in the sleep cycle. These books consider the first five to ten minutes when you are falling asleep as a stage in the sleep cycle. We think this is more of a transitional phase and not really part of the cycle. While the other stages of sleep repeat themselves throughout the night, this phase of sleep does not. For this reason, we have excluded as part of the cycle.

Dreams can occur in any of the four stages of sleep, but the most vivid and memorable dreams occur in the last stage of sleep (also commonly referred to as REM sleep). The sleep cycle repeats itself about an average of four to five times per night, but may repeat as many as seven times. Thus, you can see how

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a person has several different dreams in one night. However, most people only remember dreams that occur closer toward the morning when they are about  to wake up. But just because you can't remember those dreams do not mean that they never happened. Some people believe that they simply do not dream, when in reality, they just don't remember their dreams.

The Stages Of Sleep

The stages in the sleep cycle are organized by the changes in specific brain activity.

Stage 1: You are entering into light sleep. This stage is characterized by Non-rapid eye movements (NREM), muscle relaxation, lowered body temperature and slowed heart rate. The body is preparing to enter into deep sleep.

Stage 2: Also characterized by NREM, this stage is characterized by a further drop in body temperature and relaxation of the muscles. The body's immune system goes to work on repairing the day's damage. The endocrine glands secrete growth hormones, while blood is sent to the muscles to be reconditioned. In this stage, you are completely asleep.

Stage 3: Still in the NREM stage, this is an even deeper sleep. Your metabolic levels are extremely slow.

Stage 4: In this stage of sleep, your eyes move back and forth erratically as if watching something from underneath your eyelids. Referred to as REM sleep or delta sleep, this stage occurs at about 90-100 minutes after the onset of sleep. Your blood pressure rises, heart rate speeds up, respiration becomes

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erratic and brain activity increases. Your involuntary muscles also become paralyzed or immobilized. This stage is the most restorative part of sleep. Your mind is being revitalized and emotions is being fine tuned. The majority of your dreaming occurs in this stage. If you are awakened during this stage of sleep, you are more likely to remember your dreams.

These stages repeat themselves throughout the night as you sleep. As the cycle repeats, you will spend less time in stages 1 to 3 and more time dreaming in stage 4. In other words, it will be quicker and quicker for you to get to stage 4 each time the cycle repeats.

Evolutionary psychology theories of dreams

Evolutionary psychologists believe that dreams serve some adaptive function for survival. Deirdre Barrett describes dreaming as simply "thinking in different biochemical state" and believes people continue to work on all the same problems—personal and objective—in that state. Her research finds that anything—math, musical composition, business dilemmas—may get solved during dreaming, but the two areas especially likely to help are 1) anything where vivid visualization contributes to the solution, whether in artistic design or invention of 3-D technological devices and 2) problem where the solution lies in "thinking outside the box"—i.e. the person is stuck because conventional wisdom on how to approach the problem is wrong. In a related theory, which Mark Blechner terms "Oneiric Darwinism," dreams are seen as creating new ideas through the generation of random thought mutations. Some of these may be rejected by the mind as useless, while others may be seen as valuable and retained. Finnish psychologist Antti Revonsuo posits that dreams have evolved for "threat simulation" exclusively.

Psychosomatic theory

Dreams are a product of "dissociated imagination," which is dissociated from the conscious self and draws material from sensory memory for simulation, with sensory feedback resulting in hallucination. By simulating the sensory signals to drive the

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autonomous nerves, dreams can affect mind-body interaction. In the brain and spine, the autonomous "repair nerves," which can expand the blood vessels, connect with compression and pain nerves. Repair nerves are grouped into many chains called meridians in Chinese medicine. When a repair nerve is prodded by compression or pain to send out its repair signal, a chain reaction spreads out to set other repair nerves in the same meridian into action. While dreaming, the body also employs the meridians to repair the body and help it grow and develop by simulating very intensive movement-compression signals to expand the blood vessels when the level of growth enzymes increase.

Other hypotheses on dreaming

There are many other hypotheses about the function of dreams, including:

Dreams allow the repressed parts of the mind to be satisfied through fantasy while keeping the conscious mind from thoughts that would suddenly cause one to awaken from shock.

Freud suggested that bad dreams let the brain learn to gain control over emotions resulting from distressing experiences.

Jung suggested that dreams may compensate for one-sided attitudes held in waking consciousness.

Ferencziproposed that the dream, when told, may communicate something that is not being said outright.

Dreams regulate mood.

Hartmann says dreams may function like psychotherapy, by "making connections in a safe place" and allowing the dreamer to integrate thoughts that may be dissociated during waking life.

More recent research by psychologist Joe Griffin, following a twelve-year review of data from all major sleep laboratories, led to the formulation of the expectation fulfillment theory of dreaming, which suggests that dreaming metaphorically

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completes patterns of emotional expectation in the autonomic nervous system and lowers stress levels in mammals.

Dream content

From the 1940s to 1985, Calvin S. Hall collected more than 50,000 dream reports at Western Reserve University. In 1966 Hall and Van De Castle published The Content Analysis of Dreams in which they outlined a coding system to study 1,000 dream reports from college students It was found that people all over the world dream of mostly the same things. Hall's complete dream reports became publicly available in the mid-1990s by Hall's protégé William Domhoff, allowing further different analysis. When people are awakened while in REM sleep and asked what they have been dreaming, the reports are usually common

Often we incorporate our everyday activities in our dreams and they have common settings

The dreams either involve strenuous activities or passive events

A large percentage of the emotions experienced in dreams are negative or unpleasant – anger, sadness, anxiety

Some dreams are negative enough to be considered nightmares (unpleasant dreams) which are frightening enough to awaken a person in the middle

Personal experiences from the last day or week are frequently incorporated into dreams.

Emotions

The most common emotion experienced in dreams is anxiety. Other emotions include pain, abandonment, fear, joy, happiness, etc. Negative emotions are much more common than positive ones.

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Recurring dreams

While the content of most dreams is dreamt only once, many people experience recurring dreams—that is, the same dream narrative is experienced over different occasions of sleep. Up to 70% of females and 65% of males report recurrent dreams.

Color vs. black and white

A small minority of people say that they dream only in black and white.

Dream interpretation

Main article: Dream interpretation

Dreams were historically used for healing (as in the asclepieions found in the ancient Greek temples of Asclepius) as well as for guidance or divine inspiration. Some Native American tribes used vision quests as a rite of passage, fasting and praying until an anticipated guiding dream was received, to be shared with the rest of the tribe upon their return.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung identified dreams as an interaction between the unconscious and the conscious. They also assert together that the unconscious is the dominant force of the dream, and in dreams it conveys its own mental activity to the perceptive faculty. While Freud felt that there was an active censorship against the unconscious even during sleep, Jung argued that the dream's bizarre quality is an efficient language, comparable to poetry and uniquely capable of revealing the underlying meaning.

Fritz Perls presented his theory of dreams as part of the holistic nature of Gestalt therapy. Dreams are seen as projections of parts of the self that have been ignored, rejected, or suppressed. Jung argued that one could consider

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every person in the dream to represent an aspect of the dreamer, which he called the subjective approach to dreams. Perls expanded this point of view to say that even inanimate objects in the dream may represent aspects of the dreamer. The dreamer may therefore be asked to imagine being an object in the dream and to describe it, in order to bring into awareness the characteristics of the object that correspond with the dreamer's personality. Sigmund Freud believed that no matter how simple or mundane, dreams may contain clues to thoughts the dreamer is afraid to acknowledge in their waking hours

Dreams for Problem Solving: some theorists argue that dreaming allows people a chance to review and address some of the problems they faced during the day

Dreams for Housekeeping: Francis Crick believed that dreams are the brain’s way of removing certain unneeded memories. The mental housekeeping may be necessary because it isn’t useful to remember every single detail of our lives

Relationship with medical conditions

There is evidence that certain medical conditions (normally only neurological conditions) can impact dreams. For instance, some people with synesthesia have never reported entirely black-and-white dreaming, and often have a difficult time imagining the idea of dreaming in only black and white.

Therapy for recurring nightmares (often associated with posttraumatic stress disorder) can include imagining alternative scenarios that could begin at each step of the dream.

Dreams and psychosis

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A number of thinkers have commented on the similarities between the phenomenology of dreams and that of psychosis. Features

common to the two states include thought disorder, flattened[or inappropriate affect (emotion), and hallucinations. Among philosophers, Immanuel Kant, for example, wrote that "the lunatic

is a wakeful dreamer."[52] Arthur Schopenhauer said: "A dream is a short-lasting psychosis, and a psychosis is a long-lasting

dream."[53] In the field of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud wrote:

"A dream then, is a psychosis,"[54] and Carl Jung: "Let the dreamer walk about and act like one awakened and we have the clinical picture of dementia praecox."

McCreeryhas sought to explain these similarities by reference to the fact, documented by Oswald, that sleep can supervene as a reaction to extreme stress and hyper-arousal. McCreery adduces evidence that psychotics are people with a tendency to hyper-arousal, and suggests that this renders them prone to what Oswald calls "microsleeps" during waking life. He points in particular to the paradoxical finding of Stevens and Darbyshirethat patients suffering from catatonia can be roused from their seeming stupor by the administration of sedatives rather than stimulants.

Griffin and Tyrrell go so far as to say that "schizophrenia is waking

reality processed through the dreaming brain."[61]

Other associated phenomena

Lucid dreaming

Main article: Lucid dreaming

Lucid dreaming is the conscious perception of one's state while dreaming. In this state a person usually has control over characters and the environment of the dream as well as the dreamer's own actions within the dream. The occurrence of lucid dreaming has been scientifically verified.

Oneironaut is a term sometimes used for those who lucidly dream.

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Dreams of absent-minded transgression

Dreams of absent-minded transgression (DAMT) are dreams wherein the dreamer absentmindedly performs an action that he or she has been trying to stop (one classic example is of a quitting smoker having dreams of lighting a cigarette). Subjects who have had DAMT have reported waking with intense feelings of guilt. One study found a positive association between having these dreams and successfully stopping the behavior.

Dreaming and the "real world"

Main article: Dream argument

During the night there may be many external stimuli bombarding the senses, but the brain often interprets the stimulus and makes it a part of a dream in order to ensure continued sleep. Dream incorporation is a phenomenon whereby an actual sensation, such as environmental sounds, are incorporated into dreams, such as hearing a phone ringing in a dream while it is ringing in reality or dreaming of urination while wetting the bed. The mind can, however, awaken an individual if they are in danger or if trained to respond to certain sounds, such as a baby crying. Except in the

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case of lucid dreaming, people dream without being aware that they are doing so. Some philosophers have concluded that what we think of as the "real world" could be or is an illusion (an idea known as the skeptical hypothesis about ontology). There is a famous painting by Salvador Dalí that depicts this concept, titled "Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening" (1944). The first recorded mention of the idea was by Zhuangzi, and is also discussed in Hinduism; Buddhism makes extensive use of the argument in its writings. It was formally introduced to Western philosophy by Descartes in the 17th century in his Meditations on First Philosophy. Stimulus, usually an auditory one, becomes a part of a dream, eventually then awakening the dreamer. The term "dream incorporation" is also used in research examining the degree to which preceding daytime events become elements of dreams. Recent studies suggest that events in the day immediately preceding, and those about a week before, have the most influence.

Recalling dreams

The recall of dreams is extremely unreliable, though it is a skill that can be trained. Dreams can usually be recalled if a person is awakened while dreaming. Women tend to have more frequent dream recall than men. Dreams that are difficult to recall may be characterized by relatively little affect, and factors such as salience, arousal, and interference play a role in dream recall. Often, a dream may be recalled upon viewing or hearing a random trigger or stimulus. A dream journal can be used to assist dream recall, for psychotherapy or entertainment purposes. For some people, vague images or sensations from the previous night's dreams are sometimes spontaneously experienced in falling asleep. However they are usually too slight and fleeting to allow dream recall. At least 95% of all dreams are not remembered.

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Certain brain chemicals necessary for converting short-term memories into long-term ones are suppressed during REM sleep. Unless a dream is particularly vivid and if one wakes during or immediately after it, the content of the dream will not be remembered.

Déjà vu

Main article: Déjà vu

One theory of déjà vu attributes the feeling of having previously seen or experienced something to having dreamt about a similar situation or place, and forgetting about it until one seems to be mysteriously reminded of the situation or the place while awake.

Apparent precognition

Main article: Precognition

According to surveys, it is common for people to feel that their dreams are predicting subsequent life events. Psychologists have explained these experiences in terms of memory biases, namely a selective memory for accurate predictions and distorted memory so that dreams are retrospectively fitted onto life experiences. The multi-faceted nature of dreams makes it easy to find connections between dream content and real events.

In one experiment, subjects were asked to write down their dreams in a diary. This prevented the selective memory effect, and the dreams no longer seemed accurate about the future. Another experiment gave subjects a fake diary of a student with apparently precognitive dreams. This diary described events from the person's life, as well as some predictive dreams and some non-predictive dreams. When subjects were asked to recall the dreams they had read, they remembered more of the successful predictions than unsuccessful ones.

Popular culture

Modern popular culture often conceives of dreams, like Freud, as

expressions of the dreamer's deepest fears and desires.[73] In films such as Spellbound (1945), The Manchurian Candidate

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(1962) and Inception (2010), the protagonists must extract vital clues from surreal dreams.

Most dreams in popular culture are, however, not symbolic, but straightforward and realistic depictions of their dreamer's fears and desires. Dream scenes may be indistinguishable from those set in the dreamer's real world, a narrative device that undermines the dreamer's and the audience's sense of

security[74] and allows horror movie protagonists, such as those of Carrie (1976), Friday the 13th (1980) or An American Werewolf in London (1981) to be suddenly attacked by dark forces while resting in seemingly safe places.

In speculative fiction, the line between dreams and reality may be blurred even more in the service of the story. Dreams may be psychically invaded or manipulated (the Nightmare on Elm Street films, 1984–1991; Inception, 2010) or even come literally true (as in The Lathe of Heaven, 1971). Such stories play to audiences' experiences with their own dreams, which feel as real to them.

WHY DO WE DREAM ?

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The expectation fulfilment theory

Dreaming is Nature’s solution to the problems emotions cause animals and humans. (An emotion is another word for an expectation.) Stress, for example, is caused by an accumulation of arousal patterns in the autonomic nervous system that are not being dearoused by taking the necessary actions that would do so.

The prime function of dreams is to metaphorically act out undischarged emotional arousals (expectations) that were not acted out during the previous day. By dreaming we complete the arousal/dearousal circuit so as to wake up with an unstressed autonomic nervous system and our instincts intact.

If we have happy positive expectations we have happy dreams, but, when this system is overstretched and the dreaming process cannot cope with the amount of negative expectations (as when people continually worry), sleep balance is disturbed, dreams are miserable, even nightmarish, and depression can set in. An extreme stress overload can interfere with the process to such an extent that psychotic symptoms arise (schizophrenia is waking reality perceived through the dreaming brain).

This is the first viable theory of why we evolved to dream. It offers a holistic synthesis of the interdependence of biology and psychology that explains the evolutionary origin of dreaming and what it actually does for us every night. Since its publication in 1993 it has not been contended.

How the theory arose

Prompted by the recognition that one of his own dreams was a metaphorical translation of something that happened the previous day, Joe Griffin set off on what was to become a twelve-year research programme. During this time he carefully reviewed all the available scientific evidence about dreaming together with the competing theories put up to explain it, as well as conducting much original research of his own (detailed in full in the best-selling book: Dreaming Reality: how dreaming can keep us sane, or can drive us mad).

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Strangely, at a point where he was about to give up on his quest to solve the mystery of why dreaming evolved, he made a startling breakthrough. All the pieces of the jigsaw suddenly fell into place and he realised that dreaming dearouses the autonomic nervous system every night from all the patterns of emotionally arousing expectations that are not acted out when we are awake. He called this theory the expectation fulfilment theory of dreams.

Before stumbling across the bigger picture he had shown that all dreams are expressed in the form of sensory metaphors and the reason for this is found in the biology of the rapid eye movement (REM) state, a special brain activation that all mammals go into.

Research in France by Michel Jouvet had already indicated that instinctive behaviours are programmed during the REM state in the foetus and the neonate but Griffin took this further. He realised that this programming is necessarily in the form of incomplete instinct templates for which the animal later identifies analogous sensory components in the real world.

These analogical templates give animals the ability to respond to the environment in a flexible way and generate the ability to learn, rather than just react. We can see this process beautifully when a baby seeks out and sucks on anything analogous to a nipple, like a finger or rubber teat.

Once an instinct-driven pattern is activated and becomes an expectation it can normally only be deactivated by the actual carrying out of the programmed behaviour by the central nervous system. Although instincts are 'hard-wired' in us, this process alone clearly does not give us the flexibility we need to survive because if we acted out every arousal there would be chaos.

Expectations

All emotions derive from expectations. When an expectation is 'set up' the autonomic arousal system raises an emotion to provide the necessary energy to get the expectation met. Only when the expectation is fulfilled is the autonomic nervous system dearoused. If this complete ‘arousal/dearousal’ process does not happen whilst we

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are awake, it is 'deactivated' metaphorically in a dream. This has to happen otherwise our instincts would be conditioned out of us.

This is one of those scientific observations that needs no special equipment to test, anyone can easily check it out for themselves. If our boss makes us feel angry and we express our anger at them, the anger is dissipated. But, if we suppress the anger, it is metaphorically expressed in a dream. The reason we often have to suppress our feelings is that, if we were to act them out, at our boss every time he made us angry for example, that would be disastrous: we would be fired.

So dreaming evolved because animals needed to the ability to inhibit arousals when necessary, leaving them to be deactivated later when they could do no harm.

Metaphors

The brain is constantly matching patterns, asking in effect, "what is this incoming sensory information like?"  It is continually comparing and contrasting the incoming data it for similarities with innate instincts or memories so it can know what to expect. It has to do this in order to decide how to act. This is known as 'metaphorical pattern matching' and is why the unfulfilled emotional expectations left over from the day are run out in the form of metaphors in dreams during REM sleep.  Without this happening the brain would not be freed up to deal with any new emotionally arousing events the following day.

There are good reasons why all dream content is metaphorical and not directly about the concerns of the day. Firstly, the brain cannot generate "real world" reality without feedback from the environment. So, since all our senses are switched off whilst we are dreaming, instead of the brain seeking to fulfil the patterns of arousal externally, it does so internally, drawing on memories that have emotional and metaphorical resonances with the unresolved arousal patterns in the autonomic nervous system.  This is why dreams often seem so odd; they draw on memories and images from your entire life, even though they are only about unacted out arousals from the previous day. So every person you see in a dream is standing in metaphorically for someone else in real life.

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Secondly, without using metaphorical translations the brain would either be forced to create false emotional memories or be left with massively significant gaps in memory.

In the first case if the brain acted out unexpressed waking expectations and committed that experience to memory it would have created false memories. It could, of course, be argued that we have the ability to distinguish dreams from waking reality. But that would be missing the point. The emotional conditioning of our reactions would have still taken place even if we were subsequently able to separate dreams from real memories.  Just as someone with a phobia of spiders, who knows intellectually that they are not a real threat to them, still has the emotional conditioning triggered off and scream whenever they see one.

On the other hand, if the brain chooses to forget the dream (which is what happens) it would create gaps in memory for what actually happened since the dream will involve both real and fantasy experiences. This would be equally disastrous because a memory system with significant memories missing would be next to useless as a basis for predicting the future, as is the case with people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.  By using analogy or metaphor whilst dreaming the brain can discharge the arousal, safely forget the metaphorical dream material and keep the original record of what really happened filed away in memory.

The expectation fulfilment theory of dreaming summarised

Dreaming is the deepest trance state we go into and there are three essential principles to understand:

Dreams are metaphorical translations of waking expectations.

But only expectations that cause emotional arousals that are not acted upon during the day become dreams during sleep.

Dreaming deactivates that emotional arousal by completing the expectation pattern metaphorically, freeing the brain to respond afresh to each new day.

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The veracity of the theory

The expectation fulfilment theory of dreaming was first published in the peer reviewed journal The Therapist (1993), forerunner of the Human Givens Journal, and, despite wide exposure, has not been successfully contended.

It unifies many previously unexplained phenomena (detailed in Dreaming Reality) and predictions deriving from it have been shown to be true. In addition, the theory now stands at the heart of a new school of psychology known as ‘human givens’..

The theory’s practical applications, particularly with regard to treating mental illness, give support to its veracity. (No other theory of dreaming has produced practical applications.) In addition it led to the first straightforward explanation for hypnotic phenomena and the symptoms of schizophrenia.

Since it was first published it has received much support from psychologists, brain researchers and interested members of the public from whom we welcome further ideas and comments on the subject. Please send them to us.

Practical applications of the theory

The validity of the expectation fulfilment theory is being born out every day by the practical use it has in psychotherapy. No other dream theory has produced practical applications but in this case a new school of psychotherapy — the human givens approach — has grown up around it.

The organising idea that drives this approach is that we are all born with essential physical and emotional needs and the resources to help us fulfil them. It has been shown that when our emotional needs are met well and our resources are intact and being used properly, we do not suffer mental illness.

These needs and resources are innate in us, having evolved over millions of years. They are our common biological inheritance, whatever our cultural background — and it is because of this that they are called ‘human givens’.

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Thanks to Joe Griffin's insights, we now know, of course, that one of the important resources we have is that we dream each night to dearouse the autonomic nervous system. In other words, dreaming keeps us sane by reducing our stress levels.

Such insights have been tremendously beneficial in therapeutic practice. For example, because human givens (HG) therapists understand that depressed people wake up tired and unmotivated every day as a result of excessive dream sleep and reduced slow-wave sleep, they are able to speed up psychological treatment of depression.

The theory and its ramifications have also led to an important insight into the nature of psychotic symptoms with implications for treatment.

And it has also opened up a new line of enquiry that explains hypnosis and the connection between trance and the REM state, learning and daydreaming.

To find out more about how people are using these ideas see:Human Givens: A new approach to emotional health and clear thinking and An Idea in Practice: Using the human givens approach.

Dream interpretation

The strangeness of dreaming, despite it being a regular biological function, encourages myths and fantastic explanation. Our bizarre night-time visitations seem so intensely real and full of meaning when we are having them but remain mostly unfathomable to our conscious mind and are usually quickly forgotten.

Through all historical periods humanity has puzzled over the meaning of remembered dreams and dream interpretation industries have flourished with promises that they can satisfy our natural longing to understand the mysterious 'messages' that dreams seem to carry. The 21st century is no exception, bookshop shelves groan under the weight of dream ‘dictionaries’ and dream interpretation material. And type ‘dream interpretation’ into Google and more than two million results come up.

Much of the fanciful dream interpretation industry, including the ever-

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popular content of dream dictionaries, is harmless fun, not unlike astrology, but not always. The influence of the idiosyncratic confabulations and fantasies of Freud and Jung for example permeate our culture and have, in some cases produced virulent results, as when therapists interpret dreams as revealing repressed memories of abuse, without any corroborating evidence, and highly suggestible patients, misguided by ignorant ‘therapists’, begin to think that perhaps they were abused.  This is called false memory syndrome.

A real guide to interpreting your own dreams

The ultimate test of the expectation fulfilment theory of dreaming is if you are able to use it in your life and, like any truly curious person, we would expect you to test the theory for themselves. What follows are a few pointers as to how to do this.

The first requirement of course is to remember a dream. Dreaming is predominant

Why we evolved to forget our dreams

None of the other dream theories we have discussed so far on this site can satisfactorily explain why we forget almost all of our dreams. As we shall see, the expectation fulfilment theory of dreaming does provide a satisfying explanation for this widely observed phenomenon.

Evolution for expectation

Brains evolved to help animals make more accurate predictions about what behaviours would help them survive. But the type of expectations we have as humans, or that other animals have, for that matter, are infinitely more complex than those of a bee. When mammals evolved, they developed warm-bloodedness, which meant that they were no longer dependent on the sun's heat for mobility. But maintaining a constant warm body temperature required a greatly increased energy intake

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(estimated at up to a 500 per cent increase in calories needed). So, to meet this need, mammals had to become much better at locating food supplies while also avoiding becoming food themselves for other warm-blooded predatory mammals — all of which required a much more sophisticated prediction system, to reduce the risks.

The cortex provided the answer. The evolution of the cortex, with its much increased processing capacity, enabled mammals not just to act purely on instinct — see a food source and go for it — but to weigh up the risks and benefits of an action — do I have time to make the kill and hide it or will I get eaten by another animal while I'm doing it? In more technical terms, it enabled the ancient dopamine prediction circuits of the limbic system to be subjected to a higher-order risk analysis, based on the additional computing power provided by the cortex.

However, that left another problem to be solved. The limbic system communicates with the cortex via behavioural impulses (emotions). If these are not acted upon (for instance, because the strategy is deemed too risky or because the cortex has set other priorities — such as deciding, in certain circumstances, that it is more important to protect young than to chase a possible food source) they don't go away. In the case of humans, this state of unfulfilled expectation can also occur when we think about something in the future or the past that causes emotional arousal in the present but which can't, by its very nature, be acted upon. These uncompleted emotional impulses — expectations — stay switched on, taking up processing capacity in the expectation system.

Reducing the processing capacity

So far, two strategies have evolved for dealing with this. The first, in the spiny anteater, is the development of a much bigger cortex to store all these expectations whilst retaining sufficient spare computing power for making new, ongoing risk assessments. This may also be the strategy evolved by dolphins, which have an exceptionally large cortex. The muscle paralysis that accompanies

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REM sleep places dolphins at risk of drowning, so they can have hardly any REM sleep.

The second and much more efficient method is dreaming. In dreaming, we act out the unrealised expectations from waking by pattern matching them to analogous sensory patterns — images and events stored in memory — as it is through pattern matching that the REM system works. I am often asked why the pattern match has to be analogical or metaphorical. Apart from the evidence I have published explaining this point, [see FAQ question 8] there is a sound physiological reason for why it must be so. An expectation is an imagined scenario, using images from memory.

In dreaming, we are asking memory to provide a scenario that matches a scenario that is already a part of memory — the event that aroused the expectation. So the matching scenario has to be the best fit that memory can provide. Think of it this way — if I hold up my left hand and ask my brain for a best-fit pattern match, it can't use my left hand because that is the one I want a match for — so it must use my right hand, as the best-fit pattern match for my left. (This does not happen in waking because we pattern match our expectations to whatever stimulates t hem in the environment, not to a memory. If we want an ice cream, the expectation is fulfilled when we are actually eating it.)

The dream, then, by fulfilling the expectation, completes the circuit and switches off the arousal. But that is not the end of the matter, for we have now converted an unrealised expectation into a factual memory of completing it. Ordinarily, the hippocampus, the conscious memory store, holds our memories of recent events and quickly deconstructs those memories and sends them to various parts of the cortex — the parts concerned with vision, hearing, touch, etc — for storage. It does that to facilitate efficient pattern matching. But, if the dream is allowed to be stored as a real memory, it will corrupt the memory store and greatly diminish our ability reliably to predict the outcome of similar experiences in the future. This is avoided by preventing the hippocampus from sending the dream information to the cortex for long-term storage.[2] As explained earlier, PET scans and other types of

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research have shown that, in dreaming, the prefrontal cortex is closed down.

So it is no accident that the prefrontal cortex is switched off during dreaming. It is no accident that the hippocampus doesn't de-construct information and send it all around the brain because what the hippocampus is doing in dreaming is getting rid of expectations that didn't pan out while we were awake. It is getting them out of the way, making them inaccessible, in effect, so as to allow us to build up a proper, intelligence prediction and expectation system, an accurate storage of knowledge. (This also explains the evidence for memory consolidation — if you take away all the false expectations, the memories that are consolidated are more accurate.)

The expectation fulfilment theory can therefore explain why dreams are about emotionally arousing events, particularly about emotionally arousing expectations. It explains why dreams are consistent over time. It explains the developmental aspects of dreaming. It can explain the other tests put down by Domhoff. But, more than that, it explains the cutting-edge evidence that the brain is ever malleable, by explaining how it can be so malleable.

The purpose of the brain is to predict, so that we can get our needs met. We need to have a system that can continually adapt itself, and the expectation fulfilment theory shows how the brain does that by cancelling out the expectations that didn't work. It enables us to have a bang-up-to-date register of what really does get needs met in our lives, so that we can more accurately predict what we need to do in the future. (But we can only work with the experiences we have had. If, as a child, a young woman experienced both abuse and love from her father, she may continually seek a relationship with abusive men, until eventually she can learn that love exists separately from abuse.)

But what about remembered dreams?

You might then wonder if recalling our dreams, as sometimes happens, is undoing the dreamwork. The answer is no, because

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the arousal is switched off once the expectation is acted out. When we are awake, the cortex is switched on, enabling us to compare dream content to what is really happening around us and, thus, to distinguish between dream and reality.

Occasionally the cortex is alerted by some incongruity in the dream experience, such as flying, and we become aware that we are dreaming. (this is known as lucid dreaming) But this risks undoing the dream work of deactivating the experiences — because we now know we are experiencing a fantasy. (In more primitive mammals, if an altering of the cortex were to happen, it is less likely their brains could make the distinction between dream and reality; the fantasy would be treated as real and would therefore corrupt the memory stores.)

Depression and dreaming

Imagine waking up feeling exhausted and miserable, worse than when you went to bed, too depressed to want to do anything? That is what depression feels like.

It begins after a period of excessive worrying that is connected in some way with the person’s failure to get one or more of their essential emotional needs met. As well as having a low mood and taking no pleasure in activities that used to be enjoyable, the depressed person typically experiences the following symptoms: difficulty getting off to sleep because worrying thoughts are going round and round in your mind; waking up exhausted, often early in the morning; a change in eating patterns; constant feelings of tiredness and a loss of motivation. The resulting feelings of hopelessness, exhaustion and apathy give the depressed person even more to worry about and might even lead to suicidal thoughts, which exacerbate the situation.

The expectation fulfilment theory of dreaming explains why these symptoms occur. As a consequence, once a psychotherapist understands this theory, the psychological interventions they undertake with depressed patients are more effective.

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Worrying causes depression

For many years one fact puzzled scientists; the finding that depressed people have proportionally more REM sleep than non-depressed people, and that their REM sleep was more intense. These symptoms are all characteristic of the effects of too much pressure put on the REM sleep process as it tries to de-arouse the endless stream of worries that were not acted upon, or resolved in some way, during the day before.

Incessant worrying about something that can’t be immediately solved generates unresolved emotional arousal that has to be deactivated in order to complete the biological arousal/dearousal circuit in our brains. If action is not taken during the day to dearouse the autonomic nervous system, it is done metaphorically by dreaming.

The consequential imbalance between REM sleep and recuperative slow wave sleep causes the symptoms. (Waking up early, for example, is a sort of survival mechanism for your brain, a response to energy depletion in the glial cells which are not getting enough sugar to compensate for the energy being used up by excessive dreaming.)

When you wake up feeling like this — not refreshed and with no motivation — it’s because your brain is exhausted from too much REM sleep and not enough slow wave sleep to reenergize it. The sleep pattern is unbalanced, which is why we can say that depression is a REM sleep disorder.

Depression is physically exhausting due to the decreased amount of restorative slow-wave sleep, and mentally exhausting due to the increased firing of the orientation response (which is linked to our motivation and attention capacities) during dreaming.

Stop the worrying and the depression goes away.

I have had dreams and I have had nightmares, but I have conquered my nightmares because of my dreams.

•

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Incorporation of Waking Events Into Dreams• Another experiment involved subjects palying a game of

Tetris 2-3 hrs for 2 or 3 days.

• Subjects: 12 subjects with no prior Tetris experience – “novices”; 10 with extensive Tetris experience – “experts”; and 5 subjects with dense amnesia with extensive medial temporal lobe damage from either anoxia or encephalitis – “amnesiacs.”

• On the evening of each day of game play subjects were awakened repeatedly during the first hour of night, and asked to recall thoughts, feelings, or images from sleep.

• Nine of the novices, and five of the experts (a total of 64%) reported visual images of the game at sleep onset.

• 60% of amnesiacs also reported images from the game, however they could not recall playing the game due to amnesia.

• The reports were similar between the groups, such as seeing little squares going down the screen, and occasionally rotating them; but none reported seeing the desk or the room.

• Thus the imagery had no characteristics of episodic memories, and it was also limited the aspects of the experience to which subjects paid most attention.

Memory and Dreams• These examples illustrate that memory processing indeed

occurs during sleep.

• They also show that different types of memories are processed differently by the brain.

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• Different stages of sleep serve different functions in memory processing.

Dream Content From an Evolutionary Standpoint• There is no unified explanation, what role do dreams play,

and due to what evolutionary pressures they have evolved.

• It seems maladaptive to lose responsiveness to the surroundings and experience hallucinations instead of real events.

• Sleep however, is an easily reversible state, and different stimuli can be sensed strongly enough to trigger an awakening.

Sleep In a Novel Environment

• One evolutionary adaptation is that animals sleep in safe sites where they can be less vulnerable to attack by predators.

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• Therefore, many mammals spend a lot of energy and time seeking and protecting sleep sites (Hobson, 1989.)

• A novel environment can present unknown dangers, and individuals will often not have a such a good night sleep as in a familiar environment.

• Sleeplessness and fitful sleep that are often experienced in a novel environment function to provide an opportunity to learn to identify external stimuli, which on subsequent nights may be ignored (Symons, 1993.)

• Sleep in a novel environment will contain a higher number of nocturnal awakenings and a shorter latency of REM sleep (Gundel, et al, 1993.)

• Have u ever dream the following

• Climbing a ladder

• Climbing a staircase

• Crossing a bridge

• Driving an automobile

• Riding an elevator

• Entering a room

• Riding a horse

• Riding a roller coaster

• Walking into a tunnel

•

Common dreams•

Chase dreams

"I'm Being Chased!"

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Chase dreams are one of several common dream themes, stemming from feelings of anxiety in your waking life. Flee and flight is an instinctive response to a physical threat in the environment. In these dreams, the scenario features you being pursued by an attacker, an animal, a monster or an unknown figure, who wants to hurt or possibly kill you. Consequently, you run, you hide or you try to outwit your pursuer. Your actions in the dream parallel how you would respond to pressure and cope with fears, stress or various situations in your waking life. Instead of confronting the situation, your dream indicates that you have a tendency to run away and avoid the issue. Ask yourself who is chasing you, so that you can gain an understanding and insight of the source of your fears and anxieties.

The pursuer or attacker who is chasing you in your dream may also represent an aspect of yourself. Your own feelings of anger, jealousy, fear, and possibly love, can manifest itself as the threatening figure. Or the shadowy figure can also symbolize rejected characteristics of your self. You may be projecting these feelings onto the unknown chaser. Next time you a dream of being chased, turn around and confront your pursuer. Ask them why they are chasing you. Perhaps you are running away from something. What are you trying to run from?

If you are the one doing the chasing, then the dream may highlight your drive and ambition to go after something you want. Or perhaps the dream suggests that you are falling behind and having to catch up with everyone else.

Consider the distance or gap between you and your pursuer. This indicates your closeness to the issue. If the pursuer is gaining on

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you, then it suggests that the problem is not going to go away. The problem will surround you until you confront and address it. However, if you are able to widen the gap between your pursuer, then you are able to successful distance yourself from the problem. In essence, the problem is fading away.

A more direct analysis of chase dreams is the fear of being attacked. Such dreams are more common among women than men, who may feel physically vulnerable in the urban environment. These dreams are often brought about by the media, who magnifies fears of violence and sexual assault.

Test or exam derams

"I Failed The Test"

To dream that you are taking an exam, indicates that you are being put to the test or being scrutinized in some way.?Such dreams highlight your feelings of being anxious and agitated. You may find that you cannot answer any of the questions on the test or that the test is in some foreign language. Is time running out and you find that you can not complete the exam in the allowed time? Or are you late to the exam? Does your pencil keep breaking during the exam? Such factors contribute to you failing this test. These dreams usually have to do with your self-esteem and confidence or your lack of. You are worried that you are not making the grade and measuring up to other people's expectations of you. You may also experience the fear of not being accepted, not being prepared, or not being good enough. You feel nervous, insecure and tend to believe the worst about

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yourself.

These dreams also suggest that you may feel unprepared for a challenge. Rarely, are these dreams about the content of the test, but rather the process and how you are feeling during the exam taking process. Generally, you feel distressed and frustrated. These feelings may parallel how you are feeling in a particular challenge or situation in your waking like.

Dreams of this nature are also an indication that you are being judged and this dream is a signal for you to examine an aspect of yourself that you may have been neglecting and need to pay attention to. You may harbor some guilt because of your neglect in preparation for a school exam, meeting, business project, or some challenge. Most of the time, though, people who have such dreams are unlikely to fail a test in real life. This dream goes back to their fear and own anxiety that they may not meet other's standards of them. They are afraid to let others down.?

Falling dreams

"I'm Falling"

Falling dreams are another theme that is quite common in the world of dreams. Contrary to a popular myth, you will not actually die if you do not wake up before your hit the ground during a fall.

As with most common dream themes, falling is an indication of insecurities, instabilities, and anxieties. You are feeling

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overwhelmed and out of control in some situation in your waking life. This may reflect the way you feel in your relationship or in your work environment. You have lost your foothold and can not hang on or keep up with the hustle and bustle of daily life.?When you fall, there is nothing that you can hold on to. You more or less are forced toward this downward motion without any control. This lost of control may parallel a waking situation in your life.

Falling dreams also often reflect a sense of failure or inferiority in some circumstance or situation. It may be the fear of failing in your job/school, loss of status, or failure in love.?You feel shameful and lack a sense of pride. You are unable to keep up with the status quo or that you don't measure up.

According to Freudian theory, dreams of falling indicate that you are contemplating giving into a sexual urge or impulse. You maybe lacking indiscretion.

Falling dreams typically occur during the first stage of sleep. Dreams in this stage are often accompanied by muscle spasms of the arms, legs, and the whole body. These sudden contractions, also known as myclonic jerks. Sometimes when we have these falling dreams, we feel our whole body jerk or twitch and we awaken from this jerk. It is thought that this jerking action is part of an arousal mechanism that allows the sleeper to awaken and become quickly alert and responsive to possible threats in the environment.

According to biblical interpretations, dreams about falling have a negative overtone and suggest that man is acting and walking according to his own way of thinking and not those of the Lord.

Flying dreams

"I'm Flying"

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Flying dreams fall under a category of dreams known as lucid dreaming. Lucid dreams occur when you become aware that you are dreaming. Many dreamers describe the ability to fly in their dreams as an exhilarating, joyful, and liberating experience.

If you are flying with ease and enjoying the scene and landscape below, then it suggests that you are on top of a situation. You have risen above something. It may also mean that you have gained a different perspective on things. Flying dreams and the ability to control your flight is representative of your own personal sense of power.

Having difficulties staying in flight indicates a lack of power in controlling your own circumstances. You may be struggling to stay aloft and stay on course. Things like power lines, trees, or mountains may further obstruct your flight. These barriers represent a particular obstacle or person who is standing in your way in your waking life. You need to identify who or what is hindering you from moving forward. It may also be an indication of a lack of confidence. You need to believe in yourself and not be afraid.

If you are feeling fear when you are flying or that you feel that you are flying too high, then it suggests that you are afraid of challenges and of success.

In reality, we cannot really fly, of course. Thus, such dreams may represent that which is beyond your physical limitations. In your mind, you can be anybody and do anything. Another way of interpreting flying dreams is that these dreams symbolize your strong mind and will. You feel undefeatable and nobody can tell you what you cannot do and accomplish. Undoubtedly these dreams leave you a great sense of freedom.

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Teeth dreams

"My Teeth Are Falling"

teethintro

Dreams of falling teeth are the most common dreams that Dream Moods receives. The typical dream scenarios include having your teeth crumble in your hands, fall out one by one with just a light tap, grow crooked or rot. Such dreams are not only horrifying and shocking, but they often leave you with a lasting image of the dream. So what does it mean?

One theory is that dreams about your teeth reflect your anxieties about your appearance and how others perceive you. Sadly, we live in a world where appearance and attractiveness matter and your teeth help to convey that image. Teeth play an important role in the game of flirtation, whether it be flashing those pearly white, kissing or necking. Thus, such dreams may stem from a fear of rejection, sexual impotence or the consequences of getting old. Additionally, a dream research found that women in menopause have frequent dreams about teeth. This further points to teeth dreams as being related to getting older and/or feeling unattractive and less feminine. Teeth are an important feature to your attractiveness and how you are presented to others. Caring about how you look is natural and healthy.

Another rationalization for these falling teeth dreams may be rooted in your fear of being embarrassed or making a fool of

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yourself in some situation. These dreams are an over-exaggeration of your worries and anxieties. Perhaps the dream may be a result of you being unprepared for the task at hand.

Teeth are used to bite, tear, chew and gnaw. In this regard, teeth represent power. And the loss of teeth in your dream may be from a sense of powerlessness. Are you lacking power in some current situation? Perhaps you are having difficulties expressing yourself or getting your point across. You feel frustrated when your voice is not being heard. You may be experiencing feelings of inferiority and a lack of self-confidence in some situation or relationship in your life. This dream may be an indication that you need to be more assertive and believe in the value of your own opinion.

Traditionally, it was thought that dreaming that you did not have teeth, represent malnutrition which may be applicable to some dreamers.

Other Perspectives

A scriptural interpretation for bad or falling teeth indicate that you are putting your faith, trust, and beliefs in what man thinks rather than in the word of God. The bible says that God speaks once, yea twice in a dream or a vision in order to hide pride from us, to keep us back from the pit, to open our ears (spiritually) and to instruct and correct us.

In the Greek culture, when you dream about loose, rotten, or missing teeth, it indicates that a family member or close friend is very sick or even near death.

According to the Chinese, there is a saying that your teeth will fall out if you are telling lies.

It has also been said that if you dream of your teeth falling out, then it symbolizes money. This is based on the old tooth fairy story. If you lose a tooth and leave it under the pillow, a tooth fairy would bring you money.

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COMMON DREAM QUESTION

Why do fewer people dream in black and white?

Are the colors of your dreams associated with what you have been exposed to throughout the day?

Are the colors of the dreams caused by different emotions or stress.

How do blind people relate color to feelings, and how do they dream?

1. A study shows that 80% of people dream in color instead of black & white. So why would less people dream in black & white.

1. If you fall asleep while watching color or black or white do you begin to dream in that color?

1. When you fall asleep after getting in a big fight would your dreams have colors associated to anger such as red.

1. Do blind people primarily dream in sound? And if they dream in video how do the relate that feeling to a certain color.

LANGUAGES IN DREAM

How long does it take to dream in a new language?

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Does language exposure change your dreams?

What language do deaf people dream in?

Does location of the dream affect the language?

How long does it take to dream in a new language?

Does language exposure change your dreams?

What language do deaf people dream in?

Does location of the dream affect the language?

Nightmare

Nightmares can have physical causes such as sleeping in an uncomfortable or awkward position, having a fever, or psychological causes such as stress and anxiety. Eating before bed, which triggers an increase in the body's metabolism and brain activity, is a potential stimulus for nightmares.[2]

Occasional nightmares are commonplace, but recurrent nightmares can interfere with sleeping patterns and cause insomnia that may require medical help. Recurring post-traumatic stress disorder nightmares in which real traumas are re-experienced respond best to a technique called imagery rehearsal. First described in the 1996 book Trauma and Dreams

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by Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett, imagery rehearsal therapy involves the dreamer coming up with an alternate, mastery outcome to the nightmare, mentally rehearsing that outcome awake, and then reminding themselves at bedtime that they wish this alternate outcome should the nightmare recur. Research has found that this technique not only reduces the occurrence of nightmares and insomnia, but also improves other daytime PTSD symptoms

Medical investigationStudies of dreams have found that about three quarters of dream content or emotions are negative.

One definition of "nightmare" is a dream which causes one to wake up in the middle of the sleep cycle and experience a negative emotion, such as fear. This type of event occurs on average once per month. They are not common in children under 5, but they are more common in young children (25% experiencing a nightmare at least once per week), most common in adolescents, and less common in adults (dropping in frequency about one third from age 25 to 55)

Fearfulness in waking life is correlated with the incidence of nightmares.

The Nightmare, (1781) (Detroit Institute of Art). The canvas portraying the Incubus sitting on the woman experiencing the nightmare.

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Screaming is also a common feature of nightmares, more often than crying or moaning. The whole situation of screaming or crying can happen from 5 to 20 minutes.

Recurring dreamsMost dreams contain messages that serve to teach you something about yourself. However, soon after you wake up to go about your daily routine, you tend to quickly forget what you dream about. The message in recurring dreams may be so important and/or powerful that it refuses to go away. The frequent repetition of such dreams forces you to pay attention and confront the dream. It is desperately trying to tell you something.  Such dreams are often nightmarish or frightening in their content, which also helps you to take notice and pay attention to them.

Recurring dreams are quite common and are often triggered by a certain life situation, transitional phase in life or a problem that keeps coming back again and again. These dreams may recur daily, once a week, or once a month. Whatever the frequency, there is little variation in the dream content itself. Such dreams may be highlighting a personal weakness, fear, or your inability to cope with something in your life - past or present. 

The repetitive patterns in your dream reveal some of the most valuable information about yourself. It may point to a conflict, situation or matter in your waking life that remains unresolved or unsettled. Some urgent underlying message in your unconscious is demanding to be understood.  Recurring dreams

Most dreams contain messages that serve to teach you something about yourself. However, soon after you wake up to go about your daily routine, you tend to quickly forget what you dream about. The message in recurring dreams may be so important and/or powerful that it refuses to go away. The frequent repetition of such dreams forces you to pay attention and confront the dream. It is desperately trying to tell you something.  Such dreams are often nightmarish or frightening

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in their content, which also helps you to take notice and pay attention to them.

Recurring dreams are quite common and are often triggered by a certain life situation, transitional phase in life or a problem that keeps coming back again and again. These dreams may recur daily, once a week, or once a month. Whatever the frequency, there is little variation in the dream content itself. Such dreams may be highlighting a personal weakness, fear, or your inability to cope with something in your life - past or present. 

The repetitive patterns in your dream reveal some of the most valuable information about yourself. It may point to a conflict, situation or matter in your waking life that remains unresolved or unsettled. Some urgent underlying message in your unconscious is demanding to be understood.  

Overcoming Recurring DreamsFollowing are some tips to help you in overcoming your recurring dreams.  

1. To start to understand your recurring dream, you must be willing to accept some sort of change or undergo a transformation.

2. You need to look within yourself and confront whatever you may find no matter how difficult it may be. 

3. Look at the dream from an objective point of view. Try to get pass the emotional and reactive elements of the dream and get down to the symbolic images. Often times, dreams are masked by elements that are disturbing, thus preventing you to delve any deeper. This is a  defense mechanism that your unconscious is putting up.

4. Each and every time you have a recurring dream, write it down in great detail. Look for any subtle variations. These

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variations are the most significant as it indicates that you are one step closer to understanding why the dream recurs. 

5. Pay attention to what is going on in your waking life when you have these recurring dreams. You may start to notice a pattern.

6. Be patient. Do not get discourage if these dreams still recur even after you thought you have come to understand them.

7. Learn to accept yourself truly and fully. 

Once you discover what your recurring dream is trying to tell you, these dreams will change or altogether disappear.

Colour ,symbols and language- of dreamSymbols are the language of dreams. A symbol can invoke a feeling or an idea and often has a much more profound and deeper meaning that any one word can convey. At the same time, these symbols can leave you confused and wondering what that dream was all about.

Acquiring the ability to interpret your dreams is a powerful tool.  In analyzing your dreams, you can learn about your deep secrets and hidden  feelings. Remember that no one is a better expert at interpreting your dreams than yourself.  

To guide you with your dreams interpretations, we have interpreted over 5200 keywords and symbols and over 20000 different meanings in our ever expanding dream dictionary. These meanings are in no way, the final say in what YOUR dream  means, but it will hopefully inspire you to explore and offer a suggestive starting point for understanding your own dreams. 

Every detail, even the most minute element in your dream is important and must be considered when analyzing your dreams. Each symbol represents a feeling, a mood, a memory or something from your unconscious. Look closely at the characters, animals, objects, places, emotions, and even color and numbers that are depicted in your dreams. Even the most

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trivial symbol can be significant. This dictionary, along with your own personal experiences, memories and circumstances, will serve to guide you through a meaningful and personalized interpretation. With practice, you can gain an understanding of the cryptic messages your dreams are trying to tell you. 

A

To see the letter "A" in your dream, represents the beginning of a new stage. You are moving on to something new and grand. Alternatively, the letter "A" invokes feelings of superiority and grandeur. It may indicate the name or initial of a person.

B

To see the letter B in your dream, is a pun on "to be". Perhaps the dream is telling you to "let it be".

C

To see the letter "C" in your dream, symbolizes being average. It may also be a pun on "seeing". The dream is drawing your attention to something that you need to see or take notice. Pay attention! Alternatively, it may indicate the name or initial of a person.

D

To see the letter "D" in your dream, signifies mediocrity. Alternatively, the letter D refers to receptiveness and joy. As a Roman Numeral, it could represent the number 500.

E

To see the letter "E" in your dream, implies ease and relaxation. The drug ecstasy is often referred to as "E".

F

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To see the letter "F" in your dream, symbolizes failure. It may also denote an expletive as in "F you".

G

To see the letter "G" in your dream, may be a pun on money.

H

To see the letter "H" in your dream, symbolizes cooperation, balance and teamwork.

I

To see the letter "I" in your dream, is on pun on me, myself and I. You need to focus on you. Or the dream may be an indication that you are being too selfish. Alternatively, the letter represents action and responsibility.

J

To see the letter "J" in your dream, means that there is something that you need to hold on to and grasp. Alternatively, the dream may be a pun on someone named "Jay" or whose initial starts with J.

K

To see the letter "K" in your dream, implies that something is "okay". Alternatively, the dream may be a pun on someone named "Kay" or whose initial starts with K.

L

To see the letter "L" in your dream, is symbolic of loser. Alternatively, the dream may also signify your fear of the "l-word". You cannot even bring your dreaming mind to express love.

M

To see the letter "M" in your dream, suggests that there is something that you are keeping silent about. Perhaps you have been sworn to secrecy. Alternatively, the dream may imply

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"Mmmmm". Your unconscious mind is hungering for knowledge or information. As a Roman Numeral, it could represent the number 1000.

N

To see the letter "N" in your dream, implies the end of some habit, journey, relationship or condition.

O

To see the letter "O" in your dream, signifies an exclamation of surprise as in "oh!". Alternatively, the letter O, implies that you need to open wide. Perhaps there is something that you need to open up about and vocalize. It may refer to a sexual innuendo as in "the big O" or orgasm. This letter may also share the same significance as the number zero or a circle. 

P

To see the letter "P" in your dream, is a pun on "pee" or urine. You need to better express your emotions.

Q

To see the letter Q in your dream, is a pun on "cue". You are waiting for a sign to make the next move.

R

To see the letter "R" in your dream, suggests that you are in need of some "R & R" or some rest and relaxation.

S

To see the letter "S" in your dream, suggests that there is something that needs your attention. 

T 

To see the letter T in your dream, represents your stubbornness and your refusal to change your attitudes and

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opinions. Alternatively, the dream is analogous to a fork in the road and the two choices or directions.

U

To see the letter "U" in your dream, is a pun on "you" and how you act and behave in your waking life. Consider what you are doing and how you are feeling in the dream for additional significance.

V

To see the letter V in your dream, symbolizes victory, success or peace. As a Roman Numeral, it could represent the number 5.

W

To see the letter "W" in your dream, is a reiteration of "you". You need to focus on you and only you.

X 

To see an X in your dream, signify something that is forbidden. You are being prevented to do something. 

To dream of a treasure map marked a big X , indicates that your goals are in sight and you will soon be greatly rewarded.

Y

To see the letter Y in your dream, indicates some decision that you need to make. It may represent a fork in the road or a path that you need to choose. The letter Y may also be a pun on "why". Perhaps there is something that you need to start questioning. 

Z

To see the letter "Z" in your dream, suggests that you need to get more "Zzzz's" or rest.

DOES COLOR IN DREAM MEAN ANYTHING

It is very controversial.

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Some dream in only black and white .

Is it cultural?

Is it media based?

Dream facts

1. One-third of your lives is spent sleeping.

2. In an average  lifetime, you would have spent a total of about six years of it dreaming. That is more than 2,100 days spent in a different realm!

3. Dreams have been here as long as mankind.  Back in the Roman Era, striking and significant dreams were submitted to the Senate for analysis and interpretation.

4. Everybody dreams. EVERYBODY! Simply because you do not remember your dream does not mean that you do not dream. In fact, you have several dreams during a normal night of sleep.

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5. Dreams are indispensable.  A lack of dream activity can mean protein deficiency or a personality disorder.

6. On average, you can dream anywhere from one or two hours every night. Moreover, you can have four to seven dreams in one night.

7. Blind people do dream.  Whether visual images appear in their dream depends on  whether they were blind at birth or became blind later in life. But vision is not the only sense that constitutes a dream. Sounds, tactility, and smell become hypersensitive for the blind and their dreams are based on these senses. 

8. Five minutes after the end of the dream, half the content is forgotten. After ten minutes, 90% is lost.

9. The word dream stems from the Middle English word, dreme which means "joy" and "music".

10. Men tend to dream more about other men, while women dream equally about men and women.

11. Studies have shown that your brain waves are more active when you are dreaming than when we are awake.

12. Dreamers who are awakened right after REM sleep, are able to recall their dreams more vividly than those who slept through the night until morning.

13. Physiologically speaking, researchers found that during dreaming REM sleep, males experience erections and females experience increased vaginal blood flow - no matter what the content of the dream. In fact, "wet dreams" may not necessarily coincide with overtly sexual dream content. 

14. People who are giving up smoking have longer and more intense dreams.

15. Toddlers do not dream about themselves. They do not appear in their own dreams until the age of 3 or 4.

16. If you are snoring, then you cannot be dreaming.

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17. Nightmares are common in children, typically beginning at around age 3 and occurring up to age 7-8.

18. In a poll, 67% of Americans  have experienced Déjà Vu in their dreams, occurring more often in females than males. 

19. Around 3% of adults suffer from sleep apnea. This treatable condition leads to unexplained tiredness and inefficiency.

20. Research has shown that the house is the most common setting for dreams. 

21. It is very normal for males to experience an erection during the REM stage of sleep, even when they are not dreaming anything of a sexual nature.

 22. The original meaning of the word "nightmare"  was a female spirit who besets people at night while they sleep.

Welcome to Dream Moods!

You are entering the mysterious and fascinating world of dreams, where the rules of reality do not apply. We hope that Dream Moods will help you make sense of your dreams and achieve a better understanding of them. We are dedicated to help you find the key to unlocking and interpreting the meanings to your dreams. In  understanding your dreams, you will gain a clearer view on your personal relationships, an uncensored view of your real feelings and a better perspective on life issues. We realize that your dreams are unique; no other individual can have your background, your emotions, or your experiences. Thus, every dream can only be connected to your own "reality". In interpreting your dreams, it is important to draw from your personal life and experiences. A dream has the power to unify the body, mind, and spirit. It provides you with insight into your own self and a means for self-exploration. In understanding your dreams, you will gain a better understanding and discovery of your true self.  So stay awhile --

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explore, discover, have fun, make friends, and find out what's in YOUR dream?!

Dream-Related Questions

What is the average amount of dreams a person usually has in one night? 

The average person has about 3 to 5 dreams per night, but some may have up to 7 dreams in one night. The dreams tend to last longer as the night progresses. During a full 8-hour night sleep, two hours of it is spent dreaming.

Please tell me is it unusual for an individual to have multiple dreams during the course of one night's sleep? Is this normal? I normally dream two or three dreams in one night.

It is not at all unusual for a person to have more than one dream per night. In fact, it is perfectly normal! The trick is remembering all your dreams. Some people have trouble remembering one single dream, let alone multiple dreams. 

Does a person dream all night? If not, when do they?No, a person does not spend the entire night dreaming. A person spends about two hours in the dream state per night. A person moves through the four stages of the sleep cycle throughout the night. The final stage of the sleep cycle (referred to as REM sleep) is where dreaming occurs. Each cycle of sleep lasts anywhere from 60-90 minutes and then repeats itself throughout the night.

Would you please tell me why people do not dream? Everybody dreams! This is a scientifically proven fact. Research has shown that all human beings in a study exhibit brain activity during their sleep. Just because you cannot remember your dreams does not mean that you do not dream. So why is it that some people don't remember their dream? This may be attributed to alcohol consumption, certain antibiotics, fever, lack of sleep or too much sleep, high levels of stress, and/or unconscious fears about the content of your dreams. Some researchers believe that certain people have a genetic

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disposition to forget their dreams as they come out of their sleep. 

Do children's dreams mean the same as adults? If not what is the difference?

Dreams often reflect our experiences and life concerns. For this reason, children's dreams are different then the dreams of adults. The dreams of young children (3-5 year olds) usually have no real story line or any strong emotional content. Children around this age also frequently experience nightmares relating to their fears (strangers, monsters, loud noises, etc.) By the time children reaches their teen years, their dream patterns are matched closer to that of adults.

Is it true that some dreams can predict the future? There is no scientific proof that dreams can predict and foretell the future. Yes, many people have had dreams that eventually came true afterwards. This can be explained in how we unconsciously gather little information here and there and when you have a dream, it puts together all this unconscious information before you are consciously able to do so. In short, you unconsciously already know what was going to happen and it only appears as if the dream had predicted the future. Another explanation is that such dream are mere coincidences or is the faulty memory of the dreamer.

Why do you think that we have dreams?This is still an unresolved topic amongst researchers as to the reason we have dreams. One theory suggests that dreams serve as a means for cleansing and release. During the day, we may hold back our feelings and repress our anger. Thus dreams serve as a safe outlet for us to release our negative emotions. Another theory says that dreams is a biologically necessary aspect of sleep. Research has shown that people who were prevented from entering the dream state and woken up before they can dream were more easily irritated, jittery, and performed far below average.  I believe these are two theories summarize why we dream.  

Do dreams have any significance?

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Yes, dreams have a significance. The images in our dreams always contain hidden meaning which goes far beyond the outer appearance. The language of dreams is symbolic and not to be taken literally. The significance of dreams is personal and dependent on your own personal experiences. However, there are many universal symbols.

What does it mean when you dream about the same person over and over again?

Dreaming about the same person over and over again could just mean that you are thinking about that person a lot in real life. It is thus natural that they also appear in your dream life. Your dream is telling you that it is time to let this person know how you feel, especially if you are dreaming of him or her in a good way. Only good things can happen from you telling him or her. Even if he or she is not interested, at least you can move on from the crush.

What causes or why do some dreams keep repeating themselves?

Dreams that recur (or repeat themselves) is a clear indication that some issue is not being confronted or that it has not yet been resolved.  Your anxieties about a certain situation that you are struggling with may also cause you to have recurring dreams.

Do we dream in black and white or color, or does it mean anything if we dream one way or the other?

Most people do dream in color, but some may not notice or remember colors in their dreams. Because color is such a natural part of our visual experience, we sometimes overlook it in our dreams. Another reason is poor memory recall and how our dreams fade so quickly from our minds that we may only be able to recall the dream in shades of gray. Dreams that are in black and white are an indication of a depressed or saddened mood.

I heard from a friend that the more senses you can experience in dreams (colors, smell, etc), the greater your intelligence is in general. Do you know anything about this?

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I have never heard that the more senses you experience in your dream is correlated with your intelligence. The way we process our senses varies from individual to individual and does not necessarily have to do with intelligence. However, it is correct to say that most people recall the visual and auditory aspects of their dreams. Touch, smell, and taste tend to be secondary unless it happens to be a central component of the dream, or unless the person is visually impaired. In this case, sense of touch and/or smell will dominate. 

Do animal dreams?Similar to humans, all other mammals exhibit the same brain activity during sleep.  But the extent and nature of their dreams is another question. For obvious reasons, we cannot ask an animal the content of their dream.

I've been checking out you web site since I found it a few day ago. I must say that your site is great!!!  But I still don't understand what REM sleep is. Does it refer to deep sleeping?

Yes, the REM stage of sleep is where you achieve your deepest sleep. It is also the final stage in the sleep cycle. REM which stands for Rapid Eye Movement is so called because in this stage of sleep, your eyes move rapidly back and forth under your eyelids. It is also in REM sleep that you experience all your vivid, and sometimes bizarre dreams.

How can our daily activities effect our dreams? Whenever you suppress your feelings throughout the day, it has a very good chance of showing up in your dream. For example, if you wanted to express your anger toward someone and then refrain from doing so, then your suppressed anger may show up in your dream in some symbolic form. Traumatic experiences also have a way to affect the content of your dreams.

Are there any differences in male and female dream patterns?

If, by dream patterns, you mean brain wave activity while in the dream state, then the answer is no. There are no

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differences between male and female dream patterns. However, if your are referring to the content of the dream, then the answer is yes. Studies have shown that men tend to dream more about men, while women dream about both men and women equally. This makes perfect sense when you think about it. Dreams are often seen as aspect of yourselves. For a man to dream about a woman, indicates that he is acknowledging some feminine aspect of his own self, which may be difficult for men to admit that they have a softer feminine side to begin with.

Is it normal only to remember nightmares and never a good dream?

It is not a question of whether or not it is normal to remember only your nightmares, but why you remember your nightmares as opposed to your other dreams. Nightmares are much easier to remember for several reasons. First nightmares are vivid, frightening, and often jolt you awake. Whenever you are awakened in the REM stage of sleep, you are much more likely to recall the events of your nightmare. Secondly, nightmares tend to occur in the early morning hours, when you are about to wake up. Remembering your dreams can take some effort on your part and not a question of normality. 

What does it mean to have a dream within a dream? Having a dream within a dream may be safer and more acceptable way to express material from your unconscious. The dream within a dream protects you, the dreamer from waking up. Such dreams often reflect a hidden but crucial issue which you need to acknowledge and confront.

Is it possible to die (not really die in real life) in your our dreams? 

Yes, it is possible to experience death in your dreams. Dreams of death often occur as a result of great stress caused by relationships, school, career changes, depression or by the approach of death itself.  Death in dreams may also be viewed as a metaphor - as a new beginning or a time of renewal.

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Judging from your question, I am assuming you never have had a dream about dying.

Do you think it is possible to connect and talk with people through dreams?

On a symbolic level, yes it is possible to connect and interact with people through dreams. The dreaming mind serves as a ?rehearsal? for what you want to say to this person in real life. In this regard, your dreams definitely help you to better connect with the person. Your dreams can offer a way to help you and show you how to talk to certain people.

As for whether two people can actually to talk to each other through their dreams, that still remains to be research. This phenomenon is described as dream telepathy, a form of psychic or paranormal dreams.  There are stories of people who are extremely close, i.e. twins or mother/child, being able to communicate via their dreams.  

I frequently have dreams that something happens like a gunshot, I fall or something that would make me jerk.  I really do jerk and usually wake up. What's with that?  Like why do I jerk and wake up when something like that happens in my dream? 

There is actually a term to describe what you are experiencing in your dream. It is called cyclonic jerks. Many who dream that they are falling sometimes jerk or twitch their legs/arms and end up waking themselves up. There is no concrete reason as to why this happens. One theory is that it is our instinctive response for what the brain perceives as a potentially dangerous situation. Sometimes dreams are so real that the brain believes that you are really falling or in some sort of danger. And hence the brain sends signals to the body to start "fleeing".

Do you think it is possible to connect and talk with people through dreams?

Sometimes you cannot kick or throw a punch because your body is really immobilized and paralyzed. REM sleep is ironic. Prevents you from acting out your dreams. 

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The Importance Of Dreaming

Do you dream in order to sleep or do you sleep in order to dream? Although that question remains debatable,  researchers agree that there is a purpose and importance to dreaming.

Research have showed that people who are deprived from entering the dream phase of sleep or the REM stage, exhibit symptoms of irritability and anxiety. In one dream study, volunteers are woken up right before they enter into the dream  state. Then they are allowed to fall back to sleep. Again, right before they enter REM sleep, they are awaken.  This continues on through the night. The volunteers sleep the same amount of time as they normally do. The next day, these volunteers go about their day and observed to be disoriented, depressed, crabby, and quick tempered. There is a general impairment in their daily functioning.  Some eat more than usual.  As this study continues on through several nights, subjects become more and more agitated.  It is found that deprivation of REM sleep causes over-sensitivity, lack of concentration and memory loss. 

This study shows the importance of dreaming and its role in your well-being and health. Some researchers believe that dreams help you to tackle stress. Dreaming is a necessity and helps to recharge the mind and revitalize the body

Why should you remember your dreams?

1. Your dreaming mind has access to vital information that is not readily available to you when you are awake. Your dreams serve as a window to your subconscious and reveal your secret desires and feelings.

2. In remembering your dreams, you gain increased knowledge, self-awareness and self-healing.  Dreams are an extension of how you perceive yourself. They may be a

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source of inspiration, wisdom, joy, imagination and overall improved psychological health.

3. Learning to recall your dreams help you become a more assertive, confident and stronger person.  By remembering your dreams, you are expressing and confronting your feelings.   

4. Dreams help guide you through difficult decisions, relationship issues, health concerns, career questions or any life struggle you may be experiencing.

5. Remembering your dreams help you come to terms with stressful aspects of your lives.

6. You will learn more about yourself, your aspirations, and your desires through your dreams.

Dream Weaver

One of the most romantic songs around is Dream Weaver, by Gary Wright. This song talks about meeting a dream lover in an out-of-body love experience.

"I've just closed my eyes againClimbed aboard the dream weaver trainDriver take away my worries of todayAnd leave tomorrow behind"

Unlike other dream songs which use dreams as a substitute for actually talking to the object of desire, in Gary Wright's song, the singer plans on meeting up with his lover in his dreams, having an adventure in the night -

"Fly me high through the starry skiesMaybe to an astral planeCross the highways of fantasyHelp me to forget today's pain"

Gary Wright has said that he was inspired to write this song after taking a trip to India with then-Beatles George Harrison.

Conclusions

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• The leading scientific theory is that sleep has a large function

in memory processing.

• It appears from different research studies that different stages of sleep have different functions with respect to memory processing.

• Future research is needed to better identify these functions.

It also remains to be understood, whether dreams have a specific function, or are simply a byproduct of memory processing in sleep

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