According to Oxford Dictionary dream is a series of images, ideas, emotions and

sensations that occur uncontrollably in the mind during specific stages of sleep. Many people

believe that dreams are basically meaningless and accidental. Do you know that there is a branch

of psychological science called Oneirology? It conducts survey about dreams through

experiments. The oneirologists found that dreams help to train human reaction to menacing

situations, gain wisdom, and make tragedies become something ordinary.

First and foremost, humans will be quite ready for a threatening situation by dreaming.

As stated by Levy (2103), the threatening simulation theory proposes that dreaming is not a

harmful technique but it is a save way for humans to practice how to compromise with

threatening situations. This statement is followed by theory that declares; dreams helped

mankind behave more productively during the day. People will practice the situations and the

way we would go through them in something like virtual reality simulator (p. 95). Virtual reality

simulator is a fake environment created by human so that people would experience like the real

environment. Same goes with this theory. For instance, being chased is a common dream among

people. When we are being chased by something, we will usually find a way out to escape from

that thing. This situation is what we called a virtual reality simulator, like stated above. In real

life, if we were being chased, it is something that we have gone through virtually in your dream

and we will automatically apply the situation. Hence, it is true that we will be prepared to face a

threatening-situation dreaming.

Next, by dreaming, we will gain wisdom. It sounds unbelievable but this is a theory that

is described by Matthew Wilson, Sherman Fairchild professor of neuroscience and Picower

Scholar at MIT Center of Learning and Memory. It is obviously that people cannot remember

every single detail like images, situations and stimulus during the day. How dreams help in order

to gain wisdom? Our dreams will analyze all of these situations and filter the things that should

be remembered. The unimportant things will be disposed so that our brains will not get stuck

with incidents (Morgan, 2013). We rarely remember the dreams we had but sometimes we will

suddenly remember about, a dream that makes you overwhelmed perhaps. If we were dreaming

about the circumstances that we go through along the day, and the next day we remember what

have we dreamt of, the things in our dream will be kept in our mind because as we know dreams

can be interesting, scary and sometimes it does not make sense. These things make our dream

more memorable and easier to remember. This explains how dream can help us in gaining

wisdom and strengthen our memory.

Dreaming is said to be a process which is affected by emotions. This could be explained by

looking at people who is having trauma. According to Hartmann (2006), dreaming symbolically

about the memory makes it hard to fade away. They may not dream exactly what happen but

instead they dream of other situation that lead to have the same painful feeling. As for example,

people who had just survived from a tsunami may dream about the heavy wave or maybe dream

being in a fire building which leads to the same painful feeling during the tsunami tragedy. With

time, the dream will continuously connect to images of other frightening experiences and it will

constantly return to its standard state. It will make connections with other parts of the memory

which abates the emotional disturbance. In short, dream process helps the memory system to

identify the traumatic material as something ordinary and the event will not be so traumatic.

In summarization of the above information, it does make sense that dreaming prepares us

for alarming position, helping in improving our memory and helping the traumatized people to

forget the misery in them. Dreams come in various types, it can be exciting or it can also be

terrifying. We should not take dreams too serious because at the end of the day, it is only just a

dream.

REFERENCES

Books

Levy, J. (2013). Why?:Answer To Everyday Scientific Questions.United States.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Morgan, K. O. (2013). The complete guide to interpreting you own dreams and what they mean

to you .Washington. Atlantic Publishing Company

Online Article

Why Do We Dream?. (2003, July 14). Retrieved from

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-do-we-dream

Dictionary

Dream. (n.d.). in Oxford Advance Learners Dictionary online. Retrieved from

https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/10/