Why do we dream? Are our dreams trying to tell us something? Are they trying to warn us or prepare us for something that is going to happen in the future? These are questions that psychologists have been trying to answer for many years.
Freud used to believe that every single dream one had was simply an unconscious wish. However, a lot of people don't agree with this, especially in relation to nightmares, uneventful dreams, or those weird dreams one has from time to time that make very little sense and you wake up wondering why you'd ever dream such a thing; surely those dreams can't fit into the category of unconscious wishes we have. Therefore, theorists and psychologists have been trying to come up with different answers to these questions.
There are several theories. One is that we dream to practice what we would do in emergency situations. The fight or flight dynamic in our brains is more apparent during REM sleep. So our are dreams preparing us for how we'd deal with a fight or flight response in real life? Theory number two suggests that dreams create wisdom. Some theorists believe that when we sleep our dreams turn all the information we've learned that day into wisdom. Theory number three suggests that when we dream, we are "defragmenting our hard drives" so to speak. Some think that when we dream we get rid of unnecessary information and links or pathways in our brain and retain only what we need to build new pathways for a more streamlined system. The fourth theory is that dreams are like psychotherapy. Many of us tend to have very emotional or stressful dreams and a lot of theorists believe that while we are asleep we are able to think and work through these types of situations in a less defensive way. The last theory is no theory at all. Maybe dreams mean absolutely nothing. Maybe they aren't for any purpose and whatever we dream has nothing to do with anything in our actual lives. Personally, I think I agree with theory number five the best. So what do you think dreams mean?
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-literary-mind/200911/why-do-we-dream
Each of the theories are plausible in my opinion, but I feel that it would be difficult to support one over the 100%. Freud believed that there were two parts to a dream- the manifest and latent content. The manifest content refers to what a person remembers about the dream as soon as they wake up and the latent content refers to the actual true meaning of the dream. If this were to be true, then how do we know for sure if we are interpreting what we remember from the dream into what the dream actually means, in an accurate manner?
ReplyDeleteI found this article rather interesting, but I feel that without other technology and research into the matter, the only really practical theory is the fifth one, the absence thereof. While many of the others have evidence, anecdotal or otherwise to substantiate their claims, it’s basically impossible to really provide empirical evidence for or against any of these since we simply do not know anything about the origin, purpose, or nature of dreams aside from those principles posited in the absence theory. That is, that they are neural firings that take place while the brain rests.
ReplyDeleteHowever, that’s not to say that the other theories don’t hold up in certain scenarios. Certainly, everyone has experienced dreams that presaged some future event or offered insight into the individual’s waking experiences, but I think in many cases this is purely coincidental and/or the product of, as the article states, the consciousness wanting to find more meaningful, and useful, conclusions from these dreams.