Why do we have dreams? I know how the brain makes us dream at night. I also know that some dreams are caused by something that might be bugging you, but what about the rest of them? What do they mean?

They mean exactly that.

dreams are caused by emotions you havent expressed yet
ie swearing at a teacher

Dreaming is akin to defragmenting a computer... almost. It's the way the brain processes all the information it has received during your waking hours... it files some things away, gets rid of other things and analyses other things in a creative way. I think dreaming is a learning tool, albeit on a subconscious level.

Having studied dreams during one my stints in a psychology class in college I think dreams are there to keep our brain active while it repairs itself after the day. It's there to keep us amused while the rest of the body is in the shop. A bit like the magazines they provide when you're waiting for your car to be repaired.

Dreaming is akin to defragmenting a computer... almost. It's the way the brain processes all the information it has received during your waking hours... it files some things away, gets rid of other things and analyses other things in a creative way. I think dreaming is a learning tool, albeit on a subconscious level.

i'll agree with this. another thing about dreaming is, what happens around you while you are sleeping can be incorporated into your dreams. i find that kind of odd

Dreams are throughts and imagination. Dreams can have meaning, but most people don't often have such dreams.

another thing about dreaming is, what happens around you while you are sleeping can be incorporated into your dreams. i find that kind of odd

It's because we're not completely unconscious and unaware of this world just because we dream.

So far c7ityi is the only person to even come close to answering my question.

What about when you have extremely strange dreams where things die in firey explosions?

Latest I've heard is that dreams are a way of self-defense and training. We act out ways to protect ourselves and whatnot. At least that's what was said when research was done as to why many people act out their dreams while sleeping and why most of them tend to be violent and involve animals. Some form of protection left over from our more primitive times supposedly.

- N

So far c7ityi is the only person to even come close to answering my question.

What about when you have extremely strange dreams where things die in firey explosions?

Dreams aren't as strange as they might seem, Poliwog. Some are exactly as you stated - something that is very much on your mind will often provide some element in a dream. All the rest are perfectly meaningless.

The most widely accepted idea about dreams are that they are produced while the brain is performing "housekeeping" functions. That is, it's sorting all kinds of bits of information that have been left over from previous periods of wakefulness. The fact that many of them seem so surreal is because during that process it has linked things that are totally unrelated. For example, seeing a fish drinking a cup of coffee or anything similarly silly. In that case, you have some sort of memory about a fish and another about coffee. The two memories obviously have nothing to do with each other but simply happened to be accessed at nearly the same moment.

It's also felt that the whole process is intended to help keep us sane. A number of trials have been run involving dozens of different test subjects. They have been subjected to extended periods of sleep deprivation. In other rounds of the test, they were only deprived of REM sleep - which is the part of the sleep cycle when dreaming is experienced.

The results were very similar. Under either conditions, the subjects eventually became first, slightly incoherent, cognitive ability was reduced, and eventually that moved into vivid hallucinations and they began to exhibit several different types of psychoses. That included paranoia, hearing voices, experiencing fictional sensory experiences - like being pricked by a pin or needle when indeed they were not, and several other irrational forms of behavior.

Also, there have been a number of test run in attempts to determine if dreams were able to predict future events. The findings were pretty conclusive, to the dismay of the "psychic" crowd. The only cases where there was any connection to future events (I believe it was about 2% or less) was when the subject already had clear knowledge that related to what was going to happen. A wedding, for example, and similar things.

Light,

To dream about the future one would have to be psychic, of course. People dream differently depending on their level of consciousness.

Under either conditions, the subjects

Not subjects, people.

think about a house you havent been to in a while, and think about the furniture there. you remember a couch in the corner, a chair by the window, and a tv opposite maybe. but what colour is the chair? what design are the curtains? how big is the tv?

during the day we will store memories as sound, sight, smell, touch, etc, but that sort of memory is very resource consuming, and if all our memories were in that format, we would be unable to fit them all in. so when we dream, our brains link things together - you may tie locations of the furniture to that room, and what furniture it was, but not an image of it specifically - so your long term memory fill in the memory of a chair, with an image of a chair, which may be a mix of every chair you haev ever seen.

basically, dreaming allows our memories to be processed into a more compressed format which allows us to retain more. as well as aallowing us a chance to play out situations in our mind and see all teh possibel outcomes, so that we are better informed to make decisions.

Not subjects, people.

You're just being silly on purpose. Of course they are subjects! They are the ones being subjected to the conditions of the test.

Light,

To dream about the future one would have to be psychic, of course. People dream differently depending on their level of consciousness.



Not subjects, people.

September of 2003 I had a dream that it was Thanks Giving Day. I was playing football in the backyard with my cousin. The clouds were shaped like the backsides of a bunch of stampeeding horses (like you were chasing them). It was sunset so the sky was brilliant shades of scarlet and orange, which I thought to be natural. He threw the football but I missed it because I was distracted by something I saw in the sky. It was like a giant wooden square flying through the sky. Every time it hit one of the horse clouds they would explode in a firey colud turning the sky the shades of red and orange that it was.

I know this doesn't mean anything to anyone yet, but I'd like to know what you think it means. After a few people respond to this I'll tell you what happened that I believe correlates to my dream.

Also, I found this quote:
“Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.”
- William Dement

Dreams have a neurobiological basis that comes from the cortical (cortex) components of the brain. It draws on your memory to make sense - or maybe nonsense? - of what you have experienced. Dreams are a result of your memory experiences and are retransmitted through the cortical integration network of your brain. Dreams are most vivid during REM sleep periods: the most active and closest part of awakeness period of the cortex.

It may be of interest to know that mammals, especially dogs and cats - and birds - are also frequent dreamers. I know that my dog often paddles his legs when dreaming: as if she is running. Further, I've even heard that Armadillos have the longest REM sleep?

Dreams are of course influenced by what just happened the day before. Yesterday I was watching my brother play a round of CS:S on a zombie-modified server. I had a dream about a zombie infestation destroying the world.

Dreams can also be influenced by what is happening at the time.
Bill Oddie (T.V. Personality in the uk) once did a tv show on dreaming and when he was asleep and in REM sleep someone sprayed him with water then woke him up and he said he was dreaming of being on a ship in rought seas

I know this, but what do they mean?

if i was interested in knowing about dreams i would try the following in my browsers search box:
sleep
sleep research
dreams
dreaming

there are others but that will start you off.

dream interpretation is not valid science.

I know this, but what do they mean?Poliwog: Your question is excellent, and you've been given some excellent explanations, but you have to tell us more by what YOU mean when you say "What do you mean"?

This is extremely interesting. But I am sincerely at a loss to know what else you are searching for when you say this?

Dreams can also be influenced by what is happening at the time.
Bill Oddie (T.V. Personality in the uk) once did a tv show on dreaming and when he was asleep and in REM sleep someone sprayed him with water then woke him up and he said he was dreaming of being on a ship in rought seasThis also adds merit to the idea that dreams do not occur as stories but as random memories or memory fragments and that our brains assemble them into a story only when we become conscious of them.

As to the initial question, dreams have meaning in the way that a Rorschach test has meaning. The interpretation (story) belies something about your mental state. Sometimes this is significant, but most often it's pretty generic.

~Raithere

My dream is my life.

This also adds merit to the idea that dreams do not occur as stories but as random memories or memory fragments and that our brains assemble them into a story only when we become conscious of them.As was stated above, REM dreams are more vivid than others because they are most closest to a waking state. They are tied into "memory or memory fragments."

I have a problem in that I have a recurring dream that is very long and I cannot remember all the details when I awake. So I'm assuming that it is not a REM sleep dream. Yet it is a dream of another reality: unlike any memory that I have of the real world. Strange aye? I get bits and pieces from it when I awake but still cannot put it all together in memory when I awake.

Geez, I'm glad Freud is not around, but I bet Carl Jung could make some sense out of it!

Had another dream last night - I must be on a roll! This time I was taking a bill out of my wallet and my wallet fell into a lake. I first searched frantically for it blindly near the shore with my hand. Then when I looked down into the lake, a large scary fish with teeth grabbed it and swam away. I bet that means I'll be broke soon!

Why do we have dreams? I know how the brain makes us dream at night. I also know that some dreams are caused by something that might be bugging you, but what about the rest of them? What do they mean?


Hello. My first post.

I think dreams have to do with what's important to us, like the method, if you can call an autonomic process a "method", it like works to select the content of our dreams in deference to what matters to us, what's "on our minds" and not just for the day but also broader than that, as in the entire scope of our experience including our current expectations for what we'll experience next. I think dreams are always, like topical for us, or the "latest breaking news from your subconcious", you know, current. Like I think we dream of past things only because those past things are like something current for us now, and they give it meaning, a form or context for how we're feeling. Like if I dream of a "cousin" of mine, say for whom I haven't even done anything with for a long time, and there is no current events going on in our relationship, I don't take that "actor" in my dream to mean my real cousin. Rather it's somebody in my life who is like that person I've known in the past. There's a similarity.



You ask what do they "mean". I don't think any dream means the literal face value of them. Say, for instance, if there is a rabbit in my dream, I don't think my dream is about an actual rabbit. You know, I don't have a rabbit in my life. I think it's about something real a rabbit can represent. So then what's the essential quality of that rabbit in my dream, and then ask what actual thing in my life has that quality. A good place to start figuring that out is to look at what's gone on recently with me. The rabbit could be myself, unadmitted emotions, the identity of which I've denied, so there's fear like a small innocent rabbit running away, and like a rabbit the emotions are fertile, but I'm afraid of them, rabbit's are skiddish, so I dream of chasing this rabbit, some truth I need to find.

Only sometimes. Sometimes dreams just don't mean anything.

Only sometimes. Sometimes dreams just don't mean anything.

I'm not that great at interpreting my dreams. If I were then maybe I could prove to myself this or that one meant nothing. Like if I could really look at it objectively and be able to say, "yeah, that one is meaningless". I know that you could argue that, by the same token, I can't prove they all have some meaning.

So I guess it's a choice. You can assume a dream means nothing unless you know it does, or you can assume the opposite, that any dream means something, unless you know it doesn't.

I side on the latter only because I see the scope of any dream I have as outside my attempt to put any borders around it. Because of that , I can't prove any dream is meaningless. Besides interpretation sometimes takes a degree of understanding I don't have. All I know is some dreams mean something. That's all I know. I know dreams mean something, even if it's only some of them I actually "get". I don't know or understand all of any dream to say any one of them means nothing. So I have no examples of a dream that I'm certain means nothing. Furthermore, I don't think it's possible to.

So my over-riding bias is that dreams mean something. I don't think I could ever understand enough of a dream, or remember enough of one, to say even sometimes they don't.

Dreams are like an internal landscape, just like the external one, in which you can know alot about it, but there's always more. You can never know everything. I don't think there's any factor of either someone can say really doesn't matter. I never discovered some part of a dream that didn't matter, "discover" meaning "saw the truth of it". Anything I've discovered, that is understood, did. I've never understood anything which the understanding meant I understood it was completly irrelevant.

You could say I'm just ignoring dreams that don't support my belief about them. I don't know. Could be. I'm not sure how to put that to the test. Like how would I know a dream is meaningless? I think if that were true, I could tell. I wouldn't just not understand it. I would understand it and undertand it to mean nothing.

Then too, I'm not sure what you mean by "meaningless". Like say I was sleeping and my stomach growled and I dreamt of a sleeping bear or something, and the sleeping bear was just my stomach growling? To me that would mean something too. I'm sleeping and I'm hungry.

I had a dream within a dream a few days ago, in it I was kissing a female celebrity. Yes, a dream within a dream, how do you explain that? Anyway I think dreams are default activities of the brain whether concious or not, what you have when we sleep is the result of inadequate sensory perception, because the mind as they say is not inside us alone but our entire surrounding. Remember we came from the surroundings in the first place. Subconcious dreams is like running a powerful modern computer on DOS alone, keeping in mind all major windows OS today are founded on DOS. Or reading an internet site's source code. In my opinion, based on certain facts.

Dreams are like an internal landscape, just like the external one, in which you can know alot about it, but there's always more. You can never know everything. I don't think there's any factor of either someone can say really doesn't matter. I never discovered some part of a dream that didn't matter, "discover" meaning "saw the truth of it". Anything I've discovered, that is understood, did. I've never understood anything which the understanding meant I understood it was completly irrelevant.This, and your post above it, are both excellent intellectual analyses of dream interpretation. I have no idea of who you are or what you do, but I CAN tell you that you have a strong potential to be a good analytic psychologist. What you have posted above could be part of a master's thesis!

Your last sentence. Are you saying that sometimes in dreaming, if you find things that you conclude to be irrelevant, then therefore you just dismiss them? I wouldn't argue with this, as I wouldn't know either.

Why don't you give a crack at replying to the above post. I know you can.

Sometimes I've had dreams that I wake up...

When I were little I were scared of things so I often dreamt Nightmares. Always when I killed myself in the dream I woke up. I used to kill myself by jumping from somewhere. Later I also realized I could just open my eyes to stop the dream. It was probably because I was conscious that it was a dream.

It's possible that we have dreamt this world into being by will power, because nothingness is so simple and boring. Dreams are weird, but usually not when you're still in the dream. Dreams within dreams within dreams within dreams...

have you ever had a dreem where sleep paralisis (SP) was involved? it's so scary!

Later I also realized I could just open my eyes to stop the dream. It was probably because I was conscious that it was a dream.Most dreams you remember are during REM sleep which is the lightest (not deepest) form of sleep. This is the closest state of mind to waking up and being conscious, thus you have a dream and then wake up.

What is sleep paralysis?

The brain releases a chemical while sleeping to prevent you acting out actions in your dreams. Sometimes it releases too much, and when you wake up you are still affected by it. Therfore, you are temporarily paralysed.

Geez, I must have a lot of that in me. That's how I feel every morning when I wake up.