Have you ever woken up from a dream that surprised you but after a couple of minutes you don't actually remember it? Well, this has happened to me a couple of times. So what actually is a dream? Our thoughts at night? Scenes of our aspirations and wishes? A dream is a set of emotions and ideas felt involuntarily during the semiconscious state in our sleep. Dreams have had a plethora of theories since the early times but were only predicted based on assumptions. Technological advancements have made accurate study of dreams possible. The scientific study of dreams is called oneirology(quite a fancy name,right?). One prominent theory “activation-synthesis hypothesis” states that dreaming is nothing but electrical brain impulses that pull random thoughts and imagery from our memories. It is proven that most dreams occur during the REM (rapid eye movement) stage of sleep. During this stage, the activity of the brain's neurons is quite similar to that during waking hours. In this stage, there is no muscle activity and the eyes move rapidly. Another theory has proved that if woken up from the REM directly, eg. When woken from an alarm, the memory of dreams remains fresh as compared to when woken comfortably. Since, when woken comfortably, we transition through a few sleep stages and possibly lose that dream memory.
So is there any significance of dreams in our daily lives or is it just a random set of events that takes place in our sleep? Dreams seem to help us process emotions by encoding and constructing memories of them. The dream we see might not necessarily be real but the emotions experienced in the dream are certainly true. Our dream stories essentially try to strip the emotion out of a certain experience by creating a memory of it. This way, the emotion itself is no longer active. Dreams help regulate traffic on that fragile bridge which connects our experiences with our emotions and memories.
It is also possible that dreams are emotional because one job of dreams is to help us process emotions from our day. This may be why the amygda, an area of the brain that responds to emotions when we are awake, is active during REM sleep. Dreams could also help prepare us for emotional events as said in the threat simulation theory. The Theory states that threats are simulated or practiced in your dreams to prepare you for situations when you are awake. A dream-production mechanism that tends to select threatening waking events and simulate them over and over again in various combinations are valuable for the development and maintenance of threat-avoidance skills.
Biblography
very informative. Too good!