To sleep—perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub!
For those of you who quiz, where does this line come from?
The idea of writing about dreams results from a conversation with a friend on Monday night; he admitted having had weird dreams the previous week and I told him I’d dreamt about him the week before; this from someone who recalls about half a dozen dreams a year and then only for a brief period of time.
We all probably think of Freud and his theories of our dreams and their origins, a topic that was followed up by Jung via his dream analysis work. Freud believed that our dreams drew from our unconsicous thoughts, desires and other conflicts we have swirling in our mind and used these to try to gain a better understanding of his patients and study subjects.
Dreams are impossible for scientists to study effectively since they cannot (yet) transcribe the various neural inputs into a write up of what the patient was dreaming of; all we can generally say is that the most vivid dreams tend to occur mainly during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep when the brain is at its most active.
Scientists can therefore only theorise why dreams happen and whether they play any part in our body; all they can say is that brain activity during dreams is “similar” to the activity that is measured when memory processing.
Certain stressful periods in our life result in us having more vivid dreams and nightmares; possibly due to the fact that our body may be keeping us in more sequences of REM sleep which is necessary for survival (think back to being able to be alert enough to run away from the saber tooth tiger !).
What I did find interesting was there is data showing that groups of people from certain regions tend to have similar night visions although again no one knows quite why, other than to suggest that cultural and other localised influences play a part in our nightime dreams.
For those of you interested in reading more on dreams, here is a published article you may find interesting:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3166790/#:~:text=Most%20people%20awaken%20after%20a,brain%20to%20reach%20that%20threshold.
Any got a weird dream they care to share?
