BitoBain
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- Jun 21, 2013
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Yes! Dreams can indeed have a lot of insight into the human mind, but there is a lot of pseudoscience surrounding the subject. From my past experience, I know that dreams are typically about what we think about and worry about most. Hence why a lot of my dreams are at school. One famous experiment I saw in a documentary involved having people playing a skiing videogame that they had never seen before for several hours, then analyzing how it affected sleep. It turned out that the dreams often heavily reflected the fact that the people had played the game significantly the day before. This was done by asking the subjects what they had dreamed about. Not surprisingly, subjects often came back the next day significantly better at the game. Hard work + good sleep = major improvement.
[tangent]However, there's an even more scientific way to see what someone is dreaming about. Technology has recently come out that analyzes areas of the brain being activated and then somehow uses random pictures from all over the internet to try to match what the brain is doing. It doesn't make sense to me, but I saw it at work and it was very disturbing. The one scene I saw showed a man talking face to face with the dreamer displayed on a computer screen. It was black and white as well as very fuzzy, but it matched what the dreamer claimed disturbingly well.[/tangent]
I agree that dreams can portray our deepest concerns and interests as well as purely random thoughts. Before the twenty-first century, it was believed that dreams were purely random thoughts and recreations of past experiences, unsubject to real laws, but rather to our curiosity.
Nowadays, scientists believe that dreams start from a train of thought that often starts as we ponder concerns and ideas while dozing off. As we become more relaxed, our prefrontal cortex becomes more disabled, allowing our right brain to dominate our thoughts, (and lessening our judgment) bombarding them with randomness. Dreams can be epic, emotional, and very real, but at the same time, many of their details are created randomly from the right brain as we curiously explore random ideas. Dreams still follow a somewhat predictable course, though, often following the path that is more interesting or that we feel less prepared for. I once saw a list of the most common dreams and what they can mean about your inner personality, but it looked to me like pure speculation and pseudoscience. Teeth falling out, for example, was proclaimed a sign of being overly self-conscious. If anyone out there is a legit dream interpreter, I'd be interested to know why I always have that dream of my house being infested with giant spiders.
This brings me to a point: Dreams play a vital role in many mental aspects such as memory, creativity, dealing with stress, etc... Every big challenge that we go through requires sleep to be figured out. Being rested improves cognitive function in every way. For example, the random, stringy thoughts created by the right hemisphere of our brain during sleep play an extremely vital role in creativity. During sleep, alpha waves from the right hemisphere dominate our thoughts in the same way they do during the shower, where a shocking portion of our good ideas occur. To make another point, sleep helps us solve complex problems. It allows us to look at problems from all angles, using thoughts that would be seemingly unrelated. I have heard of studies in which one groups was asked to collaborate on a difficult problem without sleep, and the other group that was allowed a four hour sleeping session. The sleeping group showed much problem solving capabilities.
And after all of this preaching, I'm still typing this at 9:00 PM with lots of homework to get done.
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