Ever had a dream where you’re being chased by Chester Cheeto or the dream that you’re falling and you never hit the ground or a dream where it starts off nice and slowly turns into a nightmare. Dreams always leave us filled with questions and they always leave us asking the questions why did I have this dream? And what does it mean? Dreams are defined as a series of thoughts, images, and different sensations that happens when we are sleeping (Merriam Webster dictionary). Dreaming only occurs during deep sleep or rapid eye moving sleep or REM sleep. REM sleep in adults constitutes about 20-25 % of total sleep, which is about 90-120 minutes of an average night’s sleep. During an average night’s sleep human beings experiences on average between four or five periods of REM sleep that are short in the beginning and become longer towards the end (wiki). Nobody knows why humans dream and nobody knows what dreams mean but theories have been purposed to answer the questions why we dream and what they mean. Now let’s take through some of these theories.
The psychoanalytic theory of dreams comes from the great psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who believed that dreams represented the unconscious thoughts, motivations and desires of the individual. For example if a woman wants children but for some reason she cannot have them out of fear of what people may think of her, so she may have a dream of being pregnant with people upset with her or yelling at her. On another hand you may have a guy that wants to play basketball, but can’t do an injury may have a dream of playing in the NBA. According to Freud, individuals are driven by aggressive and sexual instincts that are repressed or kept from conscious awareness and theses unconscious desires manifest themselves in our dreams (psychologytoday). The psychoanalytic theory of dreams purposed that dreams are the outlet for our unconscious desires; they allow us to experience our hidden desires without really experiencing them real life. When most of us dream who do dream about our desires. We do dream about what we want most out of life. We do dream about the desires that motivate us or drive our behavior. Since a person may not be able to experience these desires in the real world, dreams provide away for a person to experience their deepest desires, without the fear of being judged. Freud’s theory on dreams hits home for a lot of people because we all can relate to the fact that we all have dreams of things that we want and just cannot have or things that may send chills up a person’s spin. Dreams provide a safe place for all our desires to be realized.
The evolutionary theory of dreams says that dreams are a way for us the practice our responses to threaten situations. Antti Revonsuo, a cognitive scientist has discovered that during REM sleep that our amygdale, the area of the brain that houses our fight or flight response is more active then usual during this period of sleep. According to Dr. Revonsuo while we are dreaming the human brain activates in the same way as if we were being threaten. According to this theory dreams are an evolutionary adaptation always us to rehearse life saving behaviors so we can be better at fight or flight in the real world (Dream). For most of us we dream about ether fighting for our lives or fighting someone in particular or we dream about being chased by something or being in an embarrassing situation, this theory believes that dreams are away of preparing us for real world situations. This theory is a little bit farfetched but it has a ring of truth in it. The truth is that a dream may prepare you for a situation or warning you of situation may be heading towards but do not realize it yet. For example you may have a dream that you are driving a car that is out of control and you just cannot stop it. This may be your dream trying to warn you that things in your life may be getting to go out of control and that if you do not stop it now, you may not be able to stop when it happens. A dream may warn you or prepare you for what lies ahead if you stay on a particular path.
Ultimately dreams are subjective and nobody can answer the questions why we dream and what they mean but the individual. In other words it’s up to the individual to decipher their own dreams, to figure out why they had a particular dream and what that dream means. It’s up to the individual to interpret their own dreams by using the symbolism within their dreams and make their own psychological connections or associations. No scientist or researcher can explain why we dream or what are dreams mean because each individual life experiences are unique and each dream is tailored to that specific person, so it is up to that person to decide what their dream means to them.
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