Dream Theory
"I don't use drugs, my dreams are
frightening enough." Why do we
dream? Are they instructions from the
spiritual world or just deep, hidden
wishes that can be used to unlock the
secrets of the unconscious mind? Nobody
knows for sure. One theory that is
prevalent today is that dreams result from
the physiological "exercise" of
the synapses of the brain. There is no
proven fact on why we dream, which is
why there are so many theories on the
topic. There is Freud's theory that
dreams carry our hidden desires and Jung’s
theory that dreams carry meaning,
although not always of desire, and that the
dreamer can interpret these
dreams. After these theories, others continued such
as the Cayce theory in
that dreams are our bodies means of building up of the
mental, spiritual and
physical well being. Finally came the argument between
Evans' theory and
the Crick and Mitchinson theory. Evans states that dreaming is
our bodies way
of storing the vast array of information gained during the day,
whereas Crick
and Mitchinson say that this information is being dumped rather
than stored.
Whichever theory is true, we may never know, but from these
following
theories we can decide for ourselves what we believe to be true and
further
help us into understanding our dreams. My own personal theory on why we
dream
is that the subconscious mind is always working. This results in
dreams.
The subconscious mind in an attempt to file away all of the
information from the
previous day results in dreams. A dream in my opinion is
nothing more than a
chemical reaction in the brain. In laboratory tests, when
people were awaked
during the RAPID EYE MOVEMENT (REM) stage of sleep and
asked to report what was
on their mind just before awaking, about 90%
reported an experience termed TRUE
DREAM. When a true dream is
experienced is seems as if it were an actual event
rather than one thought or
imagined. True dreams often involve a series of such
experiences woven
together in a somewhat bizarre story. Even those people who
claimed to rarely
dream or only remember fragments of dreams in the mornings
were able to give
detailed accounts of a true dream experience when awakened
during REM sleep.
Those who were awakened during SLOW-WAVE sleep (the deeper,
less mentally
active stages of sleep) reported mental activity in only about 60%
of cases.
Usually, this activity lacked the vivid sensory and motor
hallucinations of
true dreams. This type of mental activity is called SLEEP
THOUGHT, and
usually pertains to what the person had been thinking about most of
the day.
However this thought is usually much less productive than that of
conscious
thoughts (while the person is awake). Those who believe that we dream
due to
the brain's regular exercise of groups of neurons cite evidence that
synapses
can degenerate if they go too long without being active; this neural
activity
during REM sleep helps to preserve important neural pathways. When
neurons in
the motor and perceptual regions of the brain are exercised in this
manner,
the inevitable side-effect are the dreams we experience. The increased
mental
thought activity is due to the sleep thought being engaged in trying to
make
sense of these movements and
hallucinations.