You are in a forest, you turn around to see a huge bear running toward you, you turn to run but though you try your hardest, you cannot seem to move at all. You turn around to see the bear's snarling snout wickedly close to you...and then you wake up thankfully realizing it was just a dream. Some dreams can be frightening, or funny, or happy. Dreams can be very strange and quite puzzling but what is the purpose of these night time movies in our minds? Just why do we dream?
There has been a fascination about why we dream since the beginning of time. Many cultures believed that dreaming was a glimpse into the spiritual realm. According to World Religions teacher Gail Hartman the Australian Aborigine religion places a strong emphasis on dreams, "Aborigines believed dreams were so powerful that the world was dreamed into being." In other religions, individuals experienced a spiritual calling or the voice of God in a dream as well. In the Bible, many saints and important figures have a religious encounter or realization through a dream. For example, Mary's skeptical husband Joseph was convinced by an angel to be a father to Jesus in his subconscious state. It was believed for centuries and sometimes even in modern times that, as Junior Katie Etchart says, "Dreaming is a one way street to God."
Many studies (both scientific and psychological) have been conducted on the purpose of dreams, why we have them and what they mean. From a scientific stance, dreams are a representation from the sensory areas of our minds. They occur during Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep which makes up for about 100 minutes of sleep. During this period everyone dreams, but the dreams are only recollected if the dreamer wakes up in the middle of or at the very end of a dream. According to psychologycampus.com, dreams help the brain grow by exciting neurons and also play a role in memory. Dreams strengthen connections between certain areas of the brain while releasing other connections so less useful information can be forgotten. According to Ernest Hartmann, professor of psychiatry and director of the Sleep Disorder Center at Newton Wellesley Hospital in Boston, "activation patterns are shifting and connections are being made and unmade constantly in our brains, forming the physical basis of our minds". This principle is part of the Contemporary Theory of Dreaming, which holds that these connections are guided by our emotions. This theory considers that a possible function of dreaming could be to weave new material into the memory system in a way that reduces emotional arousal and is adaptive in coping with trauma or stress. This would be very valuable to early humans who in general probably had many more traumatic experiences than modern humans.
Extensive psychological research on dreams has also been conducted. The most famous researchers of dreams were Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Freud was a physiologist, medical doctor, psychologist and father of psychoanalysis. He is generally recognized as one of the most influential and authoritative thinkers of the twentieth century and refined concepts of the unconscious. Freud defined a dream as, "a disguised fulfillment of a repressed wish". Carl Jung was also a psychologist who specialized in psychiatry and became Sigmund's partner in the study of psychoanalysis. According to Jung dreaming is "the subconscious mind telling you what your awake mind is trying to avoid." Both Freud and Jung spent years studying dreams and how to uncover their meaning. Due to their research many methods of dream interpretation are used today.
Dreams can be interpreted in a number of ways. One theory is that certain objects stand for certain ideas. The meanings of these objects can be found in a dream dictionary, and then their meanings can be pondered from there. These meanings sometimes appear as predictions rather than interpretations of feelings. There can be many significant symbols in a dream, even seemingly small things have an interpretation such as food, or the setting of the dream. For example, important symbols in the nightmare I described earlier would be "bear", "night" and "running". According to "The Illustrated Dream Dictionary" by Russel Grant the meaning of these symbols is as follows: "if a bear attacks you look out , someone looks set to persecute you"; "night suggests obstacles and delays. A really dark night is a sign you are hiding your resentment towards someone who harmed you in the past"; "if you see yourself running you are trying to escape from a tricky situation, find yourself unable to run and it suggests a lack of self-confidence". Tying all these symbols together suggests that a person having this kind of nightmare may be lacking self confidence because of a past relationship or friendship and maybe needs to change their actions for their subconscious realizes someone is not liking how they are treating them.
Another approach to dream interpretation is having the dreamer try to make connections between the emotions they felt in the dream and the events occurring in their lives. This approach was used by Jung in order to get the full meaning of the collective unconscious experience. According to Jung, symbols did not have fixed meanings but should rather be interpreted as a discovery of a hidden feeling or conflict that needed to be resolved. Dreams are mostly metaphorical and NOT literal. The people and places in a dream are associated with a feeling, and the dreamer need only to figure out what emotion they stand for and why they are feeling that way. Hartman uses this method to evaluate and think about what her dreams may mean, "I wake up, write the dream down, and go back and look at them". This process of course can be quite "open for interpratation". Certain things to remember are that dreams often mean the opposite of what they seem to mean and recurring dreams relate that a past conflict or feeling has still not been dealt with and should be.
Dreams are still a mystery to scientists and psychologists who study them. Even those who have extensive knowledge on the subconscious are puzzled by their subjects. Trying to figure out what a dream means can be very intriguing and insightful so try it! Catch some Z's and see what experience your dreams will lead you through. Remember that, as guidetopsychology.com says, "all dreams are essentially telling us one thing...'WAKE UP!'". See if your walk through wonderland can't help you wake up to the conflicts and feelings dying to be more than a dream.
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