Does dreams have any meaning

Do Dreams Have Meaning? What the Experts Believe

Some dreams slip away like minnows when you wake up and hazily try to grasp at them. Others remain vivid in your memory, so clear and unforgettable that, as the days pass, you might start to wonder if you actually dreamed them more than once.

Even if you don’t remember many (or any) of your dreams, you do still have them. While experts still have plenty to discover about dreams, they do generally agree that dreaming is part of the human experience.

You can cover a lot of ground in your dreams. Common experiences include:

sexy encounters with a crush
ordinary activities, like doing chores or buying groceries
terrifying experiences, like returning to high school or being chased by monsters

gaining superpowers or magical abilities

Whether your dreams are mundane or peculiar, you might want to know if they have any deeper significance. Experts haven’t come up with a clear answer, but you’ll find some main theories below — along with a few tips for decoding your own dreams.

Plenty of psychologists and other experts have theorized on the deeper meaning of dreams.

Freud’s theory of unconscious wish fulfillment

Psychologist Sigmund Freud had a lot to say about dreams (and not all of it related to sex).

He suggested that dreams helped protect people from waking up early when light or sound disrupted their sleep, but he also believed dreams pointed to buried desires.

Your sleeping brain creates what he called a “manifest dream” from snippets of everyday images, experiences, and memories. The manifest dream simplifies, reorganizes, and masks the “latent dream,” or your repressed and unconscious wishes.

In other words, the manifest dream uses various symbols and bizarre or unusual images to conceal the latent dream, or what you’re really dreaming about.

Jung’s theory of compensation and self-portrayal

Like Freud, Carl Jung believed dreams had meaning. Jung focused on specific archetypes, or patterns, that appear symbolically in dreams, theorizing that dreams could help explain daily events and balance out aspects of yourself you aren’t aware of yet.

Say, for example, you have a lighthearted relationship with your partner. You enjoy the same hobbies, have great sexual chemistry, and get along well — but you can’t shake the feeling that something deeper’s missing from your relationship.

One night, you dream the two of you are reviewing housing listings, wandering through the furniture section of a department store, and then, suddenly (in the abrupt nature of dreams), taking a leisurely walk through a quiet park.

Upon waking, you might realize your dream exposed some of the more mundane things absent in your relationship, while also suggesting you might want a relationship that includes thoughtful planning for the future along with fun.

Other key theories

Other dream researchers have offered their own theories as to the meaning of dreams.

Psychologist Calvin S. Hall considered dreams part of the cognition process, or a type of thinking that happens as you sleep.

Since the images that appear in dreams reflect elements of daily life, Hall believed dreams could offer important insight into how you view yourself and others, your problems and conflicts, and the world in general.

Linguist and philosopher George Lakoff believed dreams offered a metaphorical glimpse into daily challenges and life events. In other words, the abstract symbols appearing in your dreams represent real hardships.

Psychologist and dream researcher Rosalind Cartwright also tied dreams to significant life events and emotional experiences. She believed dreams played an important role in cognitive processes, including memory and emotion regulation.

Professor G. William Domhoff also connected dreams to daily experiences. The things you do and think about during the day can resurface in dreams, he suggested, while your emotional mindset helps shape their unique content.

Domhoff also noted that, although dreams may shed some light on heavy concerns, they might not have any real purpose. You forget most of your dreams, after all.

William Dement, who helped found the field of sleep medicine, similarly suggested that, while dreams may lack a clear purpose, they can still convey meaningful messages.

Many experts don’t believe dreams have much meaning, but believe they still serve a purpose.

Existing theories outline a few of these purposes.

Threat simulation theory

Some researchers suggest that dreams serve an important evolutionary purpose.

According to threat simulation theory, dreams offer the chance to practice identifying, avoiding, and dealing with potential threats. By safely handling these threats in your dreams, you might feel safer in your waking life.

Research from 2009 found some support for this theory by comparing dreams of children who had experienced trauma with children who hadn’t.

Of course, threat simulation theory can also tie into other theories about dream meaning. Traumatized children could, for example, have more threatening dreams, because they often feel afraid in daily life.

Activation-synthesis theory

According to the activation-synthesis theory, dreams are nothing more than a collection of random images and thoughts, projected during sleep as a result of normal brain activity.

These images don’t follow any narrative structure, thanks to the pons, your brain’s random dream generator. You create the story of your dream on your own, after waking up.

Supporters of this theory believe dreams can feel strange, because these random images often make little sense when they’re combined.

Dreams as emotional regulation

The unpleasant or unwanted emotions you experience in daily life can pop up in your dreams, too.

Anxiety, guilt, sadness, or fear can quickly get overwhelming. But some experts have theorized that navigating these feelings in dreamland can help you begin resolving these feelings without all the stress.

Wondering how that might work? Well, when you dream during the rapid eye movement (REM) stage of sleep, the parts of the brain that help regulate emotion and memory are active.

What’s not active is the chemical messenger noradrenaline, which can produce feelings of anxiety or stress.

Continual-activation theory

Your brain doesn’t completely shut down when you go to sleep. Instead, it uses this time to carry out important processes, including transferring short-term memories into long-term storage.

As you sleep, your brain also takes out the trash, in a manner of speaking, by getting rid of all the leftover, unnecessary information.

As your unconscious brain focuses on processing memories, activity in your conscious brain slows way down.

According to the continual-activation theory, this prompts your brain to send a flow of data from memory storage into the conscious brain. You can think of this data — aka your dreams — as a sort of screensaver keeping the conscious part of your brain up and running, despite the lack of actual activity.

Common themes and their potential meanings

No matter what scientific theories might suggest, people around the world have long believed in the significance of dreams and attempted to guess their meanings.

Dreams may seem so intriguing in part because they’re not fully understood. But certain dreams show up so often across generations and cultures that many people believe these common themes suggest that dreams do, in fact, have significance.

Here are some common dream themes, plus possible interpretations:

A dream about	Could mean
cheating on your partner	you’re having a hard time getting your needs met in the relationship, or you feel trapped in another area of your life
your partner cheating	you feel afraid of losing your partner or rejection in another area of life
failing a test	you’re facing some stress that you don’t feel ready to handle
being naked or experiencing other public embarrassment	you feel vulnerable and worry other people will notice your flaws
discovering money or treasure	you feel confident, worthy, and good about yourself
missing your bus or train	your everyday life leaves you frustrated and you believe you’re lacking something important
losing your teeth	you’re worried about aging, or you have insecurities around how other people perceive you
finding new rooms	you’re discovering new abilities, interests, or future possibilities for yourself
falling	you feel unsupported by loved ones, or as if you’re losing control over some aspect of your life
dying	you’re facing some unwelcome changes or you have some uncertainties about the future

Ready to dig a little deeper into your dreams? These strategies can help.

Make sure you’re getting quality sleep

Remembering your dreams is an important part of deciphering them.

Dream recall may happen more naturally when you get enough sleep. Aim for about 7 to 9 hours of sleep each night to get the right amount of REM sleep. This may, in turn, boost dream recall.

Tip
As you drift off to sleep, try repeating to yourself, “I’m going to dream vividly, and I’m going to remember those dreams when I wake up.”

Review the dream

When you wake up from a dream, your first instinct might be to reach for your dream journal. Instead, lie still for a moment and let the dream really marinate.

As you let each scene that comes to you unfold, try to open your awareness to any thoughts or feelings you experienced during the dream.

As you think back over the events of the dream, pay attention to any small details that stand out. They might seem minor in the light of day, but it’s very possible they had more significance in your dream.

Write it down

Once you’ve taken yourself through the dream, grab a notebook and write down everything you can remember. As you write, you might remember more key details that help shape the dream narrative.

Jot down everything you can think of — even if you aren’t sure exactly what happened. You might write, for example, “Wandering through forest alone, searching for someone or something. Not sure, but I felt lost and lonely.”

Keep track of details, like:

colors and sounds
other people in the dream
anything you said or heard someone else say
buildings or places you visited
moods and feelings
key objects in the dream, like cars, weapons, tools, or books

Tip
Keep a notebook and small lamp on your nightstand to make this process easier, especially if you tend to wake up in the middle of the night.

Even getting out of bed to find some paper can end up jarring fragments of the dream from your mind.

Make connections to your own life

Books that offer dream interpretations can be helpful, but you’ll often gain more insight by examining the dream from the unique lens of your experiences.

People have plenty of things to say about their own dreams, but someone else’s meaning might not hold true for you.

Maybe you dream about a rabbit eating grass in the park. At first, this might seem like a simple, even somewhat boring dream. But, when you dig a little deeper, you remember feeling happy and peaceful in the dream, and that you wanted a pet rabbit as a child.

Connecting these facts to your everyday life, you might conclude that spending time outside felt good and decide to visit the park more often. You also realize you’d enjoy having a pet in your life.

No one knows for certain what purpose dreams serve. But, at the end of the day, their true function might not really matter.

If you find them meaningful, then they have value to you.

Crystal Raypole has previously worked as a writer and editor for GoodTherapy. Her fields of interest include Asian languages and literature, Japanese translation, cooking, natural sciences, sex positivity, and mental health. In particular, she’s committed to helping decrease stigma around mental health issues.

Do Dreams Have Meaning? What the Experts Believe

You can cover a lot of ground in your dreams. Common experiences include:

sexy encounters with a crush
ordinary activities, like doing chores or buying groceries
terrifying experiences, like returning to high school or being chased by monsters
gaining superpowers or magical abilities

Plenty of psychologists and other experts have theorized on the deeper meaning of dreams.

Freud’s theory of unconscious wish fulfillment

Psychologist Sigmund Freud had a lot to say about dreams (and not all of it related to sex).

He suggested that dreams helped protect people from waking up early when light or sound disrupted their sleep, but he also believed dreams pointed to buried desires.

In other words, the manifest dream uses various symbols and bizarre or unusual images to conceal the latent dream, or what you’re really dreaming about.

Jung’s theory of compensation and self-portrayal

Other key theories

Other dream researchers have offered their own theories as to the meaning of dreams.

Psychologist Calvin S. Hall considered dreams part of the cognition process, or a type of thinking that happens as you sleep.

Domhoff also noted that, although dreams may shed some light on heavy concerns, they might not have any real purpose. You forget most of your dreams, after all.

William Dement, who helped found the field of sleep medicine, similarly suggested that, while dreams may lack a clear purpose, they can still convey meaningful messages.

Many experts don’t believe dreams have much meaning, but believe they still serve a purpose.

Existing theories outline a few of these purposes.

Threat simulation theory

Some researchers suggest that dreams serve an important evolutionary purpose.

Research from 2009 found some support for this theory by comparing dreams of children who had experienced trauma with children who hadn’t.

Activation-synthesis theory

According to the activation-synthesis theory, dreams are nothing more than a collection of random images and thoughts, projected during sleep as a result of normal brain activity.

These images don’t follow any narrative structure, thanks to the pons, your brain’s random dream generator. You create the story of your dream on your own, after waking up.

Supporters of this theory believe dreams can feel strange, because these random images often make little sense when they’re combined.

Dreams as emotional regulation

The unpleasant or unwanted emotions you experience in daily life can pop up in your dreams, too.

Wondering how that might work? Well, when you dream during the rapid eye movement (REM) stage of sleep, the parts of the brain that help regulate emotion and memory are active.

What’s not active is the chemical messenger noradrenaline, which can produce feelings of anxiety or stress.

Continual-activation theory

Your brain doesn’t completely shut down when you go to sleep. Instead, it uses this time to carry out important processes, including transferring short-term memories into long-term storage.

As you sleep, your brain also takes out the trash, in a manner of speaking, by getting rid of all the leftover, unnecessary information.

As your unconscious brain focuses on processing memories, activity in your conscious brain slows way down.

Common themes and their potential meanings

No matter what scientific theories might suggest, people around the world have long believed in the significance of dreams and attempted to guess their meanings.

Here are some common dream themes, plus possible interpretations:

A dream about	Could mean
cheating on your partner	you’re having a hard time getting your needs met in the relationship, or you feel trapped in another area of your life
your partner cheating	you feel afraid of losing your partner or rejection in another area of life
failing a test	you’re facing some stress that you don’t feel ready to handle
being naked or experiencing other public embarrassment	you feel vulnerable and worry other people will notice your flaws
discovering money or treasure	you feel confident, worthy, and good about yourself
missing your bus or train	your everyday life leaves you frustrated and you believe you’re lacking something important
losing your teeth	you’re worried about aging, or you have insecurities around how other people perceive you
finding new rooms	you’re discovering new abilities, interests, or future possibilities for yourself
falling	you feel unsupported by loved ones, or as if you’re losing control over some aspect of your life
dying	you’re facing some unwelcome changes or you have some uncertainties about the future

Ready to dig a little deeper into your dreams? These strategies can help.

Make sure you’re getting quality sleep

Remembering your dreams is an important part of deciphering them.

Dream recall may happen more naturally when you get enough sleep. Aim for about 7 to 9 hours of sleep each night to get the right amount of REM sleep. This may, in turn, boost dream recall.

Tip
As you drift off to sleep, try repeating to yourself, “I’m going to dream vividly, and I’m going to remember those dreams when I wake up.”

Review the dream

When you wake up from a dream, your first instinct might be to reach for your dream journal. Instead, lie still for a moment and let the dream really marinate.

As you let each scene that comes to you unfold, try to open your awareness to any thoughts or feelings you experienced during the dream.

Write it down

Once you’ve taken yourself through the dream, grab a notebook and write down everything you can remember. As you write, you might remember more key details that help shape the dream narrative.

Keep track of details, like:

colors and sounds
other people in the dream
anything you said or heard someone else say
buildings or places you visited
moods and feelings
key objects in the dream, like cars, weapons, tools, or books

Tip
Keep a notebook and small lamp on your nightstand to make this process easier, especially if you tend to wake up in the middle of the night.
Even getting out of bed to find some paper can end up jarring fragments of the dream from your mind.

Make connections to your own life

Books that offer dream interpretations can be helpful, but you’ll often gain more insight by examining the dream from the unique lens of your experiences.

People have plenty of things to say about their own dreams, but someone else’s meaning might not hold true for you.

No one knows for certain what purpose dreams serve. But, at the end of the day, their true function might not really matter.

If you find them meaningful, then they have value to you.

Do dreams really mean anything?

InoSMI materials contain only assessments of foreign media and do not reflect the position of the editors InoSMI

Whether dreams predict the future, allow us to communicate with the gods, or simply help us better understand ourselves, the analysis of dreams has always been highly symbolic. But what if there is no secret code, and we tried in vain to find meaning in random images? With the same success, people see clouds in the form of various objects. What if dreams don't really mean anything? nine0003

David B. Feldman

When I was 14, I had a dream that I remember to this day. It did not have a special plot, but remained in my memory all these years.

I wandered through the endless corridors of the old sinister mansion. Judging by the cobwebs that adorned the exquisite furniture, no one had lived there for a long time. Despite being abandoned, the house had electricity - many crystal lamps and chandeliers illuminated the gloomy interior. I was worried, but not scared. Like the hero of a horror movie, I felt an inexplicable desire to explore everything, although the fear took from the mere thought of what I might find. In the garage I found a broken carriage. The table was laid in the dining room, but no one was sitting at it. Throughout the house I found more and more crystal lamps. There seemed to be thousands of them on my way. nine0003

And then I woke up.

Dreams have fascinated people since the beginning of time. In ancient Egypt, it was believed that people who had vivid dreams had a special gift. Many dreams were even recorded on papyrus. The Egyptians believed that the best way to receive divine revelation was to have a prophetic dream. Some even slept on special consecrated "dream beds" to learn the wisdom of the gods.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, scientists abandoned ideas of the supernatural. Mysticism was replaced by the teachings of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. These eminent researchers believed that dreams can provide insight into the depths of our minds. In his book The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud described in detail the complex system of dream analysis. The theory was based on the belief that while consciousness is in a state of sleep, the unconscious part of the mind creates images that reflect our deepest experiences. nine0003

Whether dreams predict the future, allow us to communicate with the gods, or simply help us understand ourselves better, dream analysis has always been highly symbolic. To understand the meaning of a dream, we need to decipher it, as if it were written in a secret code. An online dream book on dreammoods.com will tell you that an abandoned house means “unfinished business”, dim lamps mean “emotional concerns”, a set table means “life instability”, and a garage means “uncertainties on the way to the goal”. So it turns out that at the age of 14 I was worried about uncertainty and instability in life. nine0003

But what if there is no secret code, and we tried in vain to find meaning in random images? With the same success, people see clouds in the form of various objects. What if dreams don't really mean anything?

This is the conclusion that some neuroscientists have come to in our time. They believe that dreams are just a side effect of basic neurological processes. Although people often think that the brain shuts down during sleep, scientists now know that sleep is a period of intense neurological activity. Perhaps we sleep in order to give the brain the opportunity to collect and process memories. Just like a computer needs to periodically optimize the space on a hard drive, our brain needs to constantly process the memories it receives. This process can be compared to cleaning - the unnecessary is swept away, and the important is carefully preserved. For example, according to studies, after a full sleep, people remember better what they learned the day before, but if the dream was interrupted, little remains in memory. That is why parents and teachers advise children to get enough sleep before taking exams. nine0003

Not all scientists agree with this, but many still believe that dreams are unintended consequences of the neurological processes described above and similar ones. Harvard psychiatrists John Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley, for example, suggested that the nighttime activity of certain areas of the brain provokes sensations, emotions and memories, but they are completely random. It is human nature to look for meaning everywhere, so the brain combines nerve impulses into a story. But in reality it doesn't mean anything. It's just an attempt to make sense of brain activity, which is why dreams seem so illogical and strange. nine0003

So why do people like reading dream books so much?

Perhaps this is due to the Barnum effect, named after showman Phineas Barnum. In 1948, psychology professor Bertram Forer first demonstrated this effect in action when he asked 39 of his students to take a personality test. The subjects had no idea that each of them would get exactly the same results, containing statements like "You really need other people to love and admire you" and also "You tend to be critical of yourself." The students were then asked to rate on a five-point scale how accurate the descriptions of their personality were. The average compliance rate was 4.3. Such a high score indicated that, despite the identity of the false characteristics, the students considered the test an almost ideal tool for analyzing their personality. nine0003

Over the following decades, Forer's experiment was replicated dozens of times: horoscopes, handwriting analysis, and—yes, yes—the interpretation of dreams became objects of study.

"Barnum's statements" are so easily taken for granted because of the flexibility of their interpretation. Although they seem specific, these characteristics apply to almost everyone - almost like an explanation for my haunted house dream. Isn't it possible for each of us to be called, to one degree or another, "reacting emotionally to the lack of balance and direction in life"? The same question can be asked about almost every symbol from the dream book. And, again, if any interpretations can suit everyone, they might as well not suit anyone. nine0003

However, some researchers believe that dreams still have a clearly defined purpose and meaning. Scientists Thoré Nielsen and Ross Levin have developed a theory that intersects the almost magical Freudian system of symbolic analysis of dreams and the belief that dreams are the product of completely random algorithms. Their theory, dubbed the “neurocognitive model of dreams,” is difficult to understand, to put it mildly, and cannot be fully explained within the scope of this article. Although Nielsen and Levin argue that dreams are closely related to the neurological processes of memory consolidation, they do not consider them to be arbitrary. On the contrary, they believe that the stories that the brain tells through supposedly random dreams are dictated, at least in part, by our emotional state. For example, as the number of negative events in real life increases, the likelihood of nightmares also increases. Perhaps that is why people with psychological trauma experience them more often. According to the theory, one of the most important tasks of dreams is what Nielsen and Lewin call "the expulsion of fear." According to them, dreams help us cope with stress and calm down, so that negative emotions bother us less during the day. When this system works flawlessly, dreams are created based on the stress and fears we experience. In a dream, negative emotions break down into components and are transformed into strange, but mostly harmless stories that help to cope with internal experiences. nine0003

Although, according to the neurocognitive theory of dreams, the symbols from my dream about the haunted house do not have any individual or broad meaning that I could find in the dream book, but perhaps it has a general emotional connotation. Like many 14-year-olds, I was prone to drama because of the stress I experienced as I grew up. These feelings were reflected in my dream.

So, while dreams may not be able to see the future, maintain contact with the other world, or approach the depths of the unconscious, they can tell something about our emotions. Considering that many of us stop understanding our condition from time to time, this opportunity is quite useful. nine0003

In other words, if you're having nightmares, you might want to think about your emotional state and think about what you can do to improve it.

I would suggest closing the dream book first.

What dreams mean and where they come from

If you dream that you are suffocating, this may be a sign of lung disease. If in a dream you were covered with earth, perhaps not everything is in order with your heart. You can learn to control your sleep - however, experienced oneironauts say that it's boring. About how scientists are trying to understand what a sleeping person sees and where prophetic dreams come from - in an excerpt from a new book by somnologist Mikhail Poluektov. nine0069

Riddles of sleep. From insomnia to lethargy

Mikhail Poluektov

Alpina non-fiction. 2019

[…] A systematic study of the influence of external stimuli on the content of dreams was carried out by Alfred Maury back in 1867. Here is what he tells about his experiments:

“The first observation. I was sequentially tickled with a feather on my lips and the tip of my nose. And I saw in a dream that I was subjected to terrible torture, that they put a resin mask on my face and then quickly tore it off, along with the skin of my lips, nose and face. nine0082

Second observation. At some distance from my ear, steel scissors were driven over metal tweezers. And I saw in a dream that I heard the ringing of bells, then this sound turned into an alarm - and it seemed to me that it was during the July days of 1848 ...

Ninth observation. A candle covered with red paper was passed before my eyes several times. And now I see a thunderstorm, lightning - and the memory of the terrible storm that I endured in the English Channel on the way from Mordle to Le Havre becomes the plot of my dream "*. nine0082
It's all Mori's fantasy! Can they be trusted? — Approx. scientific ed.
According to modern ideas, sensory sensation partially breaks through the "thalamic block" that occurs in the state of sleep and invades the fabric of the dream, modifying it. During much of REM sleep (the so-called tonic phase), from which it is quite easy to get out, the inclusion of a stimulus in the dream plot seems to prevent the sleeper from awakening. […]

It has been regularly found in dream content analysis since [sleep researcher] William Dement's early experiments that the number of words in which subjects describe their dream increases as the sleep period lengthens. More words - the dream lasts longer. The authors of these studies conclude that the duration of a dream reflects the natural flow of time. However, in a later study, it was shown that for long enough periods of sleep, after which a dream report was obtained, the number of words describing the dream changes along a sinusoid: at first their number increases, but after 45 minutes it begins to decrease. That is

dream time flows in accordance with astronomical time for half the sleep cycle, and then it begins to shrink more and more.

Based on the results of this work, carried out in 2001, the researchers suggested the presence in the brain of a dream generator with a 90-minute period. A definite answer to the question whether the flow of time in a dream corresponds to astronomical has not yet been received. Perhaps there are two types of dreams in which time flows differently**. nine0003 You can also refer to the work of Danilin and Latash, published at the time in Nature: New Biology. This whole story is built on a misunderstanding: there is no clear and generally accepted definition of a dream! Therefore, different researchers mean different things by this term: Fulkes, for example, finds dreams everywhere, even in wakefulness ... In fact, mental activity changes during sleep, but does not disappear completely, unlike anesthesia, coma, etc. In stage 1, these are hypnogagic hallucinations, in stages 2 and 3 - "thought-like" activity, gradually weakening with the deepening of non-REM sleep, and only in the REM phase - "true" dreams. The features of reports from REM sleep are well known to somnologists; their main characteristic, which differs from all other types of mental activity in sleep, is high emotionality, which is confirmed by objective data from neuroscanning. It is worth accepting these definitions and studying each type of mental activity in a dream separately - and everything will fall into place! — Approx. scientific ed. nine0002 For example, dreams upon awakening from REM sleep are vivid, emotional, more detailed, the maximum number of words used to describe a dream in REM sleep is four times higher than in non-REM sleep. REM dreams more often have a meaningful plot that unfolds in time (there is a narrative, i.e. narrative, structure), contain a lot of motor activity. This is because dreams in REM sleep are supposed to reflect the processes of consolidation of visual and emotional memory. At the same time, dreams told after waking up from slow-wave sleep are less definite, they are more like “dreams”, abstract reflections, often containing the plot of recent events or works read / seen. It is believed that these features of dreams in non-REM sleep may be a reflection of the process of consolidation of declarative memory (memory for events). […] nine0003
The use of high-resolution EEG (when 256 electrodes are placed on the head and neck area) by Giulio Tononi's group in 2017 made it possible to deepen our understanding of the connection between dreams and typical EEG patterns. The scientists found that the frequency of dream reports, on the one hand, correlates with a decrease in the power of delta activity in the posterior regions of the brain, and on the other hand, the power of gamma oscillations increases in the same areas of the brain. This confirms the common assumption that

Change in the number of words in dream reports depending on the duration of sleep in a certain phase

During the experience of dreams, the brain areas associated with visual perception (occipital region) and processing of sensory (sensory) information (parietal region) are most active.

At the same time, the activity of the mentioned brain areas is preserved regardless of whether the dreamer sees a dream in a slow sleep or in a fast one. One of the interesting findings of this study was the discovery of differences in brain activity depending on the certainty of the dream report. The subjects, who spoke in detail about dream images, demonstrated an increase in gamma activity in additional areas of the brain, which, according to the authors, are responsible for the concretization of images. In this regard, the discussion of the question resumed: is it possible to understand at all what exactly a person saw in a dream? nine0003
This question was raised back in 2011 by a group of German scientists from the Max Planck Institute who studied lucid dreams. Lucid (lucid) dreams are those in which a person understands that he is sleeping and can partially control the content of his dream. Maintaining volitional control in a dream can be learned. The pioneer of lucid dream research was the American psychophysiologist Stephen LaBerge. In the 1980s at Stanford University, he conducted a series of studies aimed at studying this phenomenon. It has been shown that lucidity is not usually very characteristic of dreams: 20% of people in the general population have such dreams at least once a month, and only 1% - several times a week. It was also found that during lucid dreaming, a person's EEG behaves differently than it should in REM or non-REM sleep. At this time, fast frequencies appear on the EEG - alpha and gamma rhythms, reflecting the presence of directed attention. nine0003
Stephen LaBerge developed techniques for teaching people to have lucid dreams. The key to one of the techniques made famous by Christopher Nolan's Inception is to constantly ask yourself, "Am I dreaming?" To do this, a reality check is carried out - an element of the environment with known physical properties is selected and its behavior is evaluated. In the film, it was a spinning top that could spin indefinitely in a dream, despite the fact that the force of friction in the real world would not allow this. People trained in lucid dreaming are called oneironauts ( oneiros in Greek "dream, dream"). For experimental purposes, they are trained to signal that they have already realized that they are asleep with the help of characteristic left-right eye movements (this story is no longer from a movie, but from real life). With the use of such trained volunteers, the study of the neurophysiological correlates of lucid dreaming is carried out and, in general, the so-called "higher-level consciousness", which is characteristic only of people, is being studied.

Despite the temptation to learn how to control your dream and the real possibility for most people to do this, the technique of lucid dreaming, in general, remains unclaimed. On the one hand, this is due to the large expenditure of time and effort to master it. The situation is exactly the same in real life with auto-training or yoga - everyone knows that this is good and good for health, but only a few manage to go through the entire training cycle. On the other hand, I was recently struck by an opinion expressed at one of the sleep seminars at the Central House of Scientists by a man who had learned to control his dreams. He said that at first he was pleased with the newfound ability, because he was able to make fantastic journeys, meet wonderful women in his dreams. But rather quickly these dreams bored him. He couldn't come up with anything new and lost interest in them. So

From a practical point of view, lucid dreaming is not for everyone. Consciousness researchers and psychotherapists are most interested in using this phenomenon.

Based on the concept of the unconscious, a person who has learned to control a dream can, under the guidance of a psychotherapist, realize the symbolic meaning of his dreams. Even without these "psychoanalytic tricks," lucid dreams have proved useful in dealing with nightmares, enabling the person to actively counter or even befriend the terrifying dream images. nine0003
[In the work of German scientists on the study of motor activity in lucid dreams], six subjects trained to enter the state of lucid dreaming were given the task: after they realized that they were in their dream, they had to give a standard signal with their eyes (look to the right -left), and after that make the established movement with the hand - clench it into a fist. At the same time, they slept "in the tube" of a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the brain. Two subjects were able to fully complete the task. Changes in the fMRI pattern, which were observed in the sensorimotor area of the brain of oneironauts during the movement imagined in a dream, turned out to be identical to those that occurred during the control study in wakefulness, when they squeezed the hand or imagined squeezing it. Scientists have suggested that in the future,

having accumulated many “elementary patterns” of movements that appear in a dream, we will be able to decipher its code - to understand what action is presented to a person when he sees a dream.

Additional confirmation of the ability to understand what a sleeping person sees was obtained in 2013 by a group of scientists from Japan while studying patterns of visual perception in the process of dreams. In this experiment, using fMRI, it was determined which area of the brain was activated when viewing various images, and then these indicators were compared with the results of the description by the subjects of what they saw in a dream. It turned out that it was possible to identify specific patterns of activity in the visual cortex corresponding to elementary images that, according to the reports of the subjects, were encountered in a dream, for example, the image of a building, a car, a woman, etc. It is possible that further research will also decode the visual (visual) series dreams, despite the fact that a holistic representation, according to the classical theory, is formed as a result of the interaction of several brain areas, and not the work of just one area of the visual cortex. […] nine0003
The areas of the brain associated with movement and sensation, located in the posterior sections of the frontal and anterior sections of the parietal lobe, despite the fact that they are activated during dreams, do not cause a response visible from the side - movements and sensations in a dream are only "seen" by a person, just as a mentally ill person in a state of hallucinosis sees and hears something, it seems to him that he is actively acting, but none of this is recorded by an external observer. The bizarreness of dream plots is explained by the reactivation of memory traces associated with the perception of information about what the sleeper did or saw, while more recent or more important memory traces for a person are reactivated statistically significantly more often than memories of what happened a long time ago, it just takes less time to excite fresh traces. electrical signal intensity. nine0003

According to the theory of [American psychiatrist] Hobson, the dream state is closer to a mental illness, such as schizophrenia, than to ordinary wakefulness.

Schizophrenia is characterized by excessive activity of the "inner life" (hallucinations) with a paucity of external manifestations (apathy, poverty of emotions). From the point of view of the authors of the theory, to the greatest extent, the "switching" of sensations from external to internal, the change in the processes of memorization and perception is characteristic of REM sleep, but it can also occur in its slow phase, only to a lesser extent. This explains both the lower frequency of dream reports in non-REM sleep and the different nature of dream reports in it (more calm, dreamlike). From Hobson's point of view, during late periods of non-REM sleep (which occur already in the morning), the brain activation processes characteristic of REM sleep are introduced into the phase of non-REM sleep, anticipating the onset of the next period of REM sleep. More aphoristically, Hobson's activation-synthetic theory of dreams can be formulated as "tales that the brain tells itself." […] nine0003
The psychoanalytic concept of dreams created by Freud and his followers put an end to attempts to single out universal dream symbols for interpretation. Carl Gustav Jung wrote: “In a broader sense, it would be a great folly to assume that there is a ready-made systematic interpreter of dreams that you just need to buy and find the appropriate symbol in it. Not a single symbol of sleep can be taken separately from the person who saw this dream, just as there is no single unambiguous interpretation of any dream. Each person differs so much in the way in which his unconscious complements or compensates for consciousness that it is completely impossible to be sure that dreams and their symbolism can be in any way classified. True, there are dreams and individual symbols (I would prefer to call them "motives") that are quite typical and often encountered. Among such motives, the most frequent are falling, flying, being pursued by predatory animals or enemies, appearing in public places in a naked or half-naked form or in ridiculous clothes, a state of haste or loss in an unorganized crowd, fighting unarmed or with unusable weapons, exhausting running away to nowhere. ... But it should be emphasized that these motifs must be considered in the context of the entire dream, and not as self-explanatory ciphers. nine0003
What about dreams, which can show the future not in the form of some kind of ciphers, but in an explicit form? The most complete and detailed classification of the so-called prophetic dreams was proposed by the American psychologists Stanley Kripner and Joseph Dillard in 2001 in the book Dreams and Creative Problem Solving. Here we present this classification with the addition of "dreams about illness" made by Professor E.A. Korabelnikova.

Coincidence dreams. nine0003

Dreams-inferences in which the dreamer intuitively compares information, often perceived outside the knowledge of the waking consciousness, which is then transformed in a dream into a correct assessment of future events. So, Mikhail Vasilievich Lomonosov once saw in a dream his father, who died after a shipwreck, on a deserted island. His friend describes these events in this way: “On the way back by sea to the fatherland (from Germany, where he studied), he once dreamed that he saw his father, thrown out after a shipwreck, on an uninhabited island in the Arctic Sea, to which he had visited in his youth once brought with him by a storm ... I found my brother there (in Moscow. - Approx. Aut.) and heard from him that their father of the same year, after the first opening of the waters, went, as usual, to the sea for fishing; that four months have already passed, and neither he, nor anyone else from his artel who traveled with him, has yet returned . .. In the same autumn, the body of Vasily Lomonosov was truly found exactly on that empty island and buried, laying a large stone on the grave. In this case, Mikhailo Lomonosov, who was born and brought up in a family of Pomors, was aware of the danger they were exposed to when going fishing, and, apparently, represented the sailing routes of fishermen. This information, against the background of parting with the family and worry about relatives, at some point formed a forecast that had a high probability of coming true. nine0003

Self-fulfilling predictions, that is, those cases when a person who has seen a dream begins to unconsciously behave in such a way that the dream comes true. Such a case is described by K.G. Jung: “Another typical case happened to a lady who was overly moral. During the day she was haughty and arrogant, but at night she had dreams filled with a wide variety of obscenities. When I suspected their presence, the lady indignantly refused to admit it. But the dreams, meanwhile, continued, and their content became more threatening and reminiscent of the walks that this woman used to take in the forest, during which she indulged in her fantasies. I saw danger in this, but she did not heed my warnings. Soon, a sexual maniac attacked her in the forest, and only the intervention of people who heard cries for help saved her from imminent murder. nine0003

Pseudo-anomalous dreams, about the content of which a person either consciously lies, unconsciously fabricates or distorts the facts. So, for example, the dream of Scipio mentioned at the beginning of the chapter was invented by Cicero to enhance the instructive effect of his work.

Abnormal dreams in which the incoming information may be beyond anything known to the science of space, time or energy.

Dreams about illness. Soviet researcher Vasily Nikolaevich Kasatkin at 19In 83 he published a unique monograph "The Theory of Dreams", which became a generalization of 47,000 observations of dreams made by him. In it, he described in detail the features of the dreams of people suffering from various diseases. Often these unusual dreams were harbingers of the development of the disease. According to the observations of V.N. Kasatkina,

dreams of people with lung diseases are characterized by plots of drowning, squeezing through a narrow hole, strangulation. In case of heart disease, a person in a dream can see that he was covered with earth or he was hit by a stone, wounded in the region of the heart, while he wakes up with a feeling of fear. nine0003

E.A. Korabelnikova also showed that in people with neurosis, dreams are more common, they are more vivid, emotional. The features of perception in the dreams of patients with neurotic disorders also included: a large proportion of the novelty factor (appearance of strangers, surroundings), symptoms of direct and reverse "age transference" (perception of oneself older or younger than one's age). While the events in the dreams of healthy people predominantly occurred in the present, patients with neuroses more often experienced events of the past and future.
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