At a young age, our heads would hit the pillow and our parents would sing, “Sweet dreams.” A kiss on the forehead followed by a night full of wonders; we would dream of ourselves flying with dragons, playing with magic, or bending time and space. Fantastic features of the human brain! But dreams are not limited to just superpowers and space exploration. They can exaggerate the most mundane experiences as well, with the most common dreams consisting of falling down (a building, stairs, etc), being chased (by almost anything), or the scariest of them all: your teeth falling out.
Funnily enough, these occurrences may not be a singular random experience, but may potentially be a consequence of our consciously lived experiences. Although it is not to be taken literally that our teeth will fall off on a random day, it may be interpreted as something beyond its strict action.
In medical terminology, a dream is a state of body and mind that can portray sensory, motor, and emotional experiences while asleep. It is accompanied by visual imagery and/or activity that is triggered when our bodies enter the REM sleep stage. So, what is the REM sleep stage and how do we end up dreaming?
The Sleep Stages
Before we reach the unconscious state of mind, our bodies fall into a series of stages. These stages consist of N1, our lightest stage of sleep, N2, a deeper sleep stage in which our heart rate and body temperatures drop, N3, our deepest non-REM sleep stage that makes our bodies difficult to wake up, and the final stage, REM, also known as rapid eye movement.
The REM stage is when most dreams occur, similar to the N3 stage, our bodies display irregular muscle movements that cause us to physically act out certain behaviors in our dreams. Although REM is not necessarily the only sleep stage in which dreams occur, it is primarily associated with dreams.
These stages cycle throughout the night with different durations for each stage. It progresses into brain activity that shows up as dreams. Although sleep rejuvenates our bodies, such as regrowing tissues, building bones and muscle, as well as strengthening the immune system, it also entails a series of night terrors, sleepwalking, and bedwetting when we enter the two final stages of the sleep cycle.
The Study of Dreams
In an interview with Bellevue College’s Professor Leo Kiralla, he associated dreams with the Ancient World, Eastern philosophy and Aristotle. “Very early on people were fascinated with dreams. Dreams are in the Bible, the Quran as well. And lots of other older text. The idea is that dreams sort of portend or predict the future in some way. Throughout time, people have had different understandings of dreams;
“The actual science of studying dreams is pretty new. In a scientific sense, it’s only been studied in the last 40 years, and even at that, it’s very hard to study dreams scientifically. One is because dreams are a subjective phenomenological experience, meaning that you can only know about a dream from somebody telling you [about the dream]- That, somebody telling you about it is an altered state of consciousness. That’s a very difficult part about trying to understand dreams,” he stated.
Despite the subjectivity of dream interpretations, the question of why we dream can be answered from a technical standpoint. As Professor Kiralla clarified, “A scientific answer as to why we dream is for memory, for problem solving, for creativity, for being able to balance and manage our emotions, to filter what is important for our memory to hold on to, for experiences we need to make sense of…”
Because of the different cultures present in the world, dreams go beyond our conscious experiences. It is noted that it can also be a hallucinatory experience. “If it happened in your waking life, it would be almost like a sign of pathology.”
Sigmund Freud and Interpretations of Symbolism
As Professor Kiralla’s interview continued, he touched on the famous works of a renowned Austrian neurologist, Sigmund Freud. He stated, “Since the late 70’s and 80’s, we have had FMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and been able to work with imaging techniques with the brain, so we can see parts of the brain that light up when people are having experiences. Even at that, it’s kind of tricky. If I go a step further, at the turn of the century- In the 1900’s, Sigmund Freud and his protege, Carl Jung, [they ]came up with the theories that there is a language and semiotics. A symbolism that is embedded in dream life.”
Sigmund Freud, often referred to as the “Father of Modern Psychology”, developed theories about dreams through his published work entitled “The Interpretation of Dreams (1899)”, which birthed the concept of psychoanalysis that influenced modern psychology and psychiatry to further develop the understanding of patients and their minds.
“The interpretation of dreams is the royal road of a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.” – Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1899)
Sigmund Freud discussed that dreams may potentially provide insight into the unconscious mind, which may have unresolved issues or desires that are unfulfilled. Although at his present time, dreams were considered meaningless or uninterpretable without any religious context, Freud proposed the idea that dreams are the mind’s desires, thoughts, and/or motivations that have been ignored due to repression.
His most controversial theory of dreams stems from symbolism, which claims that certain objects symbolize a specific meaning. These Freudian dream symbols feature mostly interpretations of human life. For example, a person will often be represented as a house in a dream and birth represents a reference to water.
The interpretation of dreams is not limited to Western culture, but indigenous groups perceive these dreams as an alternate reality. With Indigenous Americans, dreams are viewed as an inaccessible world rather than subconscious desires. An example of this would be the Indigenous leader Kopenawa and anthropologist Bruce Albert, who stated the individualistic nature of psychoanalysis of dreams, in which Western culture, in the context of dreams, is egocentric.
The Connection Between Our State of Minds
Dreams are interconnected with our emotional levels, which can be influenced by a variety of mental health aspects such as anxiety and depression. It causes dreams to be subjective to our stress levels, creating a bridge between the gap of conscious and subconscious activities. It affects what we dream and how we dream.
As mentioned by Professor Kiralla, “If you’re suffering from a diagnosis such as PTSD, if you have experienced trauma, that will greatly impact your dream life. You may even have nightmares that may directly bring up content from trauma or indirectly bring up content from trauma that may wake you up, interrupt your sleep. Our brains are looking for patterns and looking to predict, to some degree, what it’s going to experience so it can keep you safe, it can keep you alive, it can allow you to reproduce your evolutionary needs.”
“When you go to sleep, you are resting and you are in that restful state, your brain is thinking: What are all the things that I am learning that I need to make sense of so that I can enhance the way that I move through the world.”
Different conditions may also affect how we dream and what we dream, such as alcohol and stress, which induce more nightmares. Anxiety can cause more vivid dreams, which can involve drowning, storms, being chased, falling, etc. Our bodies enter the fight or flight mode, which will leave our minds distressed, even when entering the waking stage.
Mark Blagrove, in Episode 258 of the Speaking of Psychology podcast, stated that the oldest theory of why we dream claims an interconnection between our memories. “We’re connecting our recent experiences with past experiences in order to consolidate or make permanent and make interconnected- The memories.” Blagrove continues about the threat simulation theory, which theorizes that our dreams practice us to overcome certain threats, “So for example, Kim, you’ve just said the threat of being unprepared for an exam, maybe we actually dream of these awful circumstances in order to practice overcoming them in a safe environment.”
The realism of dreams can be ambiguous because psychological stress may distort the symbolism that may or may not be present. Its subjectivity ultimately relies on the person’s state of mind; whether it is experiencing peacefulness or guilt, it will most likely show up in the dream world one way or the other.
