The classic definition of dreams can be stated as - Dreams are a universal human experience that can be determined as a state of consciousness characterized by sensory, emotional occurrences during sleep.
In simple terms, dreams are just like stories and pictures that our brain create while we sleep. They can be of many kinds such as entertaining, fun, romantic, scary, and can be disturbing.
There are lots of question arises -why do dreams occur? What causes them? Can we control them?
There are different views about dreams. Many people are denying the reality of dreams, they just believe dreams are the mental confusion and unconscious feeling, nothing more than that. But however many believe in reality of dreams, according to them dreams are meaningful.
Facts on dreams
We may not remember our dreams, about 95 percent of dreams are forgotten by the times someone wakes up.
Blind people can also dream with sensory components.
Every person dreams approximately 3 to 6 times per night, and each dream last about 5 minutes- 20 minutes.
We dream with our sensations of hearing, speaking and seeing things, but there is no sense of taste and smell.
Causes
-Dream act as a psychotherapy while we are asleep.
-Dreams are the result of information that our mind collect throughout the day.
-Sometimes our unconscious desires or wishes are represented by our dreams.
-Dreams occur by the nature, which makes it difficult to study, but new researches give a good deal of information about dreaming. But still, there is a long road ahead regarding full understanding of dreams.
Types of Dream
Nightmare - The distressing kind of dream are the nightmares, in which dreamer feel disturbing emotion. Fear, stress, illness and anxiety are reactions to a nightmare.
Lucid dreams - In which the dreamer knows that they are dreaming. In this kind of dream, they may have some control over their dream.
Interpretation - What we think in our mind before going to bed could affect our dream.
Memories - The concept of "repression". Some undesirable memories could become suppressed in mind. Dreams ease repression by allowing these memories to he reinstated.
A hypothesis stating that dreams reflect waking life experience of psychiatric patients and patients with sleep disorder. In short, their daytime problems and symptoms reflected in their dreams.
Phases of sleep and dreams.
Our sleep cycle is categorized into 2 stages.
Non REM (Rapid eye movement) sleep and REM sleep. These stages occur in cycles and most dreams are known to occur in REM stage which usually happen about an hour later when we fall asleep.
Psychology and dreams
Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalytic theory is largely based on interpretation of dreams which he considered as manifestation of our inappropriate hence repressed desires. However, his theory is not considered a very correct in current times, but it provides information about three layers of consciousness of our mind and how dreams emerge as an outcome of tussle between those layers.
So at last, we can say that everyone dreams, we may or may not remember all those dreams, but it can provide us an insight to our inner state, it can alter our mood in both positive and negative ways, but as a whole it makes our sleep exciting.
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