The Meaning Behind Dreams

By Easha P.

After a long, tiring day, one could argue that the best part is when you get to lay  down, close your eyes, go to sleep, and let your imagination whisk you away, through what we all know as a dream! What exactly is a dream? A dream is a series of thoughts, images, and sensations occurring in a person's mind during sleep, having a lot of variety as it is all a part of your own imagination. I, personally, enjoy the complexity of dreams, as well as the adventures I experience throughout. Dreams show another world, separate from the reality we live in. Dreams may seem like a small story in your head but it’s actually spiraled around many things involved in your brain. This is called dream interpretation. Let’s take a look at different aspects of dreams including how dreams usually occur during rem sleep, lucid dreaming, and the meaning of other types of dreams too!

Dreams can be a mix of so many emotions: happy, sad, frightening, boring, fantastical, calming, or basically any mood you can think of! Contrary to what many might think, there are actually a lot of stages in sleeping. The most vivid dreams usually happen during REM sleep, which first occurs after about 90 minutes of sleeping. REM, which stands for rapid eye movement, shows more mixed frequency brain activity than when you’re awake. Your breathing becomes more rapid and your heart rate increases, almost nearing the levels you reach when you are awake. Your arms and legs become temporarily paralyzed, stopping you from talking in your sleep, moving, etc. When your REM cycle is complete, it is the optimal time for you to wake up, because REM puts you in deep sleep that will be tiring to wake up from. When your REM cycle completes, you start to wake up from that deep sleep, making yourself more vulnerable to waking up in a less tired state. Sometimes, you know how no matter how much you think and recall your dream you can’t remember what happened at all? If you wake up in the middle of the REM cycle, you will not be able to recall your dreams. There are also 3 other stages of sleeping called Stage 1, Stage 2, and Stage 3. Stage 1 is when you just enter a state of rest and begin to sleep. Stage 2 is the period of light sleep before you go into a state of deep sleep. Stage 3 is when you are in deep sleep, which is the part you need in order to feel refreshed and awake the next morning.

Source: https://www.sleepfoundation.org/stages-of-sleep/rem-sleep

Next, let’s take a look at the types of dreaming. One of the most prominent types is lucid dreaming. In a condensed manner, lucid dreaming is basically being aware that you are dreaming and having the ability to control those dreams through your subconscious mindset. Our subconscious mind is the part of our mind that we are not aware of, but still holds great power in our day to day activities. This part of our mind is what assists the remembrance of memories and skills we have known our entire life. Thus, it plays a vital role in dreaming, since it helps form a pathway between the conscious mind that we are aware of in our reality, and our subconscious mind holding our memories and fears. This is a main factor that leads to the effect of different dreams we have. When we are in control of our subconscious mind, we are able to interpret and alter our dreams, according to our own desires, but this is not an easy task. As studies have shown, this phenomenon is very rare, as only 1% of the general population is able to effectively lucid dream several times a week. This is due to the fact that lucid dreaming is hard to achieve when people are trying to be in control of their subconscious mind. Moreover, many methods are applied to help fabricate the reality of lucid dreaming. 

Another type of dreaming is, what many would say, just the “standard” version, which depends on the individual and will vary greatly. For example, most people dream in color, but some dreams are in black and white. The less stressed you are, the more pleasant your dreams will be, and sometimes you can even smell, touch, and feel your dreams. And then, of course, there are also nightmares, though there is not always a good reason why. Some potential causes of nightmares include watching or reading something scary before bedtime, sleep deprivation, being stressed, having anxiety, eating right before sleeping, or being sick. The 3 most common themes for nightmares are death, physical violence, and being chased and/or hunted. This makes sense to me because one dream that I had was when I was being chased by a non-existent animal! I woke up screaming from fear, relieved to know that it was just a dream! There is also another similar type of dreaming called a night terror. The differences between night terrors and nightmares are seen through the fact that Night terrors usually happen in Non-REM sleep, are more common in children, and are easily forgotten. There are also healing dreams, daydreams, recurring dreams, prophetic dreams (which kind of show the future), vivid dreams, and more, which basically speak for themself. 

So now, we have seen a lot of depth to provide support in view that dreams are very interesting and are not just a tiny part that has no meaning behind it. It is, in fact, the opposite of that! While no scientist knows exactly the story about dreams; the meanings, the types, and more… we can clearly see that rem sleep is one of the fascinating stages of sleeping, lucid dreaming is a very riveting thing to achieve, and that there are many meanings and root causes to dreams! Even though we don’t know the full outlook of these captivating dreams, we can now ponder on our dreams in a better way than before! All of these aspects of a dream is something that many do not think about when they put their heads on their pillows at night, but knowing all of these intriguing puzzle pieces of dreaming can be such an eye-opening experience which can then allow us to ponder upon the true complexities of dreams.