“Dreams are the touchstones of our character."
- Henry David Thoreau
Dreams have fascinated philosophers for thousands of years, but only recently have they been the subject of empirical research and scientific studies have focused on them.
First of all, the basic question is: what is a dream? A dream can contain any image, thoughts and emotions that are experienced during sleep. Dreams can be extraordinarily clear or very vague , they can be full of happy images, understand scary sensations, be understandable or unclear and confused.
Why do we dream? What are the dreams for?
Many theories have been proposed, but in none there is full consent. Considering the tremendous amount of time we spend in the dream state, the fact that researchers have not yet fully understood the purpose and mechanisms of dreams may seem puzzling. However, it is important to consider that science and research continue to study the exact purpose and function of sleep itself.
Some researchers suggest that dreaming serves no purpose except as a biological function, while others believe that the dream is fundamental to the mind, both for physical and emotional well-being.
Ernest Hartmann, director of the Sleep Disorders Center in Boston, together with other collaborators, elaborated the " Contemporary Dream Theory " : our brains create and unravel neural connections, but in all this process there is a connection .
Trauma and dream: The Connections
In practice, a beginning and an end; on the one hand there are the waking connections but as we continue along the procedure, the connections become more inaccurate and the mental activities become more approximate, an example is the daydreaming . In the opposite part are the dreams that are guided by the emotion of the dreamer .
When there is a precise emotion in the dreamer, dreams are often very simple. For example, people who have suffered a very strong trauma, like escaping from a burning building, often have dreams like "I was on the beach and I was being sucked by an anomalous wave". The dreamer is not exactly dreaming of the traumatic event, but relives the emotion of oppression. The more the dreamer is pervaded by a strong emotion, the more identifiable the sense of his dream will be.
What happens to the dreams of those who experience the trauma can be explained as follows:
In the early days exactly the trauma experienced is dreamed. With the passage of time we begin to dream different events but still traumatic (being sucked by a wave). In the following weeks dreams bring to life traumatic experiences of the past as well as the more recent ones.
With the passage of time, dreams incorporate and connect with other (more neutral) material, present in the subject's memory , and are no longer linked explicitly to the traumatic event experienced.
So the dream would be an interconnection of memories linked to others, until the disturbing action of emotion is bland. We could say that dreams function as erasers of experiences lived in reality!
Next, let's us look at two important theories about dreams.
Psychoanalytic dream Theory:
Consistent with the psychoanalytic perspective , Sigmund Freud's dream theory suggested that they are representation of unconscious desires. According to the Freudian psychoanalytic view of personality, people are guided by aggressive and sexual instincts that are repressed by conscious awareness.
While these thoughts are not consciously expressed, according to Freud, they find meaning in our awareness, through dreams.
In his famous book The Interpretation of Dreams , Freud wrote that dreams are "... fulfilments disguised as repressed desires." He also described two different components of dreams: the manifest content and the latent content.
The manifest content consists of the actual images, thoughts and contents present within the dream, while The latent content represents the hidden psychological meaning of the dream.
Freud's theory contributed to the popularity of dream interpretation, which is still very popular today. However, research has shown that the manifest content hides the true psychological meaning of a dream .
Dream Synthesis activation Model:
The dream synthesis activation model was proposed by J.Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley in 1977. According to this theory, the circuits in the brain are activated during REM sleep, which causes areas of the limbic system involved in emotions , feelings and memories, between the amygdala and the hippocampus, become active. The brain synthesizes and interprets this internal activity and tries to find meaning in these signals, translating into dreams. This model suggests that the dream is a personal interpretation of signals generated by the brain during sleep.
Although this theory suggests that dreams are the result of internally generated signals , Hobson does not believe that the dream is meaningless. >Instead, he argues that dreaming is "... our most creative state of consciousness, one in which new configurations of information are produced from the chaos of cognitive elements. Time spent to dream is not wasted time ".
Dreams are the result of our brain trying to interpret external stimuli during sleep. They are also used to clean up the mental disorder just like the operations of cleaning the hard disk on our PC. In practice, the mind is cleaned up for the next day.