subject: Ever Wondered The Theory Behind Dreaming [print this page] Many times you might have woken up puzzling over the mysterious and fascinating events that crossed in your mind when youre asleep. Events of extreme vivid or realistic or unpleasantness, filled with anxiety or outright fear; it can be a series of thoughts and emotions filled with joyful events of mental imagery. It might be the imagery expression of your internal life emotions with a blend of incongruent ingredients to evoke feelings that create more stir than the verbose descriptions can do and with no logic connection attached. Yes! Its Dream. A dream is the chronological sequence of images produced by the brain from the past information and incidents occurred in your life, screened from the memory and crosses over your mind during sleep. When a strong desire is not fulfilled in your conscious state, you obtain the gratification of it in your dream. The mind is freer in the dreaming state.
Often you might have pondered over the cause of dreams. Some believe that its the subconscious mind speaking to you with your brain uncovering the deepest thoughts and emotions while you are asleep.
As I was surfing the pages of an online magazine on my PC wired up with ATT Uverse Internet, an interesting article on the theories involved in dreaming caught my attention. For thousands of years, people have mulled over the concept of dreams. Ancient civilizations related dreams as a means of conversation with Gods. In fact, the people of Greek and Roman empires believed that dreams are associated with occult arts. It is always a best way to study a topic by tracing down its history on the research and theories that formulated in the hands of eminent authors and theorists.
Even though there was a lot of speculation on the interpretation theories of dreams, two eminent researchers associated with the theory of dreams in the end of the nineteenth century were Sigmund Freud and his disciple Carl Jung and their theories based that dreams had psychological representation. Freuds psychoanalytical theory opened up a new arena of discussion and explanations and he called dreams as an expression of unconscious desires and repressed thoughts. Freud suggested that dreams made us experience our unconscious wishes that are nearly impossible to accomplish in real.
Dreams create a virtual world where we can do all things that we cannot do in our more repressed real lives. For instance, if you dream about winning a competition, its simply because youre obsessed with the fame and credits and the joy you get in the win and that you need to consider your competitive strengths and realistically look at the current challenges. It is this psychosomatic theory of dreams that creates an imagery which is disconnected from your conscious self and pulls material from sensory memory with an output resulting in the visions we experience in sleep.
A recent clinical study of brain scans made on the people after they went to sleep suggests that a segment of brain managing emotions slowed down during the rapid eye movement - REM or a stage when there are imagery occurrences and most vivid dreams occurring in your mind. This reveals that you are actually able to go through emotional stuff in a less rational and defensive frame of mind after experiencing it in dreams. It gears up you to confront difficult and surprising emotions. But dreams should not be mistaken as a remedy to cure emotional concussions. It should not be believed that the REM stage will completely dissipate bad memories. It just helps you to improve the ability to handle stressful situations.
Despite many theories, dreams are still a complex subject to realize and there are many more on going researches worldwide and scientists are still contemplating to understand its purpose in sleep.
