Despite the fact that sleep and awakening are very different both in terms of content and sensation, both states are deeply complex. It's no secret that children's dreams are different from those of adults. Children dream of emotional interactions with family members, friends, and scary animals, while adults dream of other adults. The dreams of young adolescents are filled with social interactions between the sleeper and his friends and important personalities. The dreams of a man differ significantly from the dreams of women, and women dream equally of men and women, and men dream more of other men. Adults dream of creative work, legacies and incessant problems, while the dreams of dying people are filled with supernatural agents, the other world, and visions of people long gone. Dreams,who carry the child into the social world of his caregivers at the beginning of life, gently send the sleeper into the arms of loved ones when life comes to an end. Dreams accompany us literally from cradle to grave.
If we shift our focus away from the study of lifelong dreams and focus on dreams that occur during the night, we still find significant heterogeneity. Rapid eye movement (REM) is followed by sleep episodes that are not REM during the night, and as morning falls, the latter episodes become shorter and REM longer. We can spend up to 45 minutes in the REM phase before waking up in the morning. Dreams seen during the REM phase are very different from other dreams. The former are filled with aggression, while the latter are not. Dreams that occur early in the night (mostly non-rapid eye movements) tend to pose an emotional problem that persists in other dreams that night. Emotional memories are passed back and forth between phases throughout the night,until they finally settle in the form of long-term memory in the cerebral cortex. The sleeping brain also actively retrieves older memories in storage as the night progresses. Dreams in the early morning REM phase contain more references and memories of early childhood than dreams that occur at the beginning of the night.
Dreams differ not only within life or one night, they also differ within historical eras. The dreams of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and indeed the dreams of ancient people, were considered portals to the spiritual world and the habitat of ancestors and gods. Ancient people (and even modern people) often saw in their dreams an opportunity to connect with the spirit of someone who asks for help or interferes in everyday life.
Sleep states also differ in intensity: the more intense the physiological arousal during the REM phase, the more strange the dream content is. For example, ordinary dreams about work are less intense than “big” and epic dreams. Such epic dreams often include scenes depicting fantasy worlds that the dreamer visits frequently and repeatedly over several dream episodes. Ordinary dreams, on the other hand, contain quite ordinary and stereotypical content, when the dreamer does nothing special, only communicates with one or two familiar characters.
A slightly more intense version of a regular dream about a routine includes familiar and unfamiliar characters. Unfamiliar characters tend to appear as male strangers and repeat their sleep-to-sleep visits as they become more intense. At a high level of intensity, the dreamer and other characters twist into a series of events and actions, united by some goal-setting narrative. The characters are thrown into a fast-paced dramatic story, with rapid plot changes and a lot of emotional conflict. As the level of intensity increases, even more bizarre visual features enter the sleep. Aliens, impossible events, supernatural creatures and metaphorical transformations of characters enter the dream.
Characters in dreams not only differ from the dreamer's waking consciousness, they can literally take control of that consciousness. Dreams of patients with dissociative identity disorder and multiple personality disorder may include manifestations of purlists. Often, a person from the inside out first comes in a dream, and then takes control over a person's behavioral repertoire and becomes an everyday person. The dreamer often experiences a transition from his primary personality to another during sleep. In that case, who is dreaming whom?
Isolated sleep paralysis, in which a person is unable to move or speak upon awakening, occurs when part of the dreamer's consciousness is awake and another remains asleep. The ensuing dream can be quite frightening: the person sees a hallucination of a malevolent presence that somehow tries to interact with him. Most often it is a demon, whose purpose is to take possession of a person or destroy him.
On the other hand, false awakening dreams attract the subjective experience of awakening without getting the person out of their sleep state. The dreamer feels as if he has woken up and then goes about his daily activities, getting dressed and brushing his teeth. By completing these routine tasks, the dreamer finally wakes up for real. Often dreams within dreams contain references to previous dream scenes and characters. The dreamer may wake up in the same place where the dream took place prior to the false awakening. The dreamer can go through several false awakenings before actually waking up.
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There are also characters that we can only encounter in a dream. The dead, for example, never appear to an awakened consciousness, but can peep into our dreams, looking alive and well and carrying a message for the dreamer. These dreams are usually clear, vivid and intense, and feel completely real.
What does all this mean? That the vast variety of sleep states suggests that dreaming is just as important as wakefulness to the biological state of the body and likely has many generative mechanisms and functions. For example, scary dreams are more likely to help us deal with threats during the daytime, while recurring dreams involving the same characters or locations support or alter the cognitive architecture of the dream itself. Dreams come to us regardless of what happens in the waking state, and, most likely, they refer us to something in the dream state, about which science is just beginning to guess.
Ilya Khel