Dreaming is the only "area" of human civilization that cannot be mapped. It has taken humans thousands of years to understand why our brains are capable of creating strange and otherworldly landscapes and situations during sleep.
Scientists today explained what happens to our bodies when we fall asleep and why we need sleep at all. As it turns out, there are several strange connections between reality and the surreal imagery of the dream world.
The dreams of lonely people are brighter and richer
All people dream, however, in completely different ways. This was discovered in 2001 by neuroscientist Patrick McNamara, while investigating the connection between social relationships and dreams.
His research team recruited 300 students for research, who were divided into groups according to their attachment abilities. They first answered the questions, how comfortable do they feel being in a relationship with someone, or maybe they prefer to avoid a relationship altogether? Thus, the state of attachment was rated as “reliable” or “unreliable”.
Students who experienced discomfort in relationships and therefore tended to avoid them altogether reported having more dreams each night than the group whose attachment state was "reliable." Moreover, the group with "insecure" attachments had more nightmares, and their dreams were more vivid than those of the other group.
Since an area of our brain called the anterior temporal lobe is important for feelings of attachment and for REM sleep, heightened dreaming seems to replace attachment.
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Video games induce lucid dreaming
What are Lucid Dreaming?
Lucid dreaming is the ability to be aware that you are in a dream. As soon as you manage to realize that this is a dream, you begin to control what is happening around, and do whatever you please. It is not surprising that each of us wants this when going to sleep, but we can not always get into lucid dreams.
Thousands of books have been written that teach how to induce lucid dreaming if desired. However, as it turned out, the simplest way to learn to have such dreams is to periodically play computer games.
Jayne Gackenbach of Grant McEwan University believes that the ability to control actions when playing in virtual reality is the same as the ability to control what happens in a dream. Thus, it is easier for gamers to learn to dream lucid dreams.
Jane also discovered that gamers are much less likely to see nightmares, because when in a dream they feel threatened, they immediately take action to turn her away from themselves, as in games, and do not seek to flee.
Animals dream and even remember them
The long-standing question of why we dream seems to have been answered … thanks to the rats. Researcher Matthew Wilson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that when rats were taught to run on a circular path, their brain activity began to manifest itself in a special way. This was recorded using a scanner.
Wilson later scanned the brains of rats while they were sleeping and found that nearly half of the animals exhibited the same pattern of brain activity when they were in REM sleep, which matched the pattern while moving in the wheel. This means that the rats continued to run in their sleep.
Scientists have suggested that the rat brain stores information, playing it again in a dream, and at the same speed as in reality. Wilson is convinced that one of the main functions of dreams is to memorize memories. That is why we better remember the information that we receive just before bed.
Amnesiac people have the strangest dreams
If dreams help keep memories alive, what if you have amnesia? It turns out that people who have lost their memory have very bizarre dreams. There are several types of memory, and amnesiac sufferers cannot remember certain events, special facts, or dates. It is interesting that in a dream, some things can return to them, for example, some skills, but in real life they do not remember these things at all.
During the experiments, people with amnesia were told about the game "Tetris", but they did not remember at all what this game was. In the middle of the night they were woken up and asked to tell what they saw in their dreams. Three out of five subjects answered that they saw "falling, overturning blocks."
An ordinary person in a dream, even with the strangest dreams, mainly sees in a dream objects familiar to him. A person with amnesia can see objects that are very strange to him, but he cannot remember where he saw them in reality.
Strange dreams are just a job of sorting out memories
Research on amnesia has allowed Dr. Robert Stickgold to come up with another hypothesis about dreams. He tried to answer the question why we have strange dreams. Stickgold revealed that amnesic sufferers retain an image of the event in their subconscious, even if they cannot consciously pull it out of the depths of memory. For some reason, the brain reproduces this image during sleep.
Why do we have strange dreams?
According to his theory, strange dreams are the brain's attempt to sort different signals in search of connections. For example, you dream that you are in a restaurant with your 5th grade soccer coach, the chairs you sit on are made of jelly, and your dog is your waiter.
Your brain takes out a file of the dog's memory and compares it to what you remember about your high school coach to see how the two are related. That is, according to Dr. Stickgold, your brain is "looking for cross-connections." Sometimes these connections coincide with reality, sometimes they do not.
Other studies have shown that the strangest dreams are associated with increased activity in the right amygdala, an area also related to memory formation. These studies support the idea that the stranger the dreams, the harder it is for the brain to find connections between different memories.
Are prophetic dreams just a coincidence?
See the future in a dream
In the 1960s, Maimonides Medical Center in New York conducted a series of unusual experiments. One of the experiments involved the ability to predict the future. The participants were divided into two groups: one group was awake and focused on a particular image. The second group slept at that time.
The scientists woke the sleeping participants while they were in REM sleep and asked them to tell what they saw in the dream. The strangest thing is that most of the participants in the second group described the images that the first group saw.
Another example is also from the 1960s. A school building in the village of Aberfan, South Wales, UK, was damaged after heavy rainfall in a coal mine collapse. More than a hundred people, most of whom are children, died. Psychiatrist John Barker traveled to Aberfan and asked its residents if anyone had dreamed of this event before it happened. 30 residents of the village said that they dreamed of a disaster. There are probably millions of such examples, and you saw the future in a dream.
What are prophetic dreams?
Some scholars argue that such predictions are nothing more than coincidences. Various factors combine together, and there is a chance that for someone these factors in a dream coincide with what will happen in reality.
This is one of those things that cannot be proven, so most of us will still believe in something supernatural rather than a banal coincidence. Who knows, maybe someday we will learn to predict the future with the help of dreams?
We only remember vivid dreams
It turns out that we can dream not only during REM sleep, but in any of the five stages, although during REM sleep the dreams are more vivid. Every night we can see several dozen dreams, but we do not remember most of them.
We don't remember dreams mainly because they are boring enough. A person is more likely to remember a vivid and strange dream than something routine. Most dreams are related to the day-to-day activities you did the day before, for example, you may often dream about ironing or checking your mail.
As is the case with the memories of rats that repeated their actions in a dream, our brain tries to repeat what happened to us in order to consolidate the memories and learn something.
But the craziest and most terrible dreams are remembered in the same way as the strange and terrible events in life. For example, to see a naked person in a crowd of people is an oddity that you will remember for a long time. You will not remember hundreds of people around, but you will surely remember the face of a naked person for a long time.
How to remember dreams?
Some people claim that they don't dream dreams, when in fact they just don't remember them. Sometimes you dream of something very interesting that you would like to remember and tell your loved ones, but very quickly after waking up, the dream disappears.
To remember your dreams, psychologists advise, right after waking up, to try not to open your eyes and not move for a while, mentally scrolling in your head what you dreamed during the night. You need to train every day.
To see vivid and positive dreams, they are also advised to establish a correct daily routine for yourself, get enough sleep, do not remember all the problems of the day before going to bed, but leave their solution for the morning.
You can change dreams with smells
It is well known that external stimuli such as light, smells, or the sound of an alarm can interfere with sleep, but several factors affect sleep quality in general, making pleasant sleep a nightmare and vice versa. Smells, for example, can have a profound effect on exactly what your dream is about.
Smells in a dream
During the study, the scientists allowed the participants to fall asleep, and then various chemicals that smelled like rotten eggs, roses, or no scent at all were fed through a nasal tube. They then woke the participants and asked what exactly they saw in the dream.
Those who smelled rotten eggs reported that in a dream they felt a sharp decline in strength and mood, although they did not remember any smells. For example, one person said that he dreamed of a beautiful Chinese woman, but suddenly she suddenly seemed very unpleasant to him, although he did not notice any special reasons for this. The sensations in a dream changed dramatically from pleasant to unpleasant.
Nightmares are detrimental to your mood
Anxiety? Depression? Nervousness? You may have had nightmares. At least, this is the conclusion made by a group of scientists who asked 147 students to fill out a questionnaire every morning for 2 weeks to track how often they have nightmares. After 2 weeks, the researchers conducted special tests to assess the psychological state of people.
Scientists have found a strong link between the number of nightmares a person has and their mood during the day. The more nightmares people had, the worse their mental state was assessed. It is difficult to say whether depression was the cause of the nightmares, or whether the person had a bad mood after the nightmares, but one thing is clear that the actual mental state and the nature of dreams have a strong relationship.
Dreams and schizophrenia
Some believe that dreams are very similar to the delusional states experienced by schizophrenics - both are associated with a specific area of the brain. In other words, the brain of schizophrenics simply does not switch from sleep to reality during the day. That is, every night, when we fall asleep, we fall into a state of schizophrenia. They even came up with a special term to describe this state - "our night craziness."
Almost everyone can see illusory dreams, but a schizophrenic will see such "dreams" in reality, being in a waking state. His brain contains a mixture of incongruous memories that arise not only in dreams, but also in reality.
