Dreams leave no one indifferent - someone takes them seriously as a kind of omen, someone treats them as a manifestation of the subconscious. That is, roughly speaking, the first approach looks at dreams as a manifestation of the future, while the second debunks it and considers dreams, on the contrary, to be an imprint of the past and present (human experience, emotions and desires). Professor at the University of Manchester in the UK, Sue Llewellyn, suggests looking at dreams from a third angle - throwing away all the mysticism, she concludes that it is really possible to predict the future from dreams precisely because they are a manifestation of the subconscious. How this is possible and why, she explains in her article.
Llewellyn asks why our brain in dreams builds certain situations with a specific sequence of events and actions of participants. Of course, absolutely natural things happen in life (like the change of day and night), but the behavior of other people very often depends on the will of chance, and you cannot project it in your head. These so-called probabilistic events may have a certain tendency to happen in a particular way, but this does not mean at all that this will always happen. Moreover, often in a dream we see some completely unexpected chains of events that go beyond the boundaries of reason. Why is our brain able to imagine them?
The answer is in the REM sleep phase, the period when we dream. It is during this period that our brain, as the scientist says, is best able to find an unobvious connection between various events. This conclusion Llewellyn drew from a number of past studies. In 1999, researchers at Harvard showed that people who took the remote association test immediately after waking from REM sleep made less obvious connections in their heads than those who responded after NREM sleep or were awake at all. “Perception during REM sleep is qualitatively different from perception during NREM sleep and most likely shows how associative memory changes. It is it, according to our assumptions, that underlies the bizarre and hyperassociative nature of REM sleep dreams,”the scientists wrote at the time. The same result has been confirmed by more recent studies.
In 2005, scientists from the University of Milan Bicocca conducted the following experiment: they gave a task requiring extraordinary thinking (namely, an arithmetic problem with matches) to patients with damage to the dorsolateral zone of the prefrontal cortex, as well as a control group of healthy people. Testing showed that people with brain damage performed better on the task. The prefrontal cortex is thought to be responsible for simple solutions, logical thinking and planning, Llewellyn says. During REM sleep, this part of the brain is inactive, therefore, our imaginations stop chasing the obvious and hit the whims.
Dreaming during REM sleep is the result of the brain compiling associations associated with our memories. According to Llewellyn, it is quite possible that most of the experienced situations are postponed only in the subconscious (98% of the brain activity is not realized by us) and are expressed in such dreams - to our great surprise.
During REM sleep, our imaginations stop chasing the obvious and run into whims.
Where does our brain get the ability to build such complex connections and guess the non-obvious consequences of events (even if only during REM sleep)? Llewellyn claims that we inherited this skill from our ancient ancestors. Most likely, she writes, in prehistoric times, man, for lack of language, thought in images. Therefore, his brain worked to calculate which image of the creature in front of him could theoretically be dangerous for him, and which does not pose a threat (that is, dividing others into conditional groups "predator", "friend", "food"). These skills should have been especially vividly manifested in places like watering places, where both herbivores and predators waiting for their prey flocked. There it was necessary to react quickly to an unexpected development of events, and even better - to predict it, because life was at stake. Such an ability to calculate in advance the course of actions of other creatures in order to save their lives in a cruel primitive world, and now manifests itself in our bizarre dreams. But what does foreseeing the future have to do with it?
Llewellyn concludes that the strange dreams we see in REM sleep are a combination of our past negative experiences in order to keep us safe from them in the future. “In our evolutionary past, dreams helped us survive,” she writes. Hence, it turns out that dreams are actually a projection of a possible future, although we no longer need to survive in the modern world as we did in primitive times. Each of us, if we understand the dream in detail and evaluate our past experience, can project how he will behave in this or that situation in reality.
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Llewellyn draws particular attention to the fact that only the one who sees the dream can understand its true meaning. No one from the outside will be able to crawl into your head and evaluate your negative memories the way you do. Therefore, the other person may not see the warning that your brain wants to show you in this or that picture while you sleep. “You may think you know yourself, but you know yourself even deeper if you ponder over your dreams,” concludes Llewellyn.
Anastasia Zyryanova