Saturday, November 12, 2011

Dreams

The following dream on September 17, 2010 is true. Names have been changed to protect the identities of those in the dream that are seen in reality. Also even though details could be added to the dream, it is best to keep it as the way it was remembered.

I’m on a school bus with my boyfriend John; he is tired and upset about something. I have him rest for a bit and lay his head in my lap until we get to his house. There is a party with friends until they all freeze and John is gone along with his mother. I find a small light and also discover a person with a mixture of colors in their eyes. Suddenly I’m pushed through a portal and get in trouble with a train moving by its self. I then get saved by a woman who drops two marble and a bag of pebbles. We return to the house and everything is back to normal. (a brief moment when I wake up) I’m in the house with no one in it and find the same person with the glowing eyes but now they are a red-violet color and holds out the portal to me. A girl pops out and says that I’m not good enough and I will taint the portal but I’m allowed in anyway.

This dream of mine held the answers to some of the problems I was having in my junior year. How do dreams provide answers, you ask? Well I’ll tell you right after we discuss what happens to the brain when we are sleeping; from a waking state to a deep slumber state.


There are two kinds of sleep the occur when we go to bed; REM and Non-REM sleep. Non-REM sleep is where we do not dream at all, which allows our body to repair cells and grow new ones. Out of the five stages, non-REM is seen in the first four. The graph to the right gives a brief description to what happens to our brain (brain waves) and body during those stages. REM or rapid eye movement sleep, is the last stage of our slumber. We enter this stage approximately 90 minutes after falling sleeping and stay in a dream for a short amount of time. Again referring to the graph; even though the first time we go into REM sleep is relatively short, stages 2, 3 and 4 cycle back, allowing our next dream to be longer then the one before. The moments inbetween the dreams, especially in stage 2, could be times when you see nothing but a blank, black screen or when you wake up to go to the bathroom or change positions in bed. It is said that one reason for having REM is for the brain to sort through all of the knoweldge that we pick up on that day and discard any that it names unneccessary. Think about it, what we remember and do on a daily routine is based on what our brains accept to be useful. So lets say, a man in the wild learned how to hunt, build a tent, making a bowl out of clay from the ground, and fishing. When he goes to bed, the brain takes everything that was gained and gets rid of the memory of making a bowl out of clay becasue it did not fit what was need for him to survive in his environment. It is unknown on how the brain discards information the way it does, so research is still needed for the future. The result of having both Non-REM and REM is very effective to our sleep because without non-REM our brain would also be active removing valuable information and our body would never be able to restore itself and without REM our brain would be full or overloading with data.

Now, since we got that our of the way, let's talk about dreams. During the time our brain is cleaning up, we are presented with events or situations that we must solve based on our waking life. This could be from stress, fear, love, or anxiety that our brain picks up while working. Even though the dream might seem weird (clowns, peope in barrels, etc.) it has hidden messages that explain items and actions in the dream that connet to a problem. For example; your riding a car with a friend on a road with muddy puddles all over it, then suddenly it turns into a roller skate and your friend is tells you where to go but you enter a building that closes shut behind you. First, you are in a car that you are in control of which can be a symbol of your life. The friend of course could just be a someone that you know or will meet in the future, however this friend is guiding you through the upcoming problems or puddy puddles when you should be one in control. Plus the car turns into a roller skate, which can be seen to be very clumsy if you don't have any balance or skill. The building could be a safe place once you have passed all troubling events, but then again you could be trapped in a situation and never be able to move on from it.

In the end some dreams can be frightening, thrilling, or just plain weird. They provide complicating situations that leave us boggled when waking up, but what can you do they are only reflecting how we feel or act towards certain events.

15 comments:

  1. I'm absolutely fascinated with the subconscious mind and dreams and all of that. I always analyze my dreams (if I remember them) to look for clues in what is going to happen or I want to happen but just haven't realized it yet, stuff along those lines. Also, I've always said that I feel as if my brain filters out every semester and now after reading this I guess it's safe to say that I'm not entirely inaccurate haha! No wonder I can't remember anything from Geometry (Freshman Year), I don't really need to !

    ReplyDelete
  2. I think the study of dreams is very interesting! It is amazing to think that every night we are dreaming in our subconsious, but yet we can only remember the dream we woke up from, even if that!

    ReplyDelete
  3. @katyxaa I'm glad to be of some help to you and let's all just hope our brains do not get rid of any of our ap bio knowledge.

    @Kristianna I have tried to look up on why we can't remember our dreams when we wake up. Do you think you would want to to a blog on that? lol.

    ReplyDelete
  4. If our brain discards anything it deems unimportant when sleeping, why do some people go blank when taking a test even though they studied the night before and knew it was important for them to retain this information. Also why do certain things stick in someones head even though it may have been pointless.

    ReplyDelete
  5. @Chelsea Rose sure! Apparently Freud's interpretation of dreams is that dream content is a product of wish fulfillment, so when we don't remember dreams, it is kind of saying that we are not emotionally equipped to handle (Of course that is in the mind of Freud, so that is another story!) Another theory is that, once we start waking up, we are stimulating motor neurons in which our brain is taken over by that than what our subconsious was dealing with. It is interesting that a lot of writers and scientists got their ideas and theories from their dreams. This suggests the subconsious is an area of the brain that stores information and ideas that is only open while we sleep.
    @USafdar That is why it is important not to cram for a test the night before. By doing that, I might be wrong but, you are trying to create more connections in the brain with the material for the test. By studying gradually, the connections are able to be secured over a longer period of time, even after sleeping. The information for the test has not been stored as long term memory. By storing it into long term memory, you can remember it for a much longer period of time.

    ReplyDelete
  6. @Kristianna thanks for the info. and from what you are saying it seems pretty accurate.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I cram every night....It helps me or if i cram right before the test.
    I guess it's just some people.
    But it doesn't stay in my long term memory.

    ReplyDelete
  8. "what we remember and do on a daily routine is based on what our brains accept to be useful"

    Usually, before I go to sleep I usually think about my day and that probably helps me retain some of my knowledge. Does anyone else do this?


    You said that we are in control of what we remember. Why is it that I can only remember certain things. I want to remember what I leaned in school, but sometimes I remember pointless information that won't benefit me in school. But it is kind of true, because I choose to remember special dates such as people's birthdays, and I can recall almost everyone's that is important to me!

    ReplyDelete
  9. This is very interesting and we were just talking about this in my BNS class. There are many theories for why we dream and why we even need to sleep but we are unsure why. It is true that after sleep we feel "charged" but there is really no cellular level of proof that after we sleep we have more energy. Also, it seems that our bodies need or want to dream. Someone who is sleep deprived will automatically go into REM sleep when they finally fall asleep and stay there for awhile. However, people who take SSRIs(drugs that block the reuptake of serotonin such as Prozac) do not dream as much or have the need to dream which I found pretty weird. There is definately still much research to be done in this field!

    ReplyDelete
  10. You guys failed to realize what I was saying. Simply I would like to see a source where it talks about our brains categorizing certain things as important or not important.

    ReplyDelete
  11. http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/aprilholladay/2007-03-12-memory-first_N.htm

    ReplyDelete
  12. What if we only remember going to sleep and waking up. If you can't recollect having a dream does it mean you didn't have one or it was just deleted before i woke up or something?

    ReplyDelete
  13. @mbergz I will have to look up more on that but from what I know, it most likely means that you are waking up inbetween stages 1-4 to shuffle around or to go do your business. You could also not be getting any REM sleep at all and probably just delta sleep or in a deep unconsciousness from stage 4. Also within 5 minutes of waking you forget half of your dream and with in 10 minutes you forget 90% of it, leaving the the last 10% to be placed in your short term memory or to be lost forever. (have to find proper site).

    ReplyDelete
  14. This is a very interesting topic since dreams are one of the parts of life commonly overlooked by the science community.

    ReplyDelete
  15. It is said we only use a small percentage of our brain. i believe 15%. how do we know our brain is actually discarding it, or putting it in the part of our brain that we dont use? I remember a lot of my dreams going back to fifth grade, and i remember a great amount of things i do throughtout the day. Is it possible that some brains find everything kind of important? is our brain really going to get overloaded? or is it keeping maintenence so we dont take over the world?

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.