What makes us dream about the things we dream of?

Question

I'm sorry if that doesn't make sense but that's the best way I can put it....hopefully, you know what I mean.

Answer 1

Our subconscious mind searches for answers to our problems and reveals them in our dreams. Sometimes these answers appear like nightmares but they too are useful. Here are some examples:

Fear of nightmares from early in life, or other anxieties or misguided beliefs about dreams and the unconscious can block dream recall, but this can usually be overcome by learning about the useful nature of dreams and by recognizing that many nightmares, like a bitter but quite necessary medicine, represent opportunities for healing and insight, and can warn of psychological imbalances that we need to remedy, or of current behaviors or decisions which may soon become detrimental unless we change them, as exemplified in this dream by Stanford University pioneer sleep researcher Dr. William Dement:

"Some years ago I was a heavy cigarette smoker, up to two packs a day. Then one night I had an exceptionally vivid and realistic dream in which I had inoperable cancer of the lung. I remember as though it were yesterday looking at the ominous shadow in my chest X-ray and realizing that the entire right lung was infiltrated. I experienced the incredible anguish of knowing my life was soon to end, that I would never see my children grow up, and that none of this would ever have happened if I had quit cigarettes when I first learned of their carcinogenic potential. I will never forget the surprise, joy, and exquisite relief of waking up. I felt I was reborn. Needless to say, the experience was sufficient to induce the immediate cessation of my cigarette habit."

Dreams have long proven themselves to be storehouses of creativity and may in fact be the well from which imagination springs. With dream incubation and the new opportunities presented by lucid dreaming, artists, musicians, dancers, sculptors, and inventors are able to dive deep into the source of inspiration and explore the vast reaches of their own creative potential by meeting face to face with the unconscious. The increased clarity and directable nature of the lucid state often enables the dreamer to return awake laden with creative insights.

In dreams we can be the hero of our own adventure, find romance, fly, travel through "solid" objects, breathe underwater, and perform feats free from embarrassment, peer pressure, monetary limits, and even physical handicaps. The boundaries of imagination are the only limits.



A few example dream-inspired works are The Beatles' well-known hit "Yesterday", Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous poem "Kubla Khan", Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde". Other artists who credit dreams as a source of inspiration include composers Sting, Peter Gabriel, Robert Palmer, Mozart, and Beethoven, poet-painter William Blake, painter Paul Klee, and screenwriters Judith Guest and Ingmar Bergman, to mention but a few.

The tale is now famous of how, after an embarrassing slump, golfer Jack Nicklaus claims to have solved a problem with his golf swing within a dream, which subsequently improved his game by ten strokes -- overnight! There are undoubtedly plenty more undocumented examples spread over history, but some well-documented ones include the dream-inspired experiment and resulting discovery of the chemical mediation of nerve impulses by Otto Leowi, which won him a Nobel prize, Elias Howe's discovery of the sewing machine, many of Thomas Edison's inventions and Friedrich Kekulé's discovery of the structure of the benzene ring from a hypnagogic dream where he saw a snake swallowing it's tail. Said an excited Kekulé to his colleagues, "Let us learn to dream!"

Answer 2

Most people believe now that dreams are simply our brain catching glimpsing of the stream of memories from the day as we process them at night

as the brain gets only a glimpse it tries to make up a story to explain that glimpse - a dream

if you also happen to have external stimuli such as being hot the brain often tried to incorporate this feeling into the dream as well so thats why dreams end up being such a rich fabric of unsual images

Answer 3

There are several theories of dreaming.

The Freudian theory of dreams indicates repressed wishes in our dreams. The symbols need interpretation because they're coded to protect our mind from additional stress.

The Jungian theory of dreams states that dreams are archetypal symbols -- constants across time and place -- that describe our current state. They simply are what they are.

The Activation Synthesis theory claims that dreams are random electrical firings from the pons. The pons is a structure that is just as active during dreaming as it is when you're awake.

As you can see, there are many theories.

Answer 4

dreams are messed... i think what happens in your day or your week or even like a month sometimes effects your dreams.. or even what you think/want to happen in the coming future... but then again there are those dreams of being eaten by a bear on top of the empire state building that don't really make sense...
lol sometimes if i get in a fight with someone, i'll dream about it that night but in different scenarios... do you kinda get what i mean? its hard to explain but im not a psychologist....

Answer 5

your mind makes you dream. Daily activities, actual event, media effect also contribute dreams at night. Dreams are subconscious mind and it is night funtion of our brain. It is normal that we dream because we are humans

Answer 6

definatley our subconcience...aka our memory bank of our life that includes things that we have even blocked out. it is full of events that created who you are, etc...answer a few above (long detailed 1) is the best for this Q.

Answer 7

Look yup what Freud said, I think it was right on the money

Answer 8

i think our strong desires and fears

Answer 9

It's called our SUBCONSCIOUS.