What is a dream? do we need them?

Question

some people dream every night and other dream rarely.why?

Answer 1

Ok, let me chime in as one of the few people to take psychology here. We don't die if we don't have dreams. Chronic lack of sleep just lowers our cells defenses. Now, dreaming as I've said in many answers, is the cerebral cortex "snatching up" information from the hippocampus (where we store our memories), and this information "flashed" by the occipital lobes causing us to "see" this information. This snatching up process facilitates in commiting things to long-term memory. This is why if you read something (with no rehearsal of course) right before you go to bed, you'll remember it a lot better than if you read it when you wake up. Now REM sleep is necessary, but not actually because of dreaming. If one doesn't get enough sleep (meaning they never enter REM sleep or their REM sleep is repeatedly interrupted) that individual will go into REM rebound and when they fall asleep, they will go directly into REM sleep. The normal process for sleeping is Stage 1 which are alpha waves and the level of consciousness, Stage 2 is slightly deeper but one can be easily awaken, then there is a transition phase and then stages 3 and 4, stage 4 is actually the deepest sleep and we spend relatively little time in stage 4. REM sleep comes near the end of our night. We have hundreds of dreams each night and they ALL occur during REM sleep. The likelihood of remembering dreams almost SOLELY depends on our REM sleep getting interrupted. That's why if we have the "falling dream" we wake up before we hit (I'm guessing this because if we don't wake up, we won't remember it so it's kind of logical). As for seeing something that we don't see when we're conscious, there has been NO study that has shown this or proven this. Dream interpreters should be viewed upon with great skepticism as shown by the varied answers to what dreams mean. Sigmund Freud was the leader in dream interpreting and I believe Freud was a quack. All of what I have said has been proven by PET. So just be skeptical when you have a dream, it is VERY UNLIKELY that it is telling you anything, and is indeed just brain activity.

Answer 2

A dream is recreating what happens in the third dimension (our everyday reality) in a fourth dimension (the dream world). It is difficult to answer do we need them as oppose to why we need them. It would seem to me, bad or good, dreams are a way to act out against, figure out, or resolve the realities of our world. We can only do certain things in our dreams; things that we could never do in realty.

So what about the occurrence of dreaming. It may have something to do with how people think while awake. Education may have a hand in this as well. Those who can think spatially and can recreate worlds artistically probably have a higher frequency of dreaming. I have an architectural background, am good at drawing. I dream every night and sometimes my dreams are so vivid that when I wake up, I recall the whole dream, remember colors, and what rooms or other things look like. For people like me, we tend to enjoy our dreamworld better than our reality, We have a lot of control of what happens in our fantasies and it is just plain fun!

Answer 3

Everyone dreams every night. Some remember them and some don't.
Dreams are involuntary during REM (rapid eye movement) if we no not have this deep level of sleep we will be psychotic and eventually die. So, yes we need to dream.

Answer 4

When we are asleep, we travel between various stages of sleep. One of those stages is REM sleep (Dream sleep). We have several episodes of REM sleep per night.

During sleep, the brain metaphorically 'tidies up' the brain; - it sort of files away all of it's experiences from the sensory stimuli which has imposed itself on our sensory systems and consequently our brains during the day.

When we are in REM sleep we can become semi - conscious and we become aware of this tidying up process. This is when we say we are dreaming. As I say, we experience several of these episodes in one night of sleep.

There is a processing system in our left hemisphere, which likes everything to be logical and to follow a linear pattern, so it takes our semi - concsious experiences in these episodes and tries to make sense out of them. (Sometimes failing utterly)

This is why dreams can seem so disjointed, because the tidying up process that you witness at the various points of REM may contain totally different information. This is why, in your dream you can be driving a car one minute and in another setting doing something else the next minute.

Answer 5

Yes we need dreams, our mind needs to put everything into perspective while we sleep, dreams are a way of doing that.

Answer 6

A dream is a wish your heart makes
When you're fast asleep....





Apolgies to Walt Disney.




To RH:

I've never had a psycho course,
I never hope to have one.
But I'd rather have to eat a horse
Than be a Freud's son.

Apologies to Ogden Nash.

By the way, what's a psycho courese? Is the course itself schizophrenic? Is it a course for people who have mental problems?

I've taken lots of psych courses, but I've never run across one of these.

Answer 7

A restless mind gives room for a dream. It is not necessary. Dreams does not in any way help us.
VR

Answer 8

we always dream but most ppl dont reamember because it happends in our rem sleep the depest part of sleep, and of coures we need it its our brains way of sorting throu all the jusnk itsprosesing every day we are bumbarded with information and stress and alsorts of stuff its also relaxing if you practes every morning thinking of your dreams even righting them down they will come to you more clearly eventually till its second natuer. good luck

Answer 9

a dream is just an expression of your truest thoughts, fears, emotions, ect... we don't need them but they are nice to ponder... dreams are mostly expressed by the one who hides themselves or the one with a great imaginations... people that show their true selves and are frankly dull don't dream that much

Answer 10

it is thought that the mind works similar to a computer and the lessons learned that day are sorted out and stored kind of like computer moving files around and yes you need them