What is dreaming?

Question

Everyone has dreamed. It seems extraworldly yet normal. Dreaming is the only real connection to an alternative reality that everyone has experienced. Is it a real place somewhere external to the body or is it mearly an interesting form of Playstation entertainment in our brain.

Answer 1

Dreaming is our mind's escape from reality. You need to read Frued; he's got it ALL figured out.

Answer 2

Someone has said that dreams are defined as little slices of death. Maybe in a way that is true because dreams can transport us to another reality or to what we perceive is a reality while we are in the dream state. Also dreams can warn us of coming events in the short term and to some in the long term depending on whether someone is psychic or not. I have written a book which deals with not only dreams but how they relate to the spirit world as compared to what we call the real world. The name of the book is "When You Die You'll Come Alive." It is available through Barnes and Noble, Borders, Books, and Music, and Amazon.com. There are in the book real examples of what people have witnessed while dreaming and/or while exeriencing near death.

Answer 3

I'd say both too.

I've had dreams that are just incoherent jumbles of symbols, dreams that would make great movies, dreams that illustrate my spiritual development and dreams that aid it. I've had at least one dream that has come true and another in which I'm certain I wasn't dreaming alone, i think it was a visitation of some sort. I've had many dreams at the end of which I feel myself returning to my body.

You can't tell me that dreaming is just my brain "defragging" or only driven by sex. Sure, some of the dreams seem to be so but not all of them. Not even half of them.

Good question, by the way.

Answer 4

before the computer was invented i just was having my real life when i was sleeping and dreaming and when the morning would get here and i would wake up that was hell so i learned to live when i was asleep and do the dirty work of making a living in the day hours was a living hell so life as a waking person was opposite of what everyone else was doing and i got labeled a nasty person to deal with because i hated being awake with other people fighting for the same things, just plan sucked to be awake in the daytime, and when i was asleep it was pure fantasy

Answer 5

the latter of course. dreaming is merely the brains way of defragging so to speak, without it we would literally go crazy in a matter of weeks. to asribe to a real, otherworldly place is to read way too much into it.

Answer 6

Both....?

I've had dreams that seemed like my brain defragging AND I've had dreams that were more like "visits" or "predictions".

I am usually aware that I am dreaming, or that my body is sleeping, when I dream.

Answer 7

A dream is the experience of envisioned images, sounds, or other sensations during sleep. The events of dreams are often impossible or unlikely to occur in physical reality, and are usually outside the control of the dreamer. The exception is lucid dreaming, in which a dreamer realizes that he or she is dreaming—being sometimes even capable of changing the oneiric reality around him or her and controlling various aspects of the dream, in which the suspension of disbelief is broken.[citation needed] Dreamers may experience strong emotions while dreaming. Frightening or upsetting dreams are referred to as nightmares. The scientific discipline of dream research is oneirology.

History
Dreams have a long history both as a subject of conjecture and as a source of inspiration (artistic or otherwise). Throughout history, people have sought meaning in dreams. They have been described physiologically as a response to neural processes during sleep, psychologically as reflections of the unconscious, and spiritually as messages from God or predictions of the future (oneiromancy).

In antiquity, dreams were thought to be part of the supernatural world, and were seen as messages from the gods. Likewise, the Torah (known in Christianity as the first 5 books of the Old Testament) and The Holy Qur'an both tell the same story of Joseph, who was given the power to interpret dreams and act accordingly. In the Later Middle Ages, dreams were seen as temptations from the Devil, and thus were seen as dangerous.

The belief that dreams were part of the supernatural world continued into the Early Middle Ages. A story from Nevers, which is reproduced in the Golden Legend, states that one night the Emperor Charlemagne dreamed that he was saved of dying from a wild boar during a hunt. He was saved by the appearance of a child, who had promised to save the emperor from death if he would give him clothes to cover his nakedness. The bishop of Nevers interpreted this dream to mean that he wanted the emperor to repair the roof of the cathedral dedicated to the boy-saint Saint Cyricus.

However in India, scholars such as Charaka (300 BC) gave alternative explanations for the reasons behind dream. In Charaka Samhita, the explanation of dreams is as follows : "The cause of dreams are seven. They are what you have seen, heard, experienced, wish to experience, forced to experience, imagined and by the inherent nature of the body".

Many tribal peoples believe that the human soul temporarily leaves the body during the dream-state, wandering in other worlds and meeting other souls, including those of the dead. These nocturnal journeys have provided a great deal of material for myth-making. In North America and Southeast Asia such voyages are thought to expose errant soul to the danger of abduction by a sorcerer or malevolent spirit; when this happens, local shamans are customarily employed to search for and retrieve the lost soul.” (Willis, p.33)

By the late 1800s, Sigmund Freud theorized that dreams were a reflection of human desires and were prompted by external stimuli.

Dreams are affected by sexual arousal and libido


Understanding dreams

The expectation fulfilment theory of dreams
'''Psychologist Joe Griffin, one of the founders of human givens psychology, has proposed the expectation fulfilment theory of dreaming. On the basis of a 12-year study, Griffin claims that dreams are expressed in the form of sensory metaphors'.[1] [2] In a New Scientist interview, Griffin stated that "...ordinarily dream sleep does a great housekeeping job for us [,] bring[ing] down our autonomic arousal level." Griffin's expectation fulfilment theory of dreams states that dreams are metaphorical translations of waking expectations. Expectations which cause emotional arousal that is not acted upon during the day to quell the arousal, become dreams during sleep. Finally, he holds that dreaming deactivates that emotional arousal by completing the expectation pattern metaphorically, freeing the brain to respond afresh to each new day.(New Scientist. April 12th pp44-47)

Michel Jouvet's research has suggested that instinctive behaviours are programmed during the REM state in the fetus and the neonate. This is necessarily in the form of incomplete templates for which the animal later identifies analogous sensory components in the real world. These analogical templates give animals the ability to respond to the environment in a flexible way and generate the ability to learn, rather than just react.[3]

Answer 8

this might be helpful
http://spirita.blogspot.com/