What are dreams?

Question

Why do you get them and what do they mean?
My friend says that dreams only last for 5 seconds..is that true??

Answer 1

no, they last for much longer than 5 seconds.

Each night, as you sleep, your brain/body go thru cycles of deep restful dreamless sleep followed by a period of lighter sleep. The ratio of deep restful sleep to light dream sleep shifts over the course of the night - the first cycles are heavy on deep sleep and then, after we have spent 4 hours or so getting our rest, it moves to more dream sleep and less resting sleep. (So by early morning, our dream sleep cycle is longer and our resting sleep cycle is shorter.)
During dream sleep, three things happen.
1. Brain activity picks up and the areas of the brain that control sight, hearing, and other sensations "light up". Also the areas for memory, language and conceptualization.
2. We experience physical paralysis. (The brain is lighting up, all over the place, sending all kinds of messages to the body. If the body were not paralyzed, your muscles would likely act on those messages. When the paralysis is incomplete, we can sleep-walk or move around and even talk in our sleep.)
3. We exhibit REM or rapid eye movements. This is evidently a result of all the brain activity we are experiencing.

So what does all this mean? Why all the brain activity? Is it just random neural firings? Short circuits? A 'reboot'? There's a lot of discussion about this, but one thing is for certain - the dreams that you experience early on in your sleep period are much less coherent than the later dreams. To have a dream that tells a story, your conceptual mind must be involved. Otherwise you just have flashes of sights and sounds that don't get 'strung together' into a narrative.

Hope that answers your question.

Answer 2

Actually dreams last for around 30 seconds. Dreams only occur durning REM sleep and you dream roughly 5 times a night, but it is typical to only remember your last dream of the night if you remember any at all.

No one knows why you get them or what they mean even though Freud based much of his career on dream interpretation. Many people claim that they can state what your dreams mean, but that is false.

Answer 3

Laboratory studies have shown that we experience our most vivid dreams during a type of sleep called Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep. During REM sleep the brain is very active, the eyes move back and forth rapidly under the lids, and the large muscles of the body are relaxed. REM sleep occurs every 90 - 100 minutes, 3 to 4 times a night, and lasts longer as the night progresses. The final REM period may last as long as 45 minutes. Less vivid dreams occur at other times during the night.

Answer 4

There are three levels of the mind the id the ego and the superego, the id is the primal instincts that all humans have. Our ego supresses these desires or needs. They find an outlet in our dreams, but the ego changes them into symbols so that the superego, or concious mind will not be startled by ones true desires. I did a small unit on freud this yaer in school that is what I remember. You can research sigmund freud for more information. It is very interesting stuff

Answer 5

since your mind can't shut off dreams are what results. i was once told everyone dreams the whole time they sleep but you only remember some of them. some people will say dreams tell the future, others say the past, and others will tell you dreams represent yourself. example: dieing in a dream means a change is happening to your or is about to happen.

Answer 6

Dreams are from your subconscious mind, reflect your hidden personality, fear and desire.

In your case, it didn't last for 5 seconds. It is just that you remember it for seconds. We have lots of dreams at night, remembering them is another thing.

Answer 7

Actually, I think it depends on the person. I've had dreams where they look so real I forget the time that goes by.

Answer 8

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 is dreaming, and is 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.

Dreamers may experience strong emotions while dreaming. Frightening or upsetting dreams are referred to as nightmares.

The discipline of dream research is oneirology.

Many humans hold different views on the purpose of dreams. Some believe dreams serve no purpose at all, while others believe they can help humans understand their subconscious thought processes to overcome psychological difficulties. Carl Jung, for instance, believed that dreams help us compensate for the parts in our “total personality” that are underdeveloped in our waking life. This was proved otherwise by Calvin Hall’s two week dream series from students and ranging age groups’ dream journals showing that our psyche in dreams is the same as our conscious behavior.

There is a very popular theory that dreams help us solve problems we are currently dealing with in our lives, especially psychological problems. For this reason some humans consult a dream dictionary and psychologists may question a patient about their dreams. However it is interesting to note that this may not be helpful even if you are trying to discover some intrinsic meaning to your remembered dreams. It’s been found that dreams relate with age, sex, strain, and preoccupations, thus, given a large amount of dreams over a series of decades and you can get a profile of a human’s mind that is “almost as individualized and accurate as its fingerprints.” However, evidence also leads against this as, though a dream may reflect upon a problem you are having (and you may even come to a solution once you’ve woken and thought about it), they almost never present a plausible solution during the dream sequence.

Another theory is that dreams are a remnant of our evolutionary past where they have served as a mental training ground for the daily life and death struggles. And yet, David Foulkes claims dreams are a “cognitive achievement,” or that we actually develop the ability to dream. Also, the amount of time spent dreaming while asleep, for any given species, is directly related to the degree of safety from predators. “The more dangerous life is, the less a species can afford to dream.” Dr. Ramon Greenberg and Dr. Chester Pearlman add that dreaming sleep “appears in species that show increasing abilities to assimilate unusual information in to the nervous system.”

There is also a theory that dreams serve an important role in brain development. Infant humans, who sleep sixteen to eighteen hours a day, will spend 50% of this time dreaming. It is thought that providing an internal source of “intense stimulation” helps the maturation of the human’s nervous system as well as preparing it to cope with the external stimulations it will have to face in its future. While this would suggest that we would no longer need to dream as adults it is also believe that dreaming changes functions to become a learning and memorizing tool, a kind of “housekeeping.”

Related is another belief that dreaming is a kind of “clearing out the software” or simply cleaning the day’s accumulation of psychological stress, though, very little that we dream about has to do with our daily lives. There is the “day residue,” the tiny bit leftover from our waking moments first described by Freud. Otherwise, our dreams often have little base in reality.

This leads to another theory that dreams are simply a made up story that have no purpose, physiologically or psychologically. Simply because humans have the propensity to think does not mean that all our thoughts have functions. In fact, the average human only remembers about 1% of the four to six dreams he or she has per sleep period. Dr. Allan Hobson and Dr. Robert McCarely agree that dreams are simple, meaningless biological mechanisms and nothing more. They believe that dreaming is caused by a “dream state generator” in the brain stem where neurons are activated by random impulses, producing equally random sensory output within the nervous system. The forebrain then takes this information and produces the dream in an attempt to rationalize the meaningless. Hobson also theorizes that dreaming is simply a mechanism to stimulate the neural circuits which must somehow be necessary to normal conscious brain functioning.

In The Dragons of Eden, Carl Sagan speculates that dreams serve the function of weakening incidental neural pathways that develop as a byproduct of normal brain activity and supports this by noting clinical trials which have shown that humans who sleep eight hours a night but are experimentally prevented from entering a REM state will begin to hallucinate after five days. According to this hypothesis dreams have little subjective significance or meaning; they are neurological waste products. Sagan notes that dreaming appears to be a necessity among animals whose cerebral cortices exceed a given level of complexity: all mammals except monotremes experience REM sleep. He concludes that dreaming must serve an important survival function because sleeping and dreaming are vulnerable states and natural selection would have eliminated the process if it did not provide compensating benefits.

Answer 9

I once had a wet dream that felt like it lasted all night.

Answer 10

i dream everynight i sleep with a lovely woman?
i do my wife