The dream factory

“Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.”

Virginia Wolf

Every night we close our eyes and an extraordinary thing happens. We shift into a different state of consciousness were we meet new and strange people and face challenging situations. This is when we forget our reality and enter a magical world made of dreams.

It is not a surprise that human beings always were concerned with understanding the nature and purpose of dreaming. It begun with people viewing dreams as a message send by the gods and with eyes filled with superstition. Aristotle was the first to believe that dreams could have a function and pointed out that they reflected a human’s bodily health. Scientists have being arguing over the decades concerning the purpose of dreaming and until today we have not an agreement upon the nature of dreaming, just theories and assumptions.

Freud was the first thinker that emphasized that dreams are the guardians of our sleep. He believed that we manufacture dreams in order to escape from environmental stimuli (i.e the noise, the temperature in the room) but also to escape from internal stimuli such as our personal worries and anxieties that would keep as awake. He believed that our unconscious desires are depicted in our dreams and reveal things about our subconscious. The forbidden wishes are not apparent in our dream but are often hidden behind symbols and this is when he developed dream analysis that is often incorporated as a part of psychoanalytic therapy.

Physiologists argue that dreams do not carry a hidden or secret message. During sleep our consciousness is suspended and this occurs during the two major stages of our sleep (NREM and REM).They believed that the experience of dreaming occurs during the REM (rapid eye movement) stage. The REM sleep is often called paradoxical sleep as the activity of the dreaming brain is similar to the activity of the waking brain. At this stage there is no cognitive responsiveness to stimuli and as if we were paralyzed. However, this is the time that we have our most vivid dreams and if we wake up at this stage we would remember them.

Allan Hobson proposed his own theory the Activation Synthesis (AS) denies that dreams have a meaning. The theory supports that because our brain is active when we are dreaming we activate some neurons randomly. In order for the brain to interpret what just occurred it creates a narrative and dreams are produced.

So far, there is not a lot that we know about our dreaming brain as we still rely on theories and it’s your choice what you like to believe in. I believe that dreams have both a bodily and psychological function. I have the sense that dreams are images constructed that are released so that they can throw the garbage of the day (things we have heard or seen that are insignificant) and clear our head. At the same time they often express anxieties, wishes, impulses that we are many times unaware of. I don’t believe that the symbols in our dreams carry a certain symbolism as Freud but I value that he is the one that emphasized the importance of dreaming. I believe more in the theory of existentialism that we all have different personalities and experiences so it would not be possible for a symbol to carry a certain meaning. Moreover, another proof that there is a psychological meaning in dreaming is the example of the repetitive dreams and dreaming after trauma.

An integration and a synthesis of the biological and psychological functions of dreaming could be useful in truly investigating the nature of dreaming. I am interested in your opinion as we all carry a dreaming factory in our brain.

(art by krecha)