Dreams Made Easy

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Falling from a cliff. These themes persist across cultures and generations. Nightmares are often brought on by a real-life event, such as moving to a new place, or a trauma, such as being the victim of a crime.

The Facts About Dreams

These dreams, too, can be instructive. But as she approached, farming instruments, like pitchforks and shovels, started flying out of his head toward her. When she backed away, it stopped. This happened a few times during the dream. She told me she had pulled away from him several times in real life because every time she let herself get close to him, he could be mean and cold. As for the farm equipment? She was a city girl, and he was more rough-hewn. One client had a recurring dream about being gagged. She talked to her husband about her concerns, and she stopped having the dream. The prefrontal cortex of the brain, responsible for logic and reasoning, is inactive during sleep, thus allowing all sorts of crazy images to evolve uncensored.

And as your dreams are linking new memories to old ones, those associations often turn out to be a little kooky. For example, a dream that combines flying, a childhood swim meet, and your college graduation seems outlandish, but upon closer inspection, you notice that the images all relate to feeling confident.

Perhaps this theme pertains to a current challenge you are facing and your desire to be brave. Some of our dreams may be a haphazard mishmash of thoughts. A fever can also affect sleep and dreams, as can a stomachache, which is why some people believe spicy foods or eating right before bed causes wild dreams.

According to legend, Abraham Lincoln told his wife that he dreamed he had been assassinated just days before he was killed.

Close View all gallery. Close Share options Pinterest. Dreams may be more than just random brain patterns. Find out what scientists have discovered about the personal truths your dreams reveal. What Is a Dream, Anyway? What Purpose Do Dreams Serve? Forgetting your child someplace. Appearing naked in public. Teeth or hair falling out.

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Being intimate with a stranger. What Are Nightmares and Recurring Dreams? Two new developments in research — brain imaging and big data — may offer some stronger answers. More detailed and timely snapshots of the brain at work, combined with the information researchers amassed about dreams from experiments in sleep labs, is gradually peeling away the mystery of dreams, and revealing their meaning.

Understanding Why We Dream | Time

From a strictly biological standpoint, scientists have learned much about the physiological process of dreaming, which occurs primarily in REM sleep. So the kind of cognitions we experience during dreams are highly emotional, visually vivid, but often illogical, disconnected and sometimes bizarre. What Do Your Dreams Mean? That does not necessarily mean, most dream researchers believe, that dreams are random expressions of emotion or devoid of some intellectual meaning. While some scientists maintain that dream patterns are strictly the result of how different neurons in the brain are firing, Deirdre Barrett, a psychologist and dream researcher at Harvard Medical School, believes they represent something more.

I think dreams are thinking in a different biochemical state. Defining that state, not to mention understanding the rules under which that universe operates, however, is a challenge. It may represent a complex interplay between emotional and cognitive information, says McNamara, so that dreams serve to help our brains process emotional memories and integrate them into our long-term memories.

And because traumatic events are associated with higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol, they can cause nightmares.

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Researchers believe that excessive amounts of cortisol can impair the interaction between the hippocampus and the amygdala, the two main brain systems that integrate memory. In post traumatic stress disorder, they get re-experienced over and over.

In fact, from sleep studies in which people were exposed to images, learning tasks or other experiences immediately before they dozed off and then examined when they awakened, many scientists believe that dreams can help us rehearse for challenges or threats we anticipate—emotionally, cognitively and even physiologically. Although much of the evidence for this is anecdotal, McNamara says, someone practicing piano or playing video games in waking life may start to do the same while dreaming.

People solving a puzzle or studying a foreign language, he adds, can have breakthroughs with dreams that go beyond the perceptions that simply taking a break from the problem can produce.

But Dreams Do Have Meaning. For example, in research with rats trained to run through mazes to get rewards, investigators were able to record neuron activity in sleeping rats and determined that the rats were running the same mazes in their dreams. In other experiments with humans, scientists monitored volunteers who slept inside an fMRI scanner while hooked up to EEG electrodes that measured brain wave activity.

When the EEG indicated they were dreaming, the participants were awakened and asked what images they had seen in their dreams. The investigators were later able to match certain patterns of brain activity to certain images for each person.

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