What is a dream?

What is a dream?
What is a dream?

Every night we enter into another world, the world of dreams. While we are dreaming, we usually believe that we are awake. The mental world of dreams is so realistic that we confuse it with the external world that we share with other people. How is this possible? And why is it happening? What are the relations between our day-life and night-life? What is the origin and function of dreams?

The Oxford English Dictionary defines dream as a “sequence of thoughts, pictures and imaginations that pass through our mind while we are sleeping.” But that definition does not affect the lived and experienced reality of dreams. I consider dreams to be better described as experiences, conscious events that are personally lived. It might seem awkward that we talk about dreams as conscious experience, but the fact that sometimes we can remember our dreams shows us that they are conscious rather than unconscious mental processes. According to www.yorux.com, we live through our dreams the same as we live through our waking life, meaning that dreaming is a peculiar form of organized human awareness. Of course, the question arises—what is consciousness? To me, it is a dream of what is happening no matter if you are awake or asleep. Your consciousness works as a simplified model of yourself and your world built from the best available sources of information. During waking states, the model is built from external sense sources that bring actual information of current circumstances in combination with internal, contextual, and motivational information. During sleep, we don’t use our senses 100% so external stimuli such as light, sound, and smell are lowered and the brain creates a model using internal stimuli. Mostly, those internal stimuli are expectations derived from past experiences and motivations such as desires or fears.

We call these experiences dreams. And their content is mostly defined by our fears, hopes, and expectations. . Basically, we can say dreaming is a kind of perception without external sense observations.

There are two types of sleep. The first type saves energy and is commonly known as mild sleep connected with growth, reparation, and both a relaxed body and mind. The other type, in contrast, is a state known as active sleep, paradoxal sleep, or rapid eye movement (REM). In that state, eyes are moving quickly, muscles contract, the body is paralyzed, and the brain is highly active with dreams occurring. REM is not the only state in which humans can dream but it provides optimal conditions for vivid dreams—an active brain in a passive body.

SIMILARITIES BETWEEN DREAMING AND WAKEFULNESS

As an important part of this explanation, it is essential to discuss the similarities and differences between wakefulness and dreaming. The majority of people very often assume that experiences in waking life and dreams are completely separated. Also, it is assumed that dreams have characteristics such as absence of thinking, lack of awareness control, and complete loss of free will. Research conducted by the lucid dreams news has shown that dreams contain consciousness and emotions and, at a smaller rate, freewill manifested as dream control. But, there were no bigger differences discovered between wakefulness and dreaming nor were any measurable cognitive functions absent or especially rare in dreams. It is important to say that these researchers discovered exactly the same level of thinking in both states.

The fact is that dreams are made of frequent changes of scenes and imagery that the dreamer rarely notices, and that is often used to support the theory that dreaming lacks some cognitive functions. But, that theory is also based on the assumption that people in awakened state would notice such changes and try to understand them. But that assumption has been proven wrong. People don’t tend to notice changes in their environment as often as we assume. Think about just how often some building on your way to work has changed and it took you weeks to even notice. Many experiments with changing actors in movies have been conducted and only 25% of examinees even noticed that the main actors were switched.

So, my intention here is not to say there is no difference between wakefulness and dreaming, but that these two states have much more in common than we think. Of course, in dreams we don’t have the law of physics or the same cultural rules, and even if we do they are often warped in such a way that we feel free of normal constraints. The big difference is that in the absence of sensory limits that create our illusion, we are in a dream whether we know it or not.