By Lily Sinker Do you ever think to yourself when you wake up, what the heck did I just dream about? Why do I keep dreaming of this? Does my dream mean anything? This is your brain having fun or in better terms experimenting. Your brain uses the time you are sleeping as a low-risk environment and a time to make new chemical reactions. When you wake up you might be wondering why you are dreaming about that test in the future that is stressing you out. This is your brain working through your anxieties and helping you prepare for that test and all of its possibilities and how to handle them. “Students who dreamed more often about the test performed better in real life”. That’s because when we are stressed we tend to dream about success and how we were able to overcome past stresses. You have probably stressed about a test more than once and still did a good job on it and your brain remembers that it helps you later on. Your brain finds connections like these all the time. Your brain might also connect your test to the school catching on fire or your pencil turning into jello. “A dream object does not transform randomly into another object, but into an object that shares formal associative qualities with the first”. That’s why when you are stressed about that test you could dream that you forgot your pants or didn’t wear shoes to the test.
Plus, the dream emotions that you usually have are mostly negative; they are things like fear, helplessness, guilt, and anxiety. You know, the fun emotions that we all love! Your brain does that so you can work through those problems and prepare to face it in the real world. Have you ever had a dream that a giant animal was attacking you? Well, if you have you can blame on our cave-dwelling ancestors for that trait. They also had these dreams so they could face dangerous situations in the safety of their dreams and are able to confront them in real life. Even though we don’t really have to worry about huge wild animals attacking us we still have to worry about problems as bad or even worse. Your brain does these things so that it can prepare you to fight a wild animal or try not to yell at one of your co-workers for eating that brownie you were saving for lunch. Also, this shows that dreams aren’t completely random for the most part because they are taking what they know and making it into something that could be useful. Most of your dreams have to do with your real life and are in familiar places like work, school, your house, or your room and can have familiar people or animals. You might still be wondering why these dreams are so weird. Well, hate to break it to you but most of your dreams are normal but you can’t really remember them, you just remember the weird things or strange dreams and that because your brain recognizes these as unusual even though it made these strange things happen. Lastly, when something like flying in your dream happens the emotion that you are experiencing are usually appropriate to what is going on in the dream no matter how weird the dream is. “The dreamer’s own self was “well preserved” and “rarely plagued by features incongruous with the waking reality”. This may make your dreams seem real because technically it is your real self and sometimes it’s hard to distinguish dreams and reality because nothing is different about the way you think, act and react and you are rarely a warped reality of yourself. Whether you dream of walking into finals half naked or dream of a tiny hand-sized purple elephant your brain is helping you in the long run even if it seems like your brain is using you as a chemical reaction experiment.
2 Comments
Anna W
12/16/2018 10:21:43 am
This post was so interesting! I always thought dreams are a funny thing and now I know why we have them. I'm so glad someone put something up about this subject. What I found most interesting is how the brain uses our relaxed state of sleeping to "experiment". You're example of dreaming about a test and later succeeding in it is interesting. I find that relatable as I tend to dream about things I'm stressed about. I didn't know that dreams could help us succeed! Awesome article!
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Grace Delisle
12/16/2018 04:09:04 pm
I really liked reading about your article! I found it super interesting that we really do have reasons for our dreams. The most interesting part to me was how sometimes if we dream about the animals attacking you that it is due to how our ancestors had to worry about things like that. Another fact that was a little surprising was how you might be dreaming about a test that could be stressing you out. This means that you are more likely to be successful on the test witch I thought was interesting.
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