Why Do We Dream? An Under-the-Covers Investigation
Ever wake up after having a bizarre and vivid dream that felt oh-so real you had to convince yourself that it didn’t actually happen? Dreams can unfold just like they’re happening in real life. They can conjure up intense emotions like fear, joy, love and ecstasy. But why do we dream? A common view amongst psychologists is that dreams are our mind’s way of sorting all of the information that accumulates in our head on a daily basis. Your dreams are the expression of your mind sorting, filing and wondering what to do with all of the various thoughts and feelings it accumulated during the day.
Your emotions work as the Steven Spielberg, or the director, of your dreams. Psychologists believe that the emotional tone of your dream is dictated by the emotion that your mind is processing or working through. If your mind is dealing with a happy emotion, then your dream will mirror the blissful state of the feeling. Many times your mind will be processing multiple emotions while you sleep. When this happens, your dreams tend to be more bizarre and less clear or focused. You may at one minute be rolling in a blissful patch of grass with the person you love and the next minute in a dark alleyway hiding from a mysterious stranger.
Many a psychic, quack psychologist or person with a book to sell has tried to interpret people’s dreams to reveal their true inner meanings. They believe that our dreams are a puzzle that, once put together, will reveal secrets or hidden motivations. This may sound fun, but for the most part the scientific community believes your dreams to be a pretty lousy predictor of your internal psychology. The best that dreams can do is to create an inner window into the emotional state of the dreamer. If you constantly have dreams that are rife with anxiety or if you have reoccurring nightmares, this could be the result of some anxiety problems that are being experienced during your waking hours.
The reason people dream during their sleep is not to reveal things during the middle of the night or express deeper thoughts and feelings that would be untoward during the daylight. We dream for a very simple reason, to get our minds ready for another day and to resolve the multitude of things we’ve seen, felt, heard, touched and tasted during the day. It’s hard enough to sort out what’s happening in our daily lives, so it’s wonderful we have such magnificent minds that can sort it all out during the easiest part of the day, when we sleep.
