Dreams May Very Well Be Your Reality

The argument behind the relevance of dreams in our daily lives is unfortunately far from over. Dream psychology is an extremely studied topic with little to no conclusions. However, when we look to decipher what the golden egg in our dreams is, we turn to Freudian theories that answer the possible mythological and spiritual concepts of our dreams. 

An old hypothesis of Freud's was that our dreams connect us to the "other" world. Have you ever been told that the tooth fairy can only come when you're sleeping because if you see it ruins their powers? That concept is much like Freud's in the sense that the beings we're "dreaming" are mythological, therefore out of a dream state, we could not understand what we are looking at. The environment in which we dream serves as a ground for communication to a reality we can't technically survive in. Instead of understanding them, we tell the dream like a story and don't bother questioning them; since there's no way any of your dreams could be real. Despite this hypothesis being outdated, it is just as complicated as what dreams are to us therefore no less significant than the theories that came after. 

Another hypothesis of the meaning behind our dreams is that our most frequent thoughts camouflage themselves in our dreams. For example, if you have a package arriving tomorrow with no confirmed time, it is fairly easy to focus the majority of your thoughts and time on its arrival. If you spend days, weeks, circling back to one topic, it becomes one of the leading things your brain knows. You can't get it out of your head. With that being said, even when you're sleeping, your brain is constantly functioning. It may very well be that your thoughts overlap with your sleep schedule, but become personified by associating itself with all of the imagination our brains can have. 

While all of these theories co-exist together, the most agreed-on thought revolves around ulterior meaning or no meaning at all; there is no in-between. Due to the countless observations and sights, we make in our daily lives, the most basic opinion is that figments in our dreams are semi- or entirely connected to the things we see every day. Scientists like Carl Jung and Patrick Mcnamara have found small patterns in our imagination. For example, if you dreamt of driving a cherry red '96 Corvette Stingray convertible during sunset, it has the potential to mean either that you long for material things, or the euphoric feelings associated with wind in your hair or the freedom of having nowhere to really go. On the other hand, it could just mean you passed a Stingray on your way home from the beach. Except, you didn't pay it much mind when you saw it, which accounts for the randomness to the story your brain is telling. This hypothesis is known as the "Activation-Synthesis Hypothesis." This hypothesis outlines that the dreams you have are brain activity in its most "excited" state. They are merely electrical impulses that are taken by memories and images that stretch from when you were born, up until right now. 

Here is a graph showing electrical activities in our sleep. It, therefore, justifies that our dreams are just responses to the heightened brain activity we do when we're not in control of it. 

This one's really cool!!! ↓⤋☟⇣

 The last hypothesis of dream psychology that deserves mentioning is the "Threat simulation theory" (this link is actually super cool. they did a study on children in the middle east and their susceptibility to dangerous living conditions and how it affected their dream cycles). This hypothesis pertains to the evolutionary purpose of dreams (Ms. Eckert you'll love this). Once it was discovered that humans could dream such abstract thoughts, oneirologists began to study other mammals in attempts to find the correlation between how well we really understand our reality versus what is really right in front of us. After it was discovered that animals could achieve equally as complex dreams as humans, Revonsuo concluded that these dreams serve as "training" to deal with our environment, more specifically, an animal's survivability. In other words, combat training for your dog, Skippy. The dreams then become simulations of dangerous situations, to which the animal/human chooses a sequence of choices that ultimately lead it to a desire of changing the outcome. 

 

Author's Note***: One time I had a dream about overturning my car driving down a canyon my family frequents during the summer. It felt so real and dangerous that I woke up crying,  and second-guessing my driving skills for weeks. Ever since that dream, whenever we take the trip, I change the torque setting on our car and insist I drive, knowing what could happen with our overconfidence in our driving skills. Reading on this hypothesis completely blew my mind because it made me realize that I subliminally take a lesson out or extra time to reflect on those crazy dreams/nightmares. Not only does it inspire some paranoia, but also figuratively a completely different path my life *would have* went on if not introduced to a new possibility. So. Weird. 

    

The dangerous dreams, or what we have coined "nightmares" are real situations that have happened in real life, and your brain is equipping you with practice on how to handle them. Before you freak out, remember that these situations don't have to happen to you, but you are significantly moved by them in some way for them to take form as such in your head. Whether it's seen in a movie or a really horrible news article, they all make you aware of yet another occasion in which your safety is compromised. When you have these nightmares, it increases your awareness of your surroundings and causes you to practice your defense mechanisms. So, I guess technically we turn more and more into superheroes when we have super ominous dreams. 

I could go on and on about dream theories considering I've accidentally gone into a rabbit hole about this stuff during writing this blog post. But, since we're on the topic of dreams, I may as well use my excuse to throw in this super cute video of a cat consoling it's kitten having a "bad" dream: