10 keys to our dreams

Interest in this topic did not arise yesterday: in the British Museum you can see a papyrus found in Thebes of 1350 BC. e., where more than 200 dreams are recorded with appropriate interpretations. But the understanding of dreams is still a matter of controversy and of concern to many of us. Let’s try to answer the ten most interesting questions about dreams.

1. Is there a technique that allows memorizing dreams?

Oh sure. However, if you forget your dreams, it is probably because you have never paid serious attention to them. Who’s guilty? A culture that, apart from psychoanalysis, does not attach much importance to dreams, and modern life: in the morning the alarm clock wakes us up, and we get up too quickly, afraid of being late for work. And since dreams happen at the end of natural sleep cycles, they are immediately drowned in waking mental activity.

Some unconsciously block the process of remembering so as not to meet the repressed side of the psyche. In addition, it turned out that in the phase of “REM sleep”, which is just accompanied by dreams, there is no synchronization between the neurons of the hippocampus (the part of the brain where memories are formed) and the neocortex (where they are stored). Perhaps that is why we do not remember well what we dreamed about.

The best way to remember your dream is to set your alarm 15 minutes earlier than usual, stay in bed to allow the images to pass through your mind’s eye, and write down what you see. The more time we devote to this, the more we write down, the better we can remember dreams.

2. What happens in my brain at night?

Each night consists of several sleep cycles of 90 minutes each. At first, drowsiness is replaced by superficial sleep, after which the first cycle begins: there comes a deep “sleep” without dreams, which is replaced by “REM sleep” with dreams, accompanied by rapid eye movements. In a newborn, REM sleep accounts for half of the total sleep cycle time, in children under two years old it is 30-40%, and in adults it is 15-25%.

3. When I imagine something on the verge of sleep and waking, is it a real dream or not?

Not really. Real dreams are unconscious psychic activity, and when we dream, consciousness floats at the behest of the imagination, but we more or less retain control over it. In this state, the brain generates alpha waves, as before falling asleep, but their frequency is slightly lower.

When a child is said to be “head in the clouds”, they are in alpha wave mode. The same is true for relaxation. Then, as the body relaxes, we spontaneously have strange images called hypnagogic images: this is the intrusion of the dream component of “REM sleep” into the waking state. These borderline states include sleepwalking (sleepwalking), narcolepsy (tendency to fall asleep mid-sentence), “memories” of alien abduction.

4. Can extraneous noise affect my dreams?

During sleep, the ears do not turn off! Otherwise, it would be more difficult for us to wake up in the morning. In the same way, words, the sound of a falling object, any rustle may well be integrated into the plot of a dream and even change it. If you are in a state of light sleep, then even very faint sounds can wake you up.

A pleasant or unpleasant smell, someone’s touch, a flash of light also affect. If you are abruptly awakened, you may enter a state known as sleep inertia, in which the person is completely disoriented: socially, he is awake and considers himself ready for daily tasks, but functionally still asleep. This is one of the options for breaking the boundaries between sleep and reality.

5. Why do we still need dreams?

For neurophysiologists, this is still a mystery. Just like why we sleep at all. Of course, each scientist has his own hypotheses in this regard. In the books The Castle of Dreams and The Dream Thief, Michel Jouvet, a classic of modern somnology, writes that REM sleep serves for the genetic programming of the brain: it allows the basic forms of behavior of our species to form in an infant, and to preserve them in an adult.

And the Nobel laureate physiologist Francis Crick believes that dreams are needed to forget: at this moment, all the impressions accumulated during the day and stored in memory are reorganized in such a way as to eliminate some memories and preserve others.

According to psychoanalysts, each of us has such desires and impulses that are repressed because they are unacceptable to consciousness. In this case, energy arises that requires discharge, and with the help of a dream, the brain is freed from the mental stress that has arisen. That is why Freud calls the dream “the royal path to the unconscious.”

6. I often have nightmares. How to get rid of them?

Nightmares are dreams of fear, pain, or unexplained anxiety. These painful dreams that everyone has from time to time can be caused by many reasons: unresolved conflict, bodily clamps, too heavy dinner … They only become a problem if you wake up screaming every night and cannot fall asleep anymore, because you are afraid to see a new nightmare.

In this case, we are talking more about post-traumatic nightmares that help to overcome unbearable emotions caused by misfortune (such as war, natural disaster, sexual violence, car and plane crashes …). They need the help of a psychologist.

But everyone can deal with “normal” nightmares. You can, for example, do the work yourself to visualize painful scenes, thereby depriving them of dramatic intensity, and then replay them in a positive way. So nightmares are not “disposed of”, they are resolved as a problem.

7. I see symbols in my dream that are not from my life. Why?

Elements of everyday life make up only 30 to 40% of the content of dreams. Regarding the remainder, Carl Gustav Jung, in Man and His Symbols, explains that these are the so-called archetypes. He divided the unconscious of each person into two “territories”.

The personal unconscious is a product of life experience and experiences of each of us. And the collective unconscious is a veritable ocean of information generated by all human experience since the beginning of time. It was in it that universal symbolic themes and archetypes gradually crystallized.

The dragon, the great mother, the hero, the wise old man, the fish, the sand are just some of the thousands of archetypal images that exist. A hero slaying a dragon, baptism, a cosmic catastrophe – these are already archetypal motifs. They arise in dreams when some problem sets them in motion and when it is necessary to replace a psychologically unacceptable situation with one that suits the psyche more. So these symbols also apply to everyday life, only they need to be deciphered.

8. Can I interpret my dreams myself?

Yes, but it takes practice! Freud showed that the dream is not just a puzzle, as it was thought before, it is connected with individuality, with the way we are arranged. In addition, the interpretation of the symbols varies considerably depending on whether you follow the Freudian, Jungian, Adlerian, or transpersonal approach. And also depending on the circumstances in which you are.

9. I have already dreamed of a catastrophe before it happened. Is this a special gift?

Prophetic or telepathic dreams are, of course, something exceptional. But just because they are rare doesn’t mean they don’t exist at all. Numerous experiments have been carried out in this area for more than forty years. The studies of the American psychoanalyst Montag Ullmann are the most famous. They show the existence of premonition and telepathy in dreams.

Since 1966, the private American organization Central Premonitions Registry has been receiving reports from the population about all “prophetic” dreams, keeping a record of them and trying to correlate them with real events. As for how this happens, here science can not yet explain anything …

10. My dog ​​yips, squeals and moves his paws in his sleep. Does he have dreams?

It may very well be. Although all animals sleep, only mammals and birds have “REM sleep” phases associated with dreams. There is probably a correlation between these phases and the mechanism of thermoregulation in warm-blooded animals. Since cold-blooded animals (fish, reptiles, amphibians, and invertebrates) do not have this mechanism, it is assumed that they do not dream.

The most significant data in this area come from observation of cats. During REM sleep, they reproduce typical forms of behavior of their species: they attack, chase prey, lick themselves … However, researchers have not yet established whether these are real dreams or automatic reactions that are not accompanied by “pictures”.