Secrets of the dream factory
An encrypted message from the unconscious — that was the dream for Sigmund Freud. Today’s brain researchers, on the other hand, consider dreams to be senseless webs that the brain gives birth to at night.
Wild and colorful, sad or romantic: dreams have long fascinated mankind. For the nighttime images and feelings seem to lead us to our deepest depths, to the shadowy world beyond waking, where fantasy and reality blur.
Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, regarded dreams as an expression of the subconscious. He believed that the pictures showed what weighs on the soul of a person, what he repressed in real life. Wishes and desires were recognizable in the dream — but in encrypted form. Because otherwise they would frighten and disturb the sleep.
Carl Gustav Jung, a student of Freud, also saw important messages in dreams: they showed the current state of the unconscious. To understand them, he said, it was necessary to know about symbols from myths and religions. But the Swiss psychoanalyst understood the nocturnal webs above all as a source of creativity.
Brain researchers say: Dreams are foams
Most neuroscientists, like many of Freud’s contemporaries, consider dreams to be meaningless series of images. They are merely a random by-product of nocturnal brain activity, a kind of neural storm. Only when the person wakes up does the consciousness interpret meaning into the images and put together a dream story.
Dream research is difficult. Because scientific methods are difficult to grasp the ghosts of the night. And reports about dreams can only reflect what the waking person still has to say about them. A dream, told while awake, already contains the interpretation of the images. This is why brain researchers find it difficult to make objectively verifiable statements about dreams.
Nevertheless, there are some facts. One thing is certain: people dream in all sleep phases. In deep sleep, we see little in the way of images, but rather dream mentally and linguistically. In the REM phase — which is characterized by violent eye-rolling during sleep — dreams are, however, full of emotion, colorful and vivid, picture after picture. This is because the emotional and visual centers of the brain are particularly active in this phase. Dreams are particularly detailed and film-like in the REM phases of the early morning hours.
Dreams are similar to the fantasies of mentally ill people
Dreams do not imitate situations that have been experienced. Usually, only fragments and shreds of memories appear before the inner eye. After a stressful experience, feelings such as fear, pain, and guilt are often relived in the dream, but not the actual situation itself.
For many people, dreams are small exercise units in which what has been learned is repeated. For example, athletes report time and again that they train their skills in their sleep. Experiments show that complicated sequences of movements are easier to perform if the person has dreamed about them beforehand. Dreams can even help to cope with stress. People who are intensively involved with something in their dreams, for example with an examination or an operation, are better able to cope with it. Studies show that.
Dreams can be extremely bizarre. That is why some researchers came up with the idea of comparing dreams with the fantasies of mentally ill people. In the process, they discovered similarities. This is because rational thoughts are faded out both in dreams and in the experiences of some sick people. Some scientists, therefore, believe that mental disorders can be easily investigated using dreams. Whether dreams are close to insanity, show repressed desires, or are rather neuron thunderstorms: it’s always exciting to take a journey through your dream world.
About the Creator
AddictiveWritings
I’m a young creative writer and artist from Germany who has a fable for anything strange or odd.^^
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