DREAMS

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DREAMS

• Their
• Meaning
• And Role
• In Our Life

by Dimitra Bella-Velidi Teacher Zafi Mandali
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What Is A Dream?
A mental activity (thoughts, images, emotions)
occurring during sleep.

• Dream

During a typical lifespan, a human spends a total
of about six years dreaming
about 2 hours each night
The contents and purpose of dreams are not fully
understood and they have been a topic of
discussion for many years. There is no
universally agreed definition of dreaming. It is
unknown where in the brain dreams originate, if
there is a single origin for dreams or what the
purpose of dreaming is for the body or mind.
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Function Of Dreams

• There are many hypotheses about the function of
  dreams.
• Freud suggested that bad dreams let the brain
  learn to gain control over emotions resulting
  from distressing experiences.
• Dreams also let the mind express things that
  would normally be suppressed in the real world
  and keeping itself in harmony.
• Dreams may also allow a person to see some future
  events or prepare for them, for example a work
  presentation, a job interview, or a first date.

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Function Of Dreams

• Dreams may also create new ideas which are not
  real. Some of these may be rejected by the mind
  as useless, while others may be seen as valuable
  and remain.
• Dreams may also change the mood. Hartmann says
  dreams may function like psychotherapy, by
  "making connections in a safe place" and allowing
  the dreamer to connect thoughts that may be
  irrelevant while the person is awake.
• Recent research suggest that dreaming
  metaphorically completes patterns of emotional
  expectation and lowers stress levels.

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REM and NREM
REM-sleep Most dreams occur in connection with
rapid eye movements, and are said to happen
during REM-sleep, during which there is a lot
brain activity to be most like that of a
sleepless person. The REM period takes up 20-25
of sleep time. Babies and little children are
believed to dream during about 50 of their sleep
time.
NREM-sleep Dreams occurring during non-REM
periods are said to happen during NREM-sleep.
Dreams during non-REM sleep are usually more
colorless in comparison.
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The Stages Of Sleep

• Sleep researchers divide up sleep time into
  stages, usually by seeing the brain waves into
  an electroencephalograph (EEG). The EEG records
  electrical activity in the brain by connecting
  some electrodes to the scalp.
• Typically, a person will have four or five REM
  periods a night, each one lasting from 5 to 45
  minutes. There is some evidence, however, that
  REM-sleep happens before dreaming and that these
  two are completely different from each other.

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The REM-Dream State
An EEG showing brainwaves during REM sleep
When a person is in deep sleep there is no
dreaming and the waves (called delta waves) come
at a high vibration about 3 per second.

• The REM-dream state is a neurologically and
  physiologically active state. In this state the
  waves come at a rate of about 60-70 per second
  and the brain generates about five times as much
  electricity as when awake. Blood pressure, heart
  rate, breathing rate, etc. can change
  dramatically during REM-sleep. Since there is
  generally no external physical cause of these
  states, the stimuli must be internal, i.e., in
  the brain, or external and non-physical.

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The Brain Activity During A Dream

• Brain stem mechanisms protect us during sleep
  from activities that could have as a result
  self-injury or injury to others. That is, most of
  us are paralyzed during sleep. However, some
  people suffer from sleep disorders where those
  activities are not prevented. People who suffer
  from this disorder flail, sleepwalk, etc., and
  can be a danger to themselves or others. Such
  people often leave their beds during sleep.
• Another curious quality of brain activity during
  dreaming is that almost all dreams are forgotten.
  We call this dream amnesia. This is not due to
  anything paranormal or supernatural, but to weak
  encoding.
• Perhaps the most curious quality of dreams is
  that we most of the time are not aware that we
  are dreaming while we are dreaming. This may
  account for time distortion, lack of reflection
  on one's plight, and the amnesia that often
  follows waking.

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Parapsychology vs. Science

• Nowadays, hardly anyone believes that dreams are
  messages from the gods. But some
  parapsychologists, believe that dreams offer an
  opening to another universe.
• Others have studied the subject of whether the
  mind is open to telepathic input during sleep and
  have failed to find evidence of psychic ability
  while dreaming. They seem to think that brain
  waves represent states of consciousness and that
  sleep is an altered state of consciousness.
  However, sleep is not a state of consciousness,
  but unconsciousness.

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Parapsychology vs. Science

• A lucid dream, also known as a conscious dream,
  is a dream in which the person is aware that
  he/she is dreaming while the dream is in
  progress. During lucid dreams, it is possible to
  gain control of the dream characters and
  environment, as well as to other impossible
  feats.
• Lucid dreaming has been researched
  scientifically, and its existence is well
  established. Allan Hobson, with his
  neurophysiological approach, has helped to
  understand the lucid dream into a less
  complicated way.

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Parapsychology vs. Science

• The prophetic or clairvoyant dream is perhaps the
  strongest reason for believing that dreaming is a
  gateway to another world. Some dreams seem
  bizarre. They seem to foretell events.
• If a significant number of dreams of just a
  single person corresponded to future events, this
  would be a great benefit to humankind and we
  should try to find out how does it work. However,
  no such person has been found yet.
• However, most parapsychologists are not
  interested in the physiology of dreaming. They
  focus instead on the content of dreams, which
  they believe reveals a passage to the paranormal
  or the supernatural.

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Nightmare

• A nightmare is a dream which causes fear or
  horror, or the feelings of pain, falling,
  drowning or dying. Such dreams can be related to
  physical causes such as a high fever, or
  psychological ones such as psychological trauma
  or stress in that persons life. If a person has
  experienced a psychologically traumatic situation
  in life, for example, a person who may have been
  captured and tortured, the experience may come
  back to haunt them in their nightmares. Sleepers
  may stay awake and be unable to get back to sleep
  for some time.

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Dream Interpretation

• Dream interpretation is the process of giving
  a meaning to dreams. In many of the ancient
  societies, including Egypt and Greece, dreaming
  was considered a supernatural communication,
  whose message could be made clear by those with
  certain powers. In modern times, various schools
  of psychology have offered theories about the
  meaning of dreams.

success, values
If you want to learn more about dream
interpretation and what each thing symbolizes,
simply go to www.dreammoods.com
obedience
love, romance
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Conclusion

• Most dream themes, such as being chased or
  falling are said to have a connection with our
  hunter-gatherer days. We have these dreams
  because our ancestors were chased by
  sharp-toothed tigers and slept in trees. The
  evidence for such beliefs is minimum. If the
  dream-state is a gateway to anything, it is
  probably a gateway to personal fears and desires,
  rather than to ancient ones of other people. We
  assume dreaming has a purpose, but that purpose
  is more likely to be rooted in this life than in
  some other one.
• It is most likely that dreams are a result of
  electrical energy stimulating memories located in
  various regions of the brain. Why does the brain
  keeps memories, remains a mystery, though there
  are several explanations. Explanations in terms
  of the paranormal and supernatural are not as
  likely to have a connection with those that limit
  themselves to biological and emotional mechanisms
  linked to brain activity.