Dreams have become very important in modern-day science. Scientists have been working on several patterns of sleep to understand the behavior of dreams.
Every one of us dreams, either during the day or night, and it is normal. However, recalling your dream is very difficult.
You are scared and walking alone in an endless dark corridor. Something wicked is chasing you and at the same time, you are oblivious. You want to run towards the light but you can hardly move your feet. You try hard to escape but someone from behind echoes your name and you don’t want to look back, fearing to get trapped. You feel something behind your back, about to grab your head and wreck it. Before he does it, you wake up sweating, believing you are not dead.
Dreams are meaningless unless you try to find a specific pattern to understanding them. You might find yourself lucky. But it is a very tough task to do.
While brain-scientists are yet to understand why we dream in the first place, numerous facts about dreaming have come to fore?
Many scientists believe that dreaming has to do something with the memory.
Believe me or not, I have heard many fairytales about dreams.
While discussing a dream that my friend had in which he had kissed Scarlett Johansson, his favorite actress while co-starring with her in a movie, another friend of mine said, “there’s a part of the brain responsible for flirting also”.
I have also heard dreams happen in fractions of a second. “Dreams are just a 3-second climax,” said another fellow.
All of this happens while you are asleep. Your body is at rest while your whole brain is active — dreaming.
Sleep is broadly categorized into two segments:
NREM – Non-Rapid Eye Movement Sleep and
REM – Rapid Eye Movement Sleep
It is believed that most of the vivid dreams (intense dreams) occur during the REM stage.
What is NREM?
Generally, there are four to six cycles of NREM every night, which are followed by short intervals of REM sleep. The average adult spends about 20 to 25 percent of the night in REM sleep.
NREM has three stages and each stage has distinct characteristics. In these three stages, there is very little or no eye movement. The first stage involves slight eye movement. It is also called “relaxed wakefulness” because a person who is asleep is misinterpreted as wakefulness.
There is no eye movement in stage two and dreaming in this stage is also rare. On average, it makes about 50% of our sleep.
So, have you ever tried to wake up your kid or anyone but they do not get up? This is the third stage in which a person is in “deep sleep”.
Dreaming is more common in this stage than in the first two stages. However, the content of dreams in this stage tends to be disengaged, less intense and less memorable than those which occur during REM.
Sleep disorders like abnormal movements, actions, emotions commonly occur in this stage. This disorder is called Parasomnia. Muscles in NREM stages are not paralyzed, which may cause sleepwalk, unlike REM.
What is REM?
REM is the brief cycle among all other stages in your sleep. Eye movement is swift during this stage due to intense brain activity. This is the stage during which vivid dreams occur and if you are awakened at this stage you are likely to remember the dreams easily.
Body in this stage is paralysed to avoid any movement.
Dreams are illogical, senseless and disconnected but at times they provide logical solutions and add to the scientific discoveries. So, do not be astonished if you are solving an equation in your sleep that you could not solve in the exam.
“I saw in a dream a table where all the elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper -only in one place did a correction later seem necessary,”
DMITRI MENDELEEV
Mendeleev was a chemist who was obsessed to find a reasonable way to organize chemical elements. The man came up with the periodic table.
Also Read: What do oneirologists and philosophers say about dreaming?
Sigmund Freud had immense interest in the techniques involved in the interpretation of dreams. Freud’s theory of dreams proposed that dreams represented unconscious thoughts, desires, and motivations. He believed dreams may appear worthless and nonsensical on the surface, however, through interpretation they can form a “poetical phrase of the greatest beauty and significance.”
Younis Sideeq 