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What Are Dreams Made Of?

Maybe the biggest mysteries in our lives are those short, bizarre movies that we watch when we fall asleep. Dreams make a lot of scientists angry because they are almost impossible to understand. Yet, there are a lot of proven facts which some scientists were able to crack.

Some say that the dreams come from our soul, some say from our memories, some even say that they foretell the future. Maybe they do all of that simultaneously.

Scientists have proven that there are more types of dreams, there are REM dreams and NREM dreams, also there are more stages of dreaming, like Hypnagogia, Deep dreaming, Hallucinating, Delirium, Trance and there are people who act differently while dreaming like Sleep walking, Sleep talking, Sleep crying etc. The important thing is that every single one of us dreams about something every night.

Some scientists made an experiment with people who suffer from amnesia and normal people to see if dreams are connected with our memory of everyday life. Both groups were given a task to play Tetris every night before they fall asleep for about 1 hour. The first group, the one where there weren’t any people with amnesia said that they have dreamed of Tetris.


The second group, the one with people who have amnesia didn’t remember dreaming about Tetris, but they said they dreamed about falling blocks. All of them reported their dreams at the Hypnagogia stage, that is the stage where we are nether awake nor asleep (usually in that stage we dream about falling from stairs or cliff or something and make that ninja move that awakes us) .

This could mean that dreams are in fact result of our memory, but not our declarative memory. The thing is There are declarative memories (which people with amnesia do not have) , things we remember consciously like our dad’s name or what day is your anniversary (don’t worry, if you forget one time, you’ll remember that date for the rest of your life even if you get amnesia) and there are implicit memories where a lot of information is stored subconsciously, those are the things we don’t pay much attention how we know, we just do them, like speaking, walking and dancing awesome when we’re drunk.

So the dreams are formed from our implicit memories, the ones that are deep in our sub consciousness, and the same memories that may say much more about us than we can consciously say about ourselves.
Other scientists believe that REM dreams are much more important to us, than NREM. They say that when we fall asleep and we go through that stage of Hypnagogia we lose our ego, so when we get to REM (Rapid Eye Movement) dreaming we are most honest to ourselves.

While we dream without our ego we are more capable to show ourselves what really bothers us in our lives so we can solve it, that is why while we dream the dreams have a lot of sense and when we wake up after 10, 20, 30 minutes they lose sense and seem bizarre. That’s because our ego is back and we no longer understand the message we send to ourselves. We block the message and usually forget the dream.

So our dreams try to guide us to solve our emotions and problems in life, using our implicit memories that are deep in our sub consciousness but here is our ego, our firewall to block that message.

The most interesting theory is yet to come. Some scientists say that the brain has so much potential and power that enables us to calculate the future, or as some say possible futures.
Everything that happens around us is a chance, a probability. Some number like coefficients on football bets.

By actions and chances of those actions happening again, some other variables, scientists believe is possible to calculate what will happen next and what the probability of that actually happening is. Similar like they do in casinos.

Our mind can calculate the percent of the probability of something happening, but it’s impossible to pay attention and remember everything, like what is everybody that you meet trough the day doing, how they are acting, what is on the news, what are the events of the next days, what are everybody telling you through the day. In theory if you know all this, and some other variables, compared to the past actions, you can calculate what is most likely to happen in the future.

The scientists say that the brain has the power to store all of this in our sub consciousness. Every little unimportant thing that is happening around us and based on that and on history, our brain can sub consciously calculate what is most likely to happen. So when we sleep it warns us, but as you know, not everything means as it seems in our dreams. Sometimes good things mean bad and bad things mean good (like dreaming that somebody dies means that he will live longer).

Scientists say that our brain shows us memories and images that only we understand on our own way and mean something only to us so we can better understand what our brain and subconscious are trying to tell us. That is why sometimes we dream something as innocent as flower and we feel bad, because sometime in our lives we experienced something with flower that meant bad to us, like seeing a bad movie where a bad guy leaves a flower to everyone he murders and that information is implanted in our brain, in our subconscious.

Be that as it may, the dreams have a lot of meaning in or lives. They decide most of our mood through the day. There are a lot of times we wake up in a bad mood. This is because we dreamed of something bad that we forgot. There are times we are happy. The dreams show our problems, our wishes. They show things we have forgotten, things we never will forget. They may even show the possible future.

Dreams will always stay our biggest mystery because we are our biggest mystery.

By Dejan Davchevski, HumansAreFree.com;

Dejan Davchevski is an International Marketing Manager, though his passion is sharing a way of living that he calls ‘The Code Of Life.’ He discovered ‘the code’ while he was in a dark period of his life and it helped him recover. You can contact Dejan on his Facebook page or website.