Dreams are a very common experience in our day to day lives. We’ve all had dreams, sure our memories of them may not be the best but nevertheless they still happened. They can be of something you experienced earlier in the day, something horrifying you witnessed in the corner of your eye or they can be just the most weird and confusing thing you have ever seen.
Despite the extraordinary nature that dreams tend to possess, they, for the most part, typically carry meaning behind them. In a way, dreams can sometimes be an insight into your inner emotions and feelings, depicting worries of betrayal, fear of loss or thoughts of joy and satisfaction with your current life.
Now this isn’t saying that all dreams have meaning necessarily. I mean we have all had at least one crazy dream before where it’s too nonsensical to actually mean anything. Like say a dream where you are riding a dinosaur or something while fighting Count Dracula, kind of nonsensical. This does bring up just one question: why do we dream of these things in the first place?
When it comes to why we dream, some researchers believe there is no real reason or even purpose behind why we dream. Other researchers believe that we dream as a way to help our own mental and physical health. This was determined through research showing that when patients woke up as they went into REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, the patients tended to show signs of anxiety, depression and lack of concentration.
While according to this researcher, dreams are meant to be helpful, I believe that this isn’t always the case. The main example of this is the existence of nightmares. In most cases, nightmares tend to cause anxiety, depression and lack of concentration, as the previously mentioned research stated for those who didn’t dream. So it mainly relies on the type of dream you have on how it will affect you.
This doesn’t necessarily refute the idea though as it calls back that our own emotions can influence our dreams. For example those with post traumatic stress disorder, or those who have been through something traumatic in general, are more likely to have nightmares. Same goes for those who recently witnessed some sort of horrifying media like horror games or movies.
From this it can be determined that dreams aren’t necessarily our brain’s way of helping us, but rather a byproduct of our emotions to an extent. This inevitably leads to the question of how do these dreams form in the first place.
Earlier, I mentioned REM sleep, here in lies how we dream in the first place. During REM sleep, part of our brain known as the thalamus sends images, sounds and other things along those lines to the cerebral cortex, the part of the brain that processes and interprets information.
Now that the questions on why and how dreams exist have been answered, how can we tell if or when we are dreaming. Since dreams are created as a result of our own emotions and the processing of images and sounds inside our head, it could be entirely possible that what we are experiencing could very well be a dream. I mean dreams can feel very realistic at times, so who is to say that what we are experiencing is not a dream.
Dreams can depict scenes that can last for days in your mind, meanwhile in the real world you’ve only been sleeping for like 45 minutes. This belief of possibly living in a dream is a very major topic in philosophy. The possibility that one day when we die only to wake up and realize it was a dream the whole time is a common philosophical belief that to some degree, I can see where this idea could be derived from, especially after discussing how dreams work.
Despite seeing the signs of how this could very much be a possible idea, I personally believe that it seems too far fetched to some degree. I mean sure dreams can be realistic sometimes, but never have I felt a dream with this level of realism.
This theory also gives too much credit to the one dreaming this as well. Despite being a writer and storyteller, this level of development of dialogue and detail is too much for it to possibly even be considered a dream.
Another reason as for why this wouldn’t be plausible is that in dreams you never see a face you don’t know. The people in your dreams are bound to be those of people you know or have seen randomly online as the brain’s input in dreams is limited to a degree. So, in order to be seeing as many faces that we do in our day to day life it would require us to have seen over millions of people.
In my opinion, worrying about that type of stuff makes life more worrying than it already is. If this was a dream anyways, then I don’t want to wake up.