You are chased and chased, fall, are late or fly away: these are dreams that most people have probably experienced. Every night you dream for hours. But usually you can remember it in one or two minutes. If present.
The nighttime messages from the brain have fascinated humanity for thousands of years. Even in ancient times, dreams were attributed a deeper meaning and were believed to be secret messages from higher powers. Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, thought that dreams contained our most intimate desires. From a neuroscientific perspective, this is unlikely.
Instead, it is now assumed that waking life continues to some extent in dreams; this is called the so-called continuity hypothesis. For example, pregnant women dream about babies more often than non-pregnant women. Or if you make and listen to a lot of music, your dreams also contain more music.
A recently published study also supports the continuity hypothesis. The international research team, including the University of Geneva, compared the dreams of two hunter-gatherer societies, the BaYaka in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Hadza in Tanzania, with those of people from Switzerland, Belgium and Canada.
The two non-Western communities are highly dependent on personal relationships for their survival, because there is no social safety net such as a state pension provision. They also record higher mortality rates than Western societies. This is due to disease or conflict between rival groups.
As the researchers have now discovered, the dreams very accurately reflect different lifestyles. Hunter-gatherers’ dreams often began with threats and ended with solutions that included social support. An example of a Hadza dream: «I dreamed that a buffalo attacked me. […] There was another man named January who came to help me.”
The dream reports from Western societies were more likely to contain social threats, such as exclusion, ostracism, shame and loss of status, and were less likely to end well. An example was: “I was with my boyfriend, our relationship was perfect and I felt completely fulfilled. Then he decided to leave me, leaving me with a deep sense of despair and pain.”
Ever since Sigmund Freud published his book ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ in 1899, dreams have been used as a tool in psychotherapy. This also applies to Christian Roesler, professor of clinical psychology at the University of Basel and the Catholic University of Freiburg. He says, “If I know nothing about a person, but I know his dreams, I can create a psychological profile of him.” The American dream researcher and psychologist Kelly Bulkeley also shares this opinion: “Give me a hundred dreams and I will tell you who you are,” he claims.
According to Roesler, the special thing about dreams is that they bring up images from the unconscious that the conscious mind ignores when awake, especially the unpleasant ones. Experiences from earlier stages of life, especially from childhood, that cause difficulties in adult life also become present in the dream. “By analyzing dreams you can get to the real problems faster,” says Roesler. The dream is essentially a window into the psyche.
Emotional conflicts, whether from the present or the past, manifest themselves graphically in dreams. This is illustrated by anxiety dreams. For example, if you dream of standing on an island and the water around you rises higher and higher until you almost drown. This can be symbolic of feeling like you are drowning in your work. Or you dream that everything around you is burning down – possibly a sign of the worry that everything you have built in life is in danger of falling apart.
Psychoanalysts also emphasize that in dreams the unimportant often appears in the foreground, while the important appears only in small details. It is believed that this shift serves to overcome the censorship of the conscious mind, which prefers not to have painful memories or feelings.
Christian Roesler describes the most common dream pattern as follows: The dream self is confronted with a task that involves enormous difficulties, but must be accomplished. He describes a typical example from a study of the dream patterns of patients in psychotherapy: the dream self is threatened by an evil figure, feels powerless, tries to escape and is persecuted.
As Roesler notes, such dreams change over the course of psychotherapy. In the persecution dream in question, the dream ego changes its response to the threat. Instead of flying, it actively fights the figure and ultimately manages to overcome the threat.
The scientifically proven treatment against nightmares is also based on the strategy of actively confronting a threat: the so-called imagery exercise therapy. Those affected repeat the terrifying dreams in their heads while awake. Imagine a story with a positive ending.
According to neurologist Isabelle Arnulf of Sorbonne University, people suffering from mental disorders such as depression, anxiety disorders or post-traumatic stress disorder are more likely to be plagued by nightmares. These are also associated with an increased risk of suicide, the researcher said in an interview with the French magazine ‘Cerveau & Psycho’. That is why repeated nightmares have recently been included in the diagnosis of suicidality.
One of the biggest mysteries in science remains why we dream in the first place. Neuroscientists in particular have long regarded nocturnal fantasies as pure nervous storms without any deeper meaning, a result of chaotic neuronal discharges. This theory has lost more and more adherents.
In contrast, there is a widespread theory that dreams help to distinguish between what is important and what is unimportant, i.e. to clear out what has been experienced. Because when you are awake, the brain is bombarded with new information and nerve connections are created that are ultimately unimportant and can even be disruptive. “Mental simulation in dreams could therefore serve to reduce the complexity of the connections established in the waking state,” Fred Mast and Andrew Ellis, psychologists at the University of Bern, said in an article.
Another theory suggests that dreams are a mental training program for potentially dangerous situations in real life. Accordingly, we can practice running from enemies or dealing with embarrassing situations while we sleep. Dreams probably also help regulate emotions.
And that’s not all: dreams provide creative inspiration – provided you can remember them. You can train this by watching the dream immediately after waking, with your eyes still closed, and then recording it in a diary. Prominent examples show that this pays off for creativity: the pop song ‘Yesterday’ is said to have appeared to Paul McCartney in a dream. Salvador Dalí’s artwork is said to have manifested itself in dreams.
But dreams can also evoke creative inspiration in the normal population, as shown in a study by dream researcher Michael Schredl of the Central Institute for Mental Health in Mannheim with more than a thousand participants. Eight percent of the dreams influenced the creativity that the participants incorporated into artistic activities. Either they used them to solve work-related problems, or they were inspired to do things they wouldn’t have dared to do before, such as approaching someone.
Christian Roesler also observes such patterns again and again: “Dreams offer creative solutions that you would not have thought of for a long time or that you would never have thought of if you were awake.” (aargauerzeitung.ch)
Source: Watson
I am Dawid Malan, a news reporter for 24 Instant News. I specialize in celebrity and entertainment news, writing stories that capture the attention of readers from all walks of life. My work has been featured in some of the world’s leading publications and I am passionate about delivering quality content to my readers.
