Halloween is right around the corner and so it is scary movie season. I wanted to watch a horror movie the other day and my roommate did not want to because he said that they give him nightmares. Personally, I do not have nightmares that often, either that or I do not remember them because I don’t tend to remember my dreams. This got me to start thinking about dreams and what they actually are.
Dreams are images, thoughts, sounds, and sensations that people can experience when they sleep. Dreams can be anything, ranging from the things that had happened to a person the previous day or the most secret fantasy that a person may have. In How Stuff Works’ article, they explain that if a person has stress building up in their life, they can link their stressful dreams to this real world stress.
Dreams occur the most during the R.E.M. state of sleep and this is when the dreams are most often remembered when a person wakes up in the morning. During R.E.M. a person experiences skeletal paralysis so that a person does not act out the dreams that they are having while they sleep. This stage can last for as long as 30 minutes and also can only a minute or two (How Stuff Works).
Many of the dreams that we have will never be remembered and scientists say that this is due to the time we wake up during the dreams. A study showed that when subjects wore red goggles before going to bed, they were more likely to remember red images in their dreams (How Stuff Works).
The hippocampus is the storage for memories of events that occur during the day and what has happened many days ago. Studies show that at night when a person is sleeping, a person’s brain transfers memories from the hippocampus to the cerebral cortex, which is the part of the brain that processes information and turns it into knowledge. A study in animals found that the neural activity replays the events that a person occurred throughout the day so that they will remember what has happened (Quora).
A nightmare is a dream that occurs, giving a person strong feelings of terror or anxiety. This type of dream usually occurs later into the night and is remembered at a much higher rate if the person is woken up from the nightmare. Nightmares can be a reaction to stress and some believe that the more you have nightmares, the more you will be able to cope with stressful situations (Psychology Today).
So although scientists are not able to directly find the reason to why we have dreams, they have some interesting theories of how memories are transferred through the brain. In the study of the people wearing red goggles before going to sleep, I would like to see more studies done to see if it was just by chance that these people saw more red images. The alternative hypothesis being that the red goggles do cause more red objects to turn up in a person’s dreams however from the evidence that I have seen, we cannot reject the null hypothesis just yet. There may have been confounding variables, like the person thought about dreaming of red objects just because they knew what the study was researching.
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