Do Our Dreams Have Meaning?

Whenever I have a dream and wake up remembering it I wonder if what I had a dream about has any meaning. I have always heard that certain dreams you have relate to something happening in your life. But, is this really true? Is there any way to prove that dreams have meaning?

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About Sleep

When doing research about this topic I learned some information about sleep in general. According to this New York Times article When doing research scientists break sleep down into two different phases, REM (rapid eye movement) sleep and non REM sleep. Dreams happen during REM sleep. REM sleep is when your eyes move all around while you sleep and you body is basically paralyzed. You don’t move around basically at all during this phase of sleeping. We know we dream during this REM phase of sleep because when surveyed 80% of people woken up during REM say they are in the middle of a dream.

Meaning Behind Dreams?

In the same article it talks about how neuroscientists essentially say dreams are mental gibberish and don’t have any secret meaning or significance. This assertion has caused a lot of dispute because many different types of therapies believe that dreams are significant. Different types of psychologists that think dreams hold psychoanalytical meaning interpret the significance in different ways. For example freudian psychologists think that what you dream are your impulses that are bad that your brain is trying to pass off as dreams. Research of neurologists strongly goes against beliefs like the ways of Freudian psychology. According to this  article dreams are fundamentally something biological. You have them to get rid of the pieces of information that are not of use to your brain. Dreams are essentially like you have a bunch of random trains of thoughts. In the New York Times article a doctor explains how dreams are bits and pieces of what happened during your day that are being added into your corresponding past memories. From what I can gather many doctors and researchers have different ways of explaining why dreams happen to us and what they mean. There are contrasting views between neurologists and some psychologists on whether dreams actually mean anything or if they are simply a biological practice. I’m curious to see if there are any discoveries that will be made in the future to tell us more about our dreams.

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sources:

http://www.nytimes.com/1984/07/10/science/do-dreams-really-contain-important-secret-meaning.html?pagewanted=all

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-theater-the-brain/201506/what-do-dreams-mean

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One thought on “Do Our Dreams Have Meaning?

  1. Madeline Elizabeth Dittrich

    I found this post very interesting because I just recently learned about dreaming in my psychology class! We also learned about Freud, and his beliefs when it comes to dreaming. Freud believed that dreams are a way for humans to process their desires. Humans need a way to process the desires that they can’t process in their waking hours, so we do it while we’re dreaming. I think dreams are such an interesting concept. I just want to know why human actually dream, since a definite answer has not yet been determined by scientists.

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