"The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind." -Sigmund Freud
My dad is in town to visit for the next few days, and with him always comes a few of his newest science-based magazines, his favorite being the "New Scientist." One of the articles in the latest edition was written about new research regarding dreams. The article looks into how we interpret dreams today which is different than the original statement made by Freud.
The article states that, "We now know that this peculiar form of consciousness is crucial to making us who we are. Dreams help us to consolidate our memories, make sense of our myriad experiences and keep our emotions in check."
Studies at Harvard Medical School where done by giving a group of people a problem to solve. What they found was the people that had non-REM sleep about the problem ended up performing better on it. They concluded that we don't just simply replay events while we dream, we are also processing these events, consolidating the memories, and then integrating the information for future use.
It has been know since the 1960s that dreams don't only occur during REM sleep, but in non-REM sleep as well; although the the content of these dreams are different. The author states in the article, "Non- REM dreams tend to be sparse and more thought-like, often without the complexity, length and vivid hallucinatory quality of REM dreams."
Daydreams may also fall into the same idea as REM dreams in that they may improve our ability to extract meaning from information and to have creative insights. Implying that it may even be true that we don't have to sleep to process memories and that daydreaming might not just be a diluted version of sleep dreaming as was once thought.
The conclusion of the article is basically that instead of the previous thought that dreams are the window to the secret you, instead they may be helping to create who you are. Dreams allow you to replay events with the absence of the hormonal rush that accompanied the actual event. Traumatic events that are replayed in dreams may eventually become less traumatizing and less emotional in our memories (this does not hold true to people with post-traumatic stress). Nightmares may actually be preparing the mind and body for these events in our waking life.
The more research that is done on dreams doesn't necessarily mean that they are taking away the magic and secrecy of dreams, but instead they may just be exploring deeper to what makes us "us." Our dreams will always be ours, research is just helping us to realize how amazing these dreams really are.
Pura Vida!
Alica Ryan, NTP
Credit due to NewScientist, March 12-18, 2011, author Emma Young, "The I in Dreaming."
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