had a crazy dream where the planet was attacked by giant killer bees and somehow I had beastboy’s powers of animal shifter (I was watching teen titans a few weeks ago :x ). idk if others had any powers but I do remember I started kicking some serious giant killer bee ass when I turned into a green Pterodactyl. good times.
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Opening credits - Paprika (Satoshi Kon, 2006).
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In the olden days, people believed that our dreams were full of clues about the future. Nowadays, we tend to think that dreams are a way for the mind to rearrange and tidy itself up after the activities of the day.
Why are dreams sometimes scary? During the day, things may happen that frighten us, but we are so busy we don’t have time to think properly about them. At night, while we are sleeping safely, we can give those fears a run around. Or maybe something you did during the day was lovely but you were in a hurry and didn’t give it time. It may pop up in a dream. In dreams, you go back over things you missed, repair what got damaged, make up stories about what you’d love, and explore the fears you normally put to the back of your mind.
Dreams are both more exciting and more frightening than daily life. They’re a sign that our brains are marvellous machines — and that they have powers we don’t often give them credit for, when we’re just using them to do our homework or play a computer game. Dreams show us that we’re not quite the bosses of our own selves.
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Gemma Elwin Harris — Big Questions from Little People & Simple Answers from Great Minds
A message from summerbirds
hi Ken, I was wondering if you could help me outt. For my lit review I want to discuss dreams and how important their content actually is psychologically. Now i keep changing my question and i keep getting thrown off by the studies i read (the more i research the harder i find it to stay on track/feel like my question has not been answered/is answerable.) currently i want to do: Is dream content psychologically important? Discussing the significance of dream content versus dream emotion. help?
You’re talking to the right person then haha. That’s a really good question I also asked myself a lot when I would get into my reading hours of dream science.
And from what I’ve read I think I came to my own conclusion based on the facts I could make sense of. Before I explain, here’s my #Dreams tag just in case you need to look at some nice articles for your review.
First question, yes, I think dream content or at least the processing of it is fundamentally if not urgently important to our brains and thus psychologically necessary. Why? because the less we dream the likelier we are to develop mental disorders.
Dreams are a way of our brains to process information. It could be useful data or it could be useless data. As long as your brain believes it’s valuable data it will process it and either it incorporates it into the brain or leaves it. In other words, it does the same our computers do, re-allocating data (and emotions) for the purpose of facilitating future processes the brain will need to do when it wakes up. It does the same for emotions, so while the emotions you feel in dreams are quite genuine they are actually emotions you’ve recently felt being weighed by the dream to either perpetuate it or drop it. I think some people have reoccurring nightmares probably because of their inability to fully process certain memories and emotions, perhaps they’re subconsciously holding on to them despite how problematic and useless they might be for the brain. The way we feel always has a way of getting the best of us.
So someone dreaming of a recent ex-lover/friend is really processing old information to make way for new ones. But people have such a wrong perception of dreams they think it’s something meaningful and it becomes a new problem or source of negative emotions.
The content within the dream is hardly ever significant as far as linear stories go. Even though our brains are just as active while under REM (rapid eye movement/ dreaming), the part of the brain that is supposed to make sense of things is essentially shut off. This is done so when the content is being processed, however unorganized and senseless it is, your ego doesn’t have a say in the way the dream processes this raw data waiting to be allocated. Which shows that both dream content as is, and dream emotions are important in their own respect.
Hope this puts you off on the right start, do check out my dream tag!
The Science Behind Our Strange, Spooky Dreams
The realm of sleep and dreams has long been associated with strangeness: omens or symbols, unconscious impulses and fears.
But this sometimes disturbing world of inner turmoil, fears and desires is grounded in our day-to-day experience, sleep researchers say.
“The structure and content of thinking looks very much like the structure and content of dreaming. They may be the product of the same machine,” said Matthew Wilson, a neuroscientist at MIT and a panelist at the New York Academy of Sciences discussion “The Strange Science of Sleep and Dreams” on Friday (Nov. 9).
His work and others’ explores the crucial link between dreams and learning and memory.
Dreams allow the brain to work through its conscious experiences. During them, the brain appears to apply the same neurological machinery used during the day to examine the past, the future and other aspects of a person’s (or animal’s) inner world at night. Memory is the manifestation of this inner world, Wilson said.
“What we remember is the result of dreams rather than the other way around,” he said.
Dreams as teachers
His work, and that of fellow panelist Erin Wamsley, a sleep scientist at Beth Israel Medical Center/Harvard Medical School, focuses on the relationship between memory and dreams in non-REM sleep. Vivid dreams often occur during REM sleep, named for the rapid eye movement associated with it, however, non-REM sleep also brings dreams but they are more fragmentary.
Wamsley’s research indicates dreams help people learn.
In a study published in the journal Current Biology in April 2010, she and colleagues found that study subjects who entered non-REM sleep and dreamed about a video game maze they had played hours earlier saw their performance increase dramatically more than those who slept but did not report any maze-related dreams. Meanwhile, thinking about the maze while awake did not improve the players’ performance.
Although this work focused on non-REM sleep, incorporation of learning happens in all stages of sleep, Wamsley told the audience.
Wamsley has also used another video game, this one of a downhill skiing, to probe the relationship between dreams and learning. Like the maze, this game was intended to be interactive and exciting for the subjects, Wamsley said.
Subjects reported their dreams after playing, and initially, their dreams put them directly back into the game, as if rehearsing. But as they fell deeper into sleep, their dreams became more extractive with less literal relationship to the game, she said. For instance, one subject described following boot prints in the snow.
This may be because in deeper sleep, the brain is trying to extract meaning from the experience earlier in the day. The subject’s dream about boot prints may have been a way to refine the dreamer’s concept of how to move through snow, she said.
Learning the maze
Like some of Wamsley’s subjects, Wilson’s also dreamed of mazes, but these mazes were real.
By accident, Wilson found when rats fall asleep their brains replay parts of their experience in a maze. By using fine electrodes to eavesdrop on the activity of single neurons in the hippocampus, a region of the brain associated with spatial memory, he saw this happen.
Individual neurons in rats’ and humans’ hippocampuses fire in response to spatial location, so each time a rat passes a certain point within the maze a single neuron fires. Once the rats fell asleep, Wilson found these neurons would fire as they were reactivated in patterns that represented brief segments of the maze, which could be run forward or in reverse, Wilson found.
In the future, science may develop ways to control cognitive functions enhanced by sleep, “using sleep and dreams as a tool the way we use learning and teaching while we are conscious,” he said.
In one study, he and colleagues successfully manipulated the content of rats’ dreams with a tone they had used earlier to direct the animals as they navigated a maze. The tone caused the rats to dream of the section of the maze they had been taught to associate with that tone.
Going without
No one can speak to the value of sleep more than someone deprived of it. Alan Berliner, a filmmaker who explored his own insomnia in his 2006 documentary “Wide Awake.” offered that perspective to the discussion.
“Every night when I put my head on the pillow, it’s like an adventure,” Berliner says in a clip of the film played during the discussion. He described songs, particularly Leonard Cohen’s “In My Secret Life,” looping in his head and his thoughts racing uncontrollably.
“I started to think the expression human error means sleepiness,” he said in the film.
The discussion, presented in collaboration with the Imagine Science Film Festival, was moderated by Tim McHenry of the Rubin Museum of Art.
I had a dream recently where I woke up with a headache, realized it came from a brain ‘implant’ of sorts, and came to find out I was a sleeper cell for a future resistance fighter that was able to send small radiowaves from the future back into his own brain (since going back in time is so far impossible, in this future, they were able to figure out how to send encrypted data into specific human brains across the quantum universe and into the observable one) filled with valuable data about a resistance and of technology, inventions and drafts from the future. Was pretty dope, could have even made a sick movie.
I remember I once had a dream where I owned a transformer (autobot) and me my bot would get into these action-movie type of scenarios that ended with cops chasing us as we got away.
dream weavin
To everyone claiming that you can become a daily lucid dreamer by reading how to books and websites online, please consider the following: There has yet to be an official method that actually works each time, effectively, with every person. What you’re all suggesting only works for some, and not even enough for it to be looked at as a definitive method for acquiring daily lucidity. In order for everyone to get the same results they would have had to be conditioned similarly to those who can acquire lucidity when they please which would be a nearly impossible task. When I say they haven’t found a method that works for people I mean everyone, not just a chosen few.
Not quite. An operating system can function just fine without a defragmented harddrive, where as, our brains would become unstable if we were to stop dreaming, leading to mental disorders. I would compare dreaming to a restart or shutdown on the computer, because that’s when you give the system a chance to activate and begin running any new programs and drivers for the first time (or after it has been introduced into the computer). Much like when we semi-shut our bodies down to let our system/brain recognize and process all of the new thoughts, experiences and memories we’ve just absorbed through out the day. ‘The brain is a creative computer’ — Dexter’s Lab
Lucid Dreamers Offer Clues to Consciousness
Lucid dreamers, people who can deliberately control their dreams during sleep, have long fascinated scientists. And now brain scans of those self-aware sleepers could offer insight into the seat of self-reflection in the mind.
It is difficult to get a full picture of what goes on in the brain when we make the transition from sleep to wakefulness. In fact, the specific areas of the brain underlying our restored self-perception and consciousness when we wake up have eluded scientists, according to a statement by the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry. But a team of researchers was able to get a picture of that isolated activity in lucid dreamers.
“In a normal dream, we have a very basal consciousness, we experience perceptions and emotions but we are not aware that we are only dreaming,” study researcher Martin Dresler, of Max Planck, said in a statement. “It’s only in a lucid dream that the dreamer gets a meta-insight into his or her state.”
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans, the team compared the activity of the brain during one of these lucid-dreaming periods with the activity just beforehand in a normal dream. Out of four participants, only two lucid-dreaming episodes could be verified as lucid dreams and were long enough to analyze with fMRI, which measures blood flow to brain regions in real time; an increase in blood flow to a specific region is a sign that region is becoming more active.
The results, detailed online July 1 in the journal Sleep, showed that a specific cortical network is activated when lucid consciousness is attained. Michael Czisch, another Max Planck researcher involved in the study, said activity in certain areas of the cerebral cortex spikes within seconds when a lucid state begins.
These regions include the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which has previously been associated with self-assessment, and the frontopolar regions, where the act of evaluating our own thoughts and feelings takes place, Czisch explained in a statement. “The precuneus is also especially active, a part of the brain that has long been linked with self-perception,” he said.
Previous research at the Max Planck Institute compared the brain activity of lucid dreamers as they entertained the same thoughts while awake and asleep. The brain activity was similar, if weaker during sleep, the researchers found.
![Is Dreaming Our Brain’s Way of Organizing Input?
Even among scientists who disagree about the dream process, no one thinks that dreams have only one purpose. Since dreams can occur at different times during the sleep cycle, they have different functions. Let’s look at a few that have been proposed.
Some researchers do believe that dreams help the brain organize and manage the tremendous amount of day-to-day input humans face. Evidence of this in found in research on infant sleep. Most dreams occur during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, which is normally characterized by brain activity very similar to waking and significant body paralysis (still allowing for twitches and eye activity). This occurs during roughly 20 percent of adults’ sleep sessions, but infants are in REM sleep during half of their slumber hours. Infants need to categorize and understand an entirely new world, but they spend a good deal of their time asleep. In order to be efficient, it’s likely that their active brains are multitasking, using sleep to help deepen the neuron pathways for new information. Studies with infant and adult rats indicate they share the same type of neuron firing during sleep. Researchers concluded that if the purposes of sleep were different for infants and adults, then their brain activity would not be comparable [source: Karlsson, et al]. Therefore, it’s a safe bet that a good deal of dream time is spent organizing data we’ve absorbed.
What else could be happening? Some therapists think that a good deal of a person’s dreaming is the unconscious knocking on the door, trying to get out and express itself. This began with Freud, who believed the unconscious focused on aggression and sex. Modern therapists adopt a wider view of the unconscious, believing it contains information about many topics our brain hasn’t (or won’t) process.
There are brain researchers who believe that many of our dreams are simply random neuronal firing. Since a dreaming brain is obviously very active but not technically conscious, the brain is essentially producing dreams to keep itself busy. This could account for the seemingly disjointed and weird aspects of some dreams.
Much information has been collected about dream states using technology such as PET, EEG, EOG and EMG, as well as observations of sleepers and self-reports of dreams. The brain, however, is not yet wide open for exploration and still holds many secrets, including the details of dreaming.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m82dfsf5Br1qbn5m1o1_400.jpg)
Is Dreaming Our Brain’s Way of Organizing Input?
Even among scientists who disagree about the dream process, no one thinks that dreams have only one purpose. Since dreams can occur at different times during the sleep cycle, they have different functions. Let’s look at a few that have been proposed.
Some researchers do believe that dreams help the brain organize and manage the tremendous amount of day-to-day input humans face. Evidence of this in found in research on infant sleep. Most dreams occur during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, which is normally characterized by brain activity very similar to waking and significant body paralysis (still allowing for twitches and eye activity). This occurs during roughly 20 percent of adults’ sleep sessions, but infants are in REM sleep during half of their slumber hours. Infants need to categorize and understand an entirely new world, but they spend a good deal of their time asleep. In order to be efficient, it’s likely that their active brains are multitasking, using sleep to help deepen the neuron pathways for new information. Studies with infant and adult rats indicate they share the same type of neuron firing during sleep. Researchers concluded that if the purposes of sleep were different for infants and adults, then their brain activity would not be comparable [source: Karlsson, et al]. Therefore, it’s a safe bet that a good deal of dream time is spent organizing data we’ve absorbed.
What else could be happening? Some therapists think that a good deal of a person’s dreaming is the unconscious knocking on the door, trying to get out and express itself. This began with Freud, who believed the unconscious focused on aggression and sex. Modern therapists adopt a wider view of the unconscious, believing it contains information about many topics our brain hasn’t (or won’t) process.
There are brain researchers who believe that many of our dreams are simply random neuronal firing. Since a dreaming brain is obviously very active but not technically conscious, the brain is essentially producing dreams to keep itself busy. This could account for the seemingly disjointed and weird aspects of some dreams.
Much information has been collected about dream states using technology such as PET, EEG, EOG and EMG, as well as observations of sleepers and self-reports of dreams. The brain, however, is not yet wide open for exploration and still holds many secrets, including the details of dreaming.
A message from thepeopleofelsewhere
Hey man, you are honestly the most well rounded individual I have virtually met. I love your blog, and I have a few questions about dreams. I don't remember if you made a post about how to have an out of body experience, but I read it some where. Anyways, is that the same as Lucid Dreaming?
Thanks man, I’m guessing you’re talking about either Near-Death Experiences are Lucid Dreams, Experiment Finds or Near-Death Neurologist: Dreams on the border of life
And basically dreams and out of body experiences aren’t all that different from one another. It is the brain under a REM (Rapid eye movement) state where the body is in total lockdown so that you don’t act out your dreams and also to rest and replenish the body (the brain becomes more active during this state I should add). But sometimes parts of the body and brain remain active even as you sink into the dream/ REM state, this produces those out of body experiences, near death experiences, and the feeling of being under paralysis/ someone holding you down when in reality it’s just your body still under lock down while your brain is only somewhat active.
Mass Participation Dream Experiment Launches
Is it possible to influence people as they sleep and give them their perfect dream?
April 10th saw the launch of a new study that uses a specially designed iPhone app in an attempt to improve the dreams of millions of people around the world. If successful, the study will allow people to create their perfect dream and so wake up feeling especially happy and refreshed.
This study was launched at the Edinburgh International Science Festival by psychologist Professor Richard Wiseman from the University of Hertfordshire.
Wiseman has teamed-up with app developers YUZA to create ‘Dream:ON’ — an app that monitors a person as they sleep and plays a carefully crafted ‘soundscape’ when they dream.
Each soundscape has been carefully designed to evoke a pleasant scenario, such a walk in the woods, or lying on a beach, and Wiseman hopes that these sounds will influence people’s dreams.
At the end of the dream the app sounds a gentle alarm and prompts the person to submit a description of their dream into a database known as ‘The Dream Catcher’. Users of Dream:ON are also encouraged to share their dreams via Facebook and Twitter.
Each night Wiseman will collect thousands of dream reports and use the information to discover whether it is possible to give the world sweet dreams. “The app is free and we want as many people as possible to participate,” noted Wiseman. “I have conducted many mass participation experiments in the past, but this is by far the most ambitious and exciting.”
