In the arms of Morpheus, we don’t just dream. Sometimes our brain scares us with nightmares.
It is completely normal to be frightened by a dream. But our brain doesn’t hatch secret plans to scare us with nightmares.
In the past, many people believed that dreams were a window to another world. People lived two inseparable lives: one in a waking world and the other in a dream world.
They believed that the dream world contained a mixture of past and future, of gods and goddesses, and that it helped people find purpose in life. These dreams often revealed new ideas, met new people, not necessarily benevolent, which is why some people found them scary. Others saw it as a sign or a prophecy from the gods.
A special language of the brain?
When scientists first started studying dreams about 200 years ago, they thought dreams were a special type of story that the brain tells itself. They thought it was a special language in which ideas and emotions were explained using symbols and signs. In this dream state, different parts of the brain were talking to each other.
Let’s imagine you dream that your house is damaged, the house was supposed to represent the dreamer and the brain is trying to tell you that you or your ego has been damaged. Dr. Sigmund Freud, considered by many to be the founder of psychoanalysis, wrote a very famous book on dreams in 1900 called “The Interpretation of Dreams”.
A hundred years ago, people began to explain things more thoroughly through science and technology. This made it possible to understand these processes differently. But that doesn’t mean that the way their ancestors explained dreams was necessarily wrong.
According to scientists, there are two main types of sleep, and dreams occur during a phase called REM sleep. In English it is called Rapid Eye Movement (rapid eye movements) because at this time of night people move their eyes back and forth rapidly. It is during this phase of the night that we dream.
If you observe cats or dogs sleeping, you will sometimes see their eyes moving and their paws fidgeting. This indicates that they are in REM sleep and may be dreaming. But we don’t really know what cats and dogs dream about, because they can’t tell us.
The other major type of sleep is non-REM sleep, called deep sleep or slow-wave sleep. In this type of sleep, people sleep very deeply. But they don’t seem to be dreaming at the time.
A mechanic still poorly understood
For the past 50 years, some scientists have believed that dreaming is how the brain decides every day what to keep and what to throw away. In a way, it’s like cleaning your room: your brain decides what you need to know and trashes what isn’t important.
Scientists believe that children find it more difficult to separate the waking world from the dream world and that they often confuse the two.
Filmmakers have brought this confusion to the screen time and time again over the years. Many movies deal with how dreams can frighten and confuse us.
As you can see, many people wonder why dreams are scary. The truth is that we are not sure.
What we do know is that everyone dreams, and everyone thinks dreams can be weird, scary, and sometimes confusing. We could share the ability to dream with all warm-blooded animals, so it’s likely that this ability plays an important role in our health.
I guess everyone tries to make sense of their dreams, even scientists. But we are still unable to see inside another person’s brain to know what they are dreaming about. And that’s probably a good thing.
Drew Dawson, Director, Appleton Institute, CQUniversity Australia
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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