FREE ESSAY ON DREAMS

DREAMS

I don't use drugs, my dreams are frightening enough. Why do we dream? Are they
instructions from the spiritual world or just deep, hidden wishes that can be used to
unlock the secrets of the unconscious mind? Nobody knows for sure. One theory that is
prevalent today is that dreams result from the physiological exercise of the synapses of
the brain. There is no proven fact on why we dream, which is why there are so many
theories on the topic. There is Freud's theory that dreams carry our hidden desires and
Jung's theory that dreams carry meaning, although not always of desire, and that the
dreamer can interpret these dreams. After these theories, others continued such as the
Cayce theory in that dreams are our bodies means of building up of the mental, spiritual
and physical well being. Finally came the argument between Evans' theory and the Crick
and Mitchinson theory. Evans states that dreaming is our bodies way of storing the vast
array of information gained during the day, whereas Crick and Mitchinson say that this
information is being dumped rather than stored. Whichever theory is true, we may never
know, but from these following theories we can decide for ourselves what we believe to be
true and further help us into understanding our dreams.
My own personal theory on why we dream is that the subconscious mind is always working.
This results in dreams. The subconscious mind in an attempt to file away all of the
information from the previous day results in dreams. A dream in my opinion is nothing
more than a chemical reaction in the brain. In laboratory tests, when people were awaked
during the RAPID EYE MOVEMENT (REM) stage of sleep and asked to report what was on their
mind just before awaking, about 90% reported an experience termed TRUE DREAM. When a true
dream is experienced is seems as if it were an actual event rather than one thought or
imagined. True dreams often involve a series of such experiences woven together in a
somewhat bizarre story. Even those people who claimed to rarely dream or only remember
fragments of dreams in the mornings were able to give detailed accounts of a true dream
experience when awakened during REM sleep. Those who were awakened during SLOW-WAVE sleep
(the deeper, less mentally active stages of sleep) reported mental activity in only about
60% of cases. Usually, this activity lacked the vivid sensory and motor hallucinations of
true dreams. This type of mental activity is called SLEEP THOUGHT, and usually pertains
to what the person had been thinking about most of the day. However this thought is
usually much less productive than that of conscious thoughts (while the person is awake).
Those who believe that we dream due to the brain's regular exercise of groups of neurons
cite evidence that synapses can degenerate if they go too long without being active; this
neural activity during REM sleep helps to preserve important neural pathways. When
neurons in the motor and perceptual regions of the brain are exercised in this manner,
the inevitable side-effect are the dreams we experience. The increased mental thought
activity is due to the sleep thought being engaged in trying to make sense of these
movements and hallucinations.