Sunday, April 27, 2008

Why Do People Dream? - This Is A Question Asked The World Over

When we wake in the morning, or middle of the night we are intrigued by the visions that filled our head through our slumber. There have been countless books written offering analogies and explanations of those visions so that we can somehow make sense of the mini movies that we see at night while we are asleep. With all this knowledge1AD6 out there, which face it we have all at least looked at once, we are still not clear as to why these visions play in our head. Here we offer an brief explanation of why do people dream.

Firstly, it is important to state that just because you do not remember your dreams when you wake, does not mean that you did not dream while you were asleep. The basic fact is that each and every living breathing being dreams. That includes adults, babies and even animals. Though the amount of our time asleep that is spent dreaming varies, it has been scientifically proven that we all dream. Dreams are easily forgotten, and you have more then one dream a night and the one you remember when you wake is often the last one that you had.

So the Question Remains: Why do People Dream?

It is an essential part of our healthy, normal functioning life. Yes, essential. As a matter of fact there have been numerous experiments done on willing subjects where they were given medication that did not allow them to enter into REM sleep. REM sleep is when dreams take place. The deprivation of this state and dreams led to the participants becoming incredibly anxious and even abrasive. They had difficulty concentrating and exhibited other personality changes. These experiments also showed that the younger a person is the more important the dreaming is.

There are two schools of thought as to why people dream. The first is that dreaming is exercise for the mind. So your dreams do for the mind what running does for you body. The second thought as to why people dream is that it helps us deal with emotions that we experienced throughout our day that we were unable to express. So they are a response to an emotional arousal.

The key here is that they are unexpressed emotions that we had throughout the day. So if you had a screaming match with your spouse, there's a high probability that you are not going to dream about that all night because you were able to express yourself. However if someone through the day made you very angry and instead of being able to confront that anger and express it you had to simply put a smile on your face and go on about your day, that anger is an emotional arousal. Something you were not able to deal with in your day.

This is what the brain does to get rid of the "gunk" of the day. Mind you (no pun intended) that your dream is really a metaphor for that emotional arousal. So the person at work that angered you may appear as a monster of some type in your dream.

Now you can dream about the same thing on repeated nights. The way to do this is to think about them. This is how reoccurring dreams take place. A person spends time thinking about an issue or situation without resolving it, day in and day out. The mind then at night presents you with dreams that work out the scenario in different ways, offering you resolutions. So why do people dream? To help them live a healthy fully functional life.

Visit WhyDoPeopleDream.net for more information and advice to the age old question Why Do People Dream and other dream related questions.

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