The Complexity of Dreams

Written by Anna Truong

Wind whooshes in your ears, gently whispering nothing yet your heart races in your chest as you speed through the tangled woods. You could feel the adrenaline pumping in your veins. The beads of sweat gather on your forehead. The ground beneath your feet suddenly becomes stickier and stickier every second like mud until you realise–you are sinking.

Ding! Ding! Ding! The annoying sound of your alarm clock shrieks out, making you question everything you were seeing not long ago.

Sleep is crucial for our well-being and dreams are like a package deal. Dreams can feel like floating on fluffy clouds or drowning under the cold ocean. They could feel as real as it gets, involving images, thoughts and feelings, but once it's over, poof!---Gone forever are the memories of all extraordinary nighttime adventures.

How Do Dreams Function?

We undergo many stages of sleep at night. Although dreams can occur in any stage, they primarily happen during the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, a phenomenon discovered in 1953 by a physiologist Nathaniel Kleitman and his graduate student Eugene Aserinsky. The REM sleeping stage evokes a more vivid and intense imagination for the dreamer.

People who often wake up in the middle of the night and people who possess more creative imaginations and sensitive emotions tend to remember dreams longer. However, memories of our dreams will mostly fly away like dust.

When we sleep, the function of our hippocampus, a memory storage that is located within the temporal lobe of the brain, becomes less efficient than when we are awake. In simple terms, it dozes off like we do. Since events in dreams are perceived to be temporary data, they are stored in a short-term memory. Therefore,

many of us have a difficult time remembering specific dreams no matter how bewildering they were.

Additionally, the prefrontal cortex, the logical lobe in our brain, becomes inactive when we sleep. This explains why some dreams, for example, your friend taking the body shape of a horse, can feel ‘out of place’. Meanwhile, the heightened emotional charges that we experience in dreams are driven by the high activation of the amygdala, a region of the brain that processes our feelings. 

Why Do We Dream What We Dream?

A character recognition study conducted by experts in 2000 revealed through analysing 320 dream reports that 48% of the dream characters were personally known to the dreamer whilst 35% were identified by their social roles (doctor, police, etc.). This suggests that many dream characters are connected with real-life experiences, indicating the potential merging of the two worlds. 

Some psychologists believe that dreams are well connected to the processing of our psyche and daily lives. Others are skeptical due to the perplexing content of their dreams that they cannot interpret reliably. 

In general, people have many different types of dreams. Some may be immersed with colorful scenery while others may be plain black and white like the 80s television screen. However, we all have dreams that involve a variety of sensory imagery. 

There has been progress with dream research shown such as in Japan where scientists use neural decoding that includes brain scans and questionnaires to predict and visualise dreams. Despite the efficiency of 75% accuracy of this technique, dreams continue to be a complex and difficult phenomenon, hence even impossible for experts in fields of psychology and neuroscience to prove existing theories.  Thought-provoking questions such as why dreams even exist still linger today as an unknown mystery.

So tonight, when you fall asleep, dreaming of wild boars chasing you until you drop or zooming across the blue skies, remember — your brain may be resting,  but it is far from quiet.

References:

PMC Article

Kumari, Archana, et al. The Neurobiology of Dreaming: A Review. National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 2020, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7279884/

Scientific American Article

Why Do We Forget So Many of Our Dreams? Scientific American, 3 June 2019, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-we-forget-so-many-of-our-dreams1/

Devon Duvets Article

“Why Do We Forget Our Dreams?” Devon Duvets, https://www.devonduvets.com/news/post/why-do-we-forget-our-dreams?srsltid=AfmBOopNMaCz_Zn8RA8ioa7Ap2Z1Tg7MGONisuRdxR2cojx9SrOXK9WJ.

Sleep Foundation Article“These Are Dreams: What They Tell Us About Sleep.” Sleep Foundation, https://www.sleepfoundation.org/dreams.

Psychology Today Article

Huff, Garrett. “Why We Dream What We Dream.” Psychology Today, 12 Jan. 2015, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sleep-newzzz/201501/why-we-dream-what-we-dream

Wiley Journal Article

Domhoff, G. William, and colleagues. “A Study of Dream Content and Character Recognition.” Journal of Sleep Research, vol. 9, no. 4, 2000, pp. 285–291, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.1365-2869.2000.00213.x#b2