Ierrellus wrote:Helandhighwater wrote:Have you ever thought that dreams might just be mostly meaningless interpretations made by your brain in a state where it is not fully able to communicate between various areas of the brain, ie those commonly associated with context, meaning or reason. When you are asleep it seems there is a significantly reduced signalling between all the various areas that generally are in play when we consciously make sense of the world. Whilst I wouldn't be so gauche as to assume this means dreams have no reason or meaning, I might well suggest that most of it is a mix of the days experience and your minds lack of ability to put it in a narrative you could make sense of, and hence has no consistent meaning beyond general fears and doubts you experience on a day to day basis, none of which are related to specific things in a dream.
I know I sound crazy.
Not crazy. I spelled this out earlier. It's the interpretation given in the Time/Life book "The Brain". However,I do believe that unresolved problems cause nightmares. I'm retired. My worst dreams are being back at work with a co-worker who evicted me from her home when I was hospitalized. These dreams are an unwanted replay of the past ad nauseum. They are gut reactions, bearing little resemblance to rational thought. It's almost as if that affair resonated throughout my body.
Yeah as long as we don't start going down the road of smoking a cigar as a woman means precisely that you have penis envy or whatever other specific nonsense that we tend to read into dreams I think it's quite right to say dreams are general and reflect a way of dealing with things broadly rather than specifically.
As far as nightmares go you do tend to have more early on in your dream state, most of which you fail to remember unless you wake up, as the night progresses you tend to have more benign dreams, dreams you are more likely to remember as you move towards consciousness. I would suspect that most nightmares are actually just a normal way of the body stressing itself without you consciously being aware of it with the ultimate result that it removes stress, and it might explain how we prime our brain so we ultimately wake up more relaxed. When of course though we have dreams that repeat themselves over time which you often remember, I think in that case you may be right this is something other than a natural de-stress and more likely to reflect unresolved issues.
