Dreaaaaammmss

Hi Ninjas, 

Song pick: The lion sleeps Tonight - The Lion king ( 😅😅 yoo, I just had to do this, the song is a classic)Link for easy access to the Song Pick

Some one asked a question at the comment section of my last post, and after my attempts to reply, I ended up giving directions to this post.

(Hehe, you have no idea the kind geek you just unleashed, but since you asked amma just get right to it, get it off my chest yunno😁..) I had to pull out my glasses for this one.

I said last time that dreams are the manifestation of our subconscious, details of the day that come out to play while we are asleep, and this led our anonymous friend to ask the question "if dreams were about past activities, why do people talk about dreams coming through?"

Before I jump out to try and answer that question, allow me to go off a little and share some things I know from my huge head.

For you to understand how the human mind works you have to start from the top and work your way down to the case at hand. There are two doctrines for understanding the human mind:

Materialism and Dualism. 

Materialism is basically saying that the brain is the source of mental life, and that humans are material beings bla bla bla (please stay with me)

Dualism on the other hand talks about how the mental life takes form from two elements, Matter and Spirit which we can so easily call the Body and the Soul.

While Dualism would make more sense to you and me since after all we are all religious beings and it gives us hope of a higher power to look up to, yet with the invention of technology, the idea has become obsolete.

Hold on to these two doctrines while I continue( you could put it into a mental basket if you wish while we continue to make progress).

Now back to the where dream come from.

Many psychologists have different theories about this, yet the contents and purpose of dreams have not been fully understood. Dreams are believed by some to be bye product of sleep which help us to sort out certain life problems we might have in reality. Dreams occur in different stages of sleep but they are most memorable at the REM stage of sleep. I could go on to explain the different stages of sleep, but no body asked me, so amma just zip it and continue. 

So the REM sleep where the giant alphabets mean rapid eye movement (in case you were wondering) involves rapid eye movement which almost makes it seem like you are awake, plus the brain is to an extent highly active during this stage. A person is more likely to remember their dream if they are woken at the REM stage, and in the REM stage dreams take on random combinations to get their point as opposed to the N-REM stage. This just means that in REM sleep dreams, you can be a goat, bat, table or in my case a vampire etc, it's a realm of endless possibilities while in the N-REM sleep your dreams are much more thoughtful, they are include memories of events as they happened. ( also add these types of sleep to your mental basket.)

Now fast forward to the part where I try to answer the question at hand "why do people talk about dreams coming through?"

I could just flat out say it's a mere coincidence, but that wouldn't satisfy your curiosity would it? Like I said in the comment section to argue about this from a religious stand point would only render this argument null and void.( philosophy taught me that). Arguing from that perspective also has to involve the doctrine of Dualism which like I also said earlier has become obsolete. Which means it wouldn't hold water logically speaking. 

To answer this I will have to tap into my favourite psychological concepts:Cognitive dissonance theory, false and selective memory. (Again add to your mental basket)

Cognitive dissonance theory is the idea that when we experience an internal inconsistency between two thoughts it leads to dissonance. This when simply put means we just want things to fall in place in our head. It manifests itself in different ways like when we tend to be drawn to information that supports our existing view rather than information that challenges it. This causes us to seek out confirmation bia; seek out support for our views and ideas.( damn, you better be jotting these things down). An example is that you are more likely to take seriously a dream where a person you believe to be evil in reality is chasing you with a pitch fork in your dream than that where your mom is chasing you.( so its easier for you to believe this dream of an evil pitch fork wielding human to have a significant real life meaning)

Now to the concept of a false and selective memory.

You can say that dreams become memories when you are wake up. Now memories are not never photographic( unless you were born with a photographic memory, which is pretty rare) Memories are never exact because you have to reconstruct them, and they can often be distorted by shapes and factors you are unaware of. An easy example is this ; You might be pretty confident about hanging your keys behind your door when you came back last night because that is what you do all the time when you come back, that actually you lose the memory that you kept it on top of the fridge this time instead of hanging it behind the door. With that picture being painted, it is believed that you can unconsciously tweak dream scenes to fit into real life experiences, and with you having selective memory, which is remembering what makes sense to you, due to the multi faceted nature of dreams, it is easy to find connections between real life events and dream content.

I read about a research conducted, where people were asked to write down their dreams in a diary, after which this prevented the selective memory effect, and dreams no longer seemed accurate about future events. 

Finally to end my rant, an average human dreams for an average of six years (yep 6 ), that does not rule out the element of coincidence, since you will have a good number of dreams to pick from to match future events.

I remember I had this teacher in junior secondary school, and every time after each class, he would ask if we all understood him. Of course someone or people will always say no because at the end of the day Computer science was a bit confusing when it came to codes and all that. But whenever some of us shouted no to his question, he would laugh and say that the confusion of some meant that the equation was now balanced. 

I used to think he was just being funny, but now when I think about it, he was actually right.

So you might not believe whatever I just wrote, or you might not understand it, but it's alright because you are just performing you duty as part of the grand scheme of things 😊. I believe that without doubt, there won't be enlightenment. ( also: *inserts katara's voice* I believe Aang can save the world 😁)

I bet I just made my psychology professor very proud If only he knew I existed 💔.( I did warn that a geek was unleashed😅)

So now you can see that there is a logical explanation as why people believe that dreams come through, and with this I think I have managed to answer your question to the best of my abilities.