A dream is a complex series of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that usually happen unconsciously in the mind during certain specific stages of sleep.
In the more accurate way dream is defined through four main components:
1) A form of thinking that occurs under minimal brain direction
2) A form of experience that a person believed that he experiences through his senses
3) Something memorable
4) Have some interpretation of experience
The content and purpose of dreams are still not fully known or explained. Throughout recorded history, they have been a topic of scientific speculation and a hot subject of philosophical and religious interest but still, they have certain unknown reasons behind them. Dream interpretation is a way to drawing meaning from dreams and searching for the hidden message. The scientific study of dreams is termed as oneirology.
Psychological Facts About Dreams
Dreams are still a mystery but various psychological studies and research studies help us to somehow illustrate the dreams and their hidden messages. Here are some facts listed below which are related to dreams.
1. Wish Fulfillment
Dreams are the “royal road to the unconscious mind of a person. The content of person‘s dreams reflects the dreamer’s unconscious mind and especially the dream content is formed by unconscious wish fulfillment. The important and strong unconscious desires are generally related to early childhood memories and experiences and those memories may arise in dreams.
Also Read: Up all night? Can’t sleep? Here is why!
2. A Message From Mind
Dreams are a real message to the dreamer that person should pay proper attention for his own good. Some dreams present the dreamer with revelations that can open up and help to solve out emotional or religious problems, troubles, and fears. Recurring dreams are there again and again repeatedly to demand attention they actually suggest that the dreamer is neglecting an issue associated with the dream.
3. The Connection Between Conscious and Unconscious Mind
Sometimes dreams may function to recombine unconscious elements with consciousness on a short-term basis by a process termed as mental recombination. This mental recombination may be greatly helpful to maintain an optimal information processing flexibility in brain information networks.
4. A Way of Satisfaction
According to some old theories of psychology sometimes dreams allow the repressed parts of the mind to get satisfaction and relief through fantasy while keeping the conscious mind from thoughts that would incidentally cause one to awaken from shock. It is also believed that dreams may regulate the mood.
5. A Way of Knowing Emotions
The dream accounts revealed that various types of emotions are experienced during dreams including joy, happiness, sorrow, and fear. But most common emotion experienced in dreams is anxiety, and negative emotions are in much more common than positive ones.
Miscellaneous Facts
Some general facts related to dreams are enlisted here
- Approximately 80% of the dreams are in color, there are small percentages of people who claim to only dream in black and white.
- We can control our dreams.
- A lucid dream is one in which we aware that we are dreaming even though we are still asleep.
- 95% of all dreams are suddenly forgotten shortly after waking.
- A person can only dream about things he already knows or has experienced.
- The faces of people a person sees in the dreams are faces which he has seen before in real life.