Others say that dreams are just random synapses firing, activating bits and pieces of your experiences in a haphazard way. They say that there isn't any special meaning to them. Often as not, they are jumbled elements of your everyday existence and the memory of past experiences. In fact, every fundamental element of a dream is based on some past experience. Your dreams may put together people and places that couldn't possibly have been together. Your grandmother scuba diving with your ex-boyfriend. It matches people of the wrong ages and times. Being a toddler while watching your younger sister drive you to the store. We may even create houses and landscapes that never existed, or at least never existed together. But, no matter how bizarre the plot and the characters are, every single basic element is something we have experienced at one time or another. Even people who claim to have fantastic dreams will tell you that the unicorns are just horses with a horn on their heads. There is no symbolic narrative. A cigar is just a cigar, and a tunnel is just a tunnel.
Either way, the fact that you can remember your dreams at all means that they are connected in some way to your conscious mind. However, the connection is usually tenuous. Most people forget the minute details of their dreams shortly after waking up. Many people can't remember even the gross (as in big, not as in yucky) details within minutes. Still more don't remember anything at all about the dream by mid-morning. I would bet real money that most of you reading this can't remember with clarity more than a dozen or so dreams you've had in your entire life. Of those, you likely don't remember the full story line, just the details that stuck with you. L. Strumpell, a contemporary of Freud theorized that we don't remember the particulars of dreams because we don't learn from them. He theorized that we learn by association and repetition. Dreams are usually so random and the plot lines so vague, that nothing sticks with us. That would seem to lend credence to the second theory I outlined above.
At one time, it was believed that dreams are connected to REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. Most of us experience a period during sleep in which our eyeballs move back and forth very rapidly. Tying dreams to REM sleep raised an interesting paradox. REM sleep generally only lasts for a few seconds to a few minutes, while the subjective plot lines of dreams can go on for hours, or in some less common cases, days. Nowadays, it is believed that REM sleep and dreams are not connected. Sleep studies have shown that people experience vivid dreams without ever going into REM sleep.
Dreams are dreck that our mind drops on the ground as it starts up the dialog once again after sleep. They show us events that would certainly jar us if they happened during our waking hours. However, they don't give us glimpses into a hidden realm, other than what we glue together from available bits and pieces of experience. It certainly isn't useful to build the goals of our lives on the contents of our dreams. Artists and authors have based their work on their dreams, but many of the rest of us, talented as we may be, don't have dreams that are universally interesting enough to make a living by selling them.
For one, I just enjoy having a laugh at how utterly bizarre my dreams tend to be.
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