Do you ever have that feeling when a dream is so real that you wake up in a panic believing that you are doomed to fall off a cliff, but it turns out it was just a feeling of falling in your dream? For me, that feeling is all too common and leads me to question why?
Why do we have dreams that feel so real that we wake up in a panic? What is it inside our brains that lead us to believe whatever is happening in our dream is so real, we then freak out in real life? It is a hard concept to grasp and question but after researching what and why we dream I found these answers.
Many psychologists have studied whether dreams have a physiological, biological or psychological function but it has yet to be answered. They have instead researched and speculated theories as to why we dream.
First dreams and sleep work hand in hand with sleep to help the brain sort through everything it collects during the waking hours. Your brain is met with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of inputs each day. Some are minor sensory details like the color of a passing car, while others are far more complex, like the big presentation you're putting together for your job.
During sleep, the brain works to plow through all this information to decide what to hang on to and what to forget. Some researchers feel like dreams play a role in this process.
Another theory is that dreams typically reflect our emotions. During the day, our brains are working hard to make connections to achieve certain functions. Then it's during sleep that the emotions of the day battle it out in our dream cycle. If something is weighing heavily on your mind during the day, chances are you might dream about it either specifically, or through obvious imagery.
Now the least intriguing theory of the bunch is that dreams don't really serve any function at all, that they're just a pointless byproduct of the brain firing while we slumber. We know that the rear portion of our brain gets active during REM sleep when most dreaming occurs.
Some think that it's just the brain winding down for the night and that dreams are random and meaningless firings of the brain that we don't have when we're awake.
The brain is still a mystery and as long as it stays that way we will still be in the dark on exactly why we dream. But we can speculate and be imaginative because that’s what we were made for, to create, discover and continue to question and explore the unknown abyss of life.
