The reality of dreams- if there is one
For some, dreaming is an escape from the grueling reality of day-to-day life. It is an opportunity to run wild with your own unique imagination, with no limitations to what you can accomplish. For me, I dread the nights I dream.
No one knows the science behind dreams. There are many different guesses, but ultimately there is no true answer that lets us know why our minds craft dreams the way they do and why that is different for each person. I either have wildly vivid dreams or no dreams at all. And recently, my dreams have been so vivid that I wake up still convinced an event actually took place, or I can still feel a touch lingering. Sometimes I wake up suddenly because a dream was far too much. I can feel it physically weighing on my mind, like how my eyelids feel heavy after a difficult sleep. The mind is a wild place that will likely never be able to be explained, and I think dreams are the most intriguing and unique function of the mind.
There are a few broad reasons for dreams that have been speculated, but none confirmed.
A mini-movie pulled from various memories
Sometimes, when dreams feel familiar, it's because they are. I can recall cases where my mind replayed memories, sometimes ones that I had forgotten, which allowed me to look back on a situation. Though typically from my experiences, these memories are slightly altered or have a type of dystopian air to them, like something is not quite right but I can't tell what.
2. A reality generated or triggered by an intense emotion
This is the one that scares me the most because this is the speculation that leads me to believe that there is a meaning behind dreams and that they are meant to tell a story or show you something intentional. Being a very emotional person especially after my personal experiences this year it alarms me that my dreams may reflect deeper untapped emotions. As I’m sure we all know, it is difficult to understand and express all of our emotions, because they come about in different ways for each individual. So is the purpose of dreams, these little almost-true worlds generated by our minds, to show us what we really feel? Or is it simply easy to assign our own personal experiences to a similar event in order to find meaning because we want everything to have its proper place?
3. A repressed memory
I believe that this speculation for the purpose of dreams has an aspect of truth to it. Especially for those who have experienced trauma, we know that repressed memories of traumatic incidents can come up in many many ways, oftentimes when you least expect it. Manifesting in a dream could be that memory's way of worming its way out of your subconscious and into your conscious mind. In my case, my dreams are far too outlandish for this to be true, at least in their broader meanings.
4. A premonition
This speculation I believe to be true because if you can have premonitions in your mind it makes sense that they can manifest in your subconscious mind in dreams. But I also think it is obvious when this is true. In my train of thought it is similar to getting ‘a feeling’ about something or intuition- you know when you feel it to be true, and you know when you don’t. I believe that dreams would contain that same feeling of truth if they really represented subconscious premonitions.
5. Intentionally planted by another being
As far as my beliefs go, this one is a stretch, but many people believe in all-powerful external forces that can alter your mind or aspects of life, for example, God or the devil. I don’t believe this is part of the reasoning behind dreams because I think that dreams are far too personal and intricate to be affected by a divine source– I believe the mind is the one thing that is absolutely ours in the grand scheme of the universe and all that exists, and that the imagination is the most underutilized tool. So maybe dreams are our own way of letting our imagination run free. It’s possible that when we sleep, we release control of the creative side of our minds and it generates whatever it feels like. But then what inspires that? How does our subconscious decide (if it even can decide) what to place in dreams? Could it possibly be based on what we fell asleep thinking about? Maybe, but that wouldn’t explain how dreams can get twisted into the most outlandish stories with trying emotions that sometimes (for me at least) end in jutting awake with tears rolling down your face.
I am an ‘expect the worst and hope for the best’ type of person, and I believe my dreams reflect that. If they really do capture your deepest emotions or if they even slightly reflect them, my dreams could be evidence of that. Typically, when I dream of an event, it is usually the worst-case scenario or shown in a negative light. For example, last night I had a dream, (the dream that inspired me to immediately wake up and begin writing this piece at 8 am), and I was surrounded by people that I either don’t like or don’t know, and people who are no longer in my life. I was in a place that I shouldn’t have been, and essentially the events of said event throughout the night led to me emotionally breaking down completely in front of people who, in my dream, only wanted to see me fail. I opened myself up to these people and was made to regret it. Already not a great start especially for someone who deals with a lot of social anxiety in the real world. But I was confident in my dream, which was one positive aspect. Sometimes dreams can allow you to see how life would be in different scenarios and show you how different qualities of yourself would interact, even if the overall experience has a negative connotation.
Now, the part that gets me about all of this is that even though all of these people are not in my life anymore, I know that none of them would act the way they did in my dream in real life. These were people who I let go of on good terms, and people who I once shared important relationships with. People who have made it clear they wish me well. It was my pessimistic mind casting an evil hue on these people, but why? Is there even a real reason? Or was it my imagination running wild? Some may say that this dream represented a fear of opening up to people or a longing for my life to go back to the way it was and to be surrounded by these people in a time when we were together. I disagree. I interpret this as my inability to ‘expect the best.’ The reality of that situation would not have ended up the way it did in my dream, and in that, I am 100% confident. Whether or not this dream had meaning or not, what I took from it is that I do expect the worst, from people and situations, to deter the possibility of disappointment. So maybe it’s not about what dreams are trying to tell us, but rather what we draw from them. Dreams can reflect the good, the bad, or whatever you want them to. I love discussing the fact that each person is so insanely unique from the next, so maybe it’s up to the individual to discover what dreams mean, not the unit. All that means is that we should spend more time thinking introspectively and getting to know our own minds because we are the only ones who can understand ourselves most truly. Let that be a blessing, not a curse. I find beauty in knowing that my own self is something that is solely mine.
So essentially, attempting to find meaning in these glorified memory dumps is useless, at least scientifically. You have to build it on your own. Though if you're like me, you yearn to know what your mind is really trying to tell you, or if it's trying to tell you anything at all.
