Yesterday, I read a article by Jay Dixit about dreams. It says that dreaming is a sensitive system that tries to pay much attention to the threatening cues in our environment, and as Harvard's Barrett puts it, the dreams are just thinking in a different biochemical state.
This artcile descrbiles a bit devilish study first in which researchers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison tried to find out what will happen when a rat stops dreaming. The result of study was that rats lost their ability to defend themeslves. Finnish psychologist Antti Revonsuo believes that this is not because they were exhausted but because they were robbed of their dreams. Dreams, he contends, are a training ground in which animals and people alike go over the behaviors that probably are the key to prevent themselves from danger. In article, the author analyzed many situations and gave out several real instances, as well as quoted Revonsuo and other scientists' arguments and conclusions, trying to figure out the stuff of dreams. It's amusing and thought-provoking, and really gave me a clear recognition of dreams.
In a article of New Concept English I read before, I already knew that we need sleep
not because we need to rest our bodies but because we need dreams. In psychiatrist William Dement's experiments, people in test who showed some personality disorders because they were disturbed from their rapid eye-movement or REM sleep—which indicates dreaming—for several nights on end. And in this article, I got to know more about dreams.
Dreams basically simuates virtual realities, most of which are so lifelike that they often confuse us and make us think that is really happening. I read a book on psychopathology of everyday life and interpretation of dreams by Freud before, he told that dreams are secret accomplishments or satisfactions of subconscious wishes. This author also quoted Freud's opinion, that Freud saw dreams as convoluted pathways toward fulfilling forbidden aggressive and sexual wishes and that frightening dreams were just wishes in disguises. It makes sense for me, yet this article goes further in addressing the function of dreams. It says that dreams are a sort of theater in which our brains screen realistic scenarios and the primary of function of negative dreams is rehearsal for similar real events, in which we don't dream about other people, only ourselves. We practice reactions in our dreams over and over again to ensure our own survivals when confronted with a threat.
Just a few days before, after I watched a lot of violent and bloody murder films at late night, I dreamed a lot about scenarios that I was chased and threatened. In that cold lifeless world, there were dangerous events, negative emotions, monsters, near-death experiences and such far more sinister than in waking life. Now, I know that our dreams just served to protect us, why I dreamed that horrific scene that night because during our sleep the dreaming brains scans emotional memories, when it detects a memory trace with a strong negative emotion—which probably derived from awful experiences in real life—and then it constructs a nightmare around that theme. Probably it feels not good at frist, but it just tries to train us in dreams. If you conquer dread in dreams, yourself will improve. So a function of dreams as Revonsuo thinks is to protect and prepare us, thereby dreams simulate emergency situations and provide an arena for
safe training. Why the dream world is so filled peril is to simuate the potential threats and prepare us to react quickly in dangerous encounters.
In last paragraph "The Nighttime Edge", it talks about the dreams' edge over consicous thought. It gives an example we all knew in high school that how German chemist Friedrich August Kekule found the molecular structure of benzene, which is because he dreamed about a snake devouring its own tail and this had inspired him. Sometimes we probably had been in similar situations, for which we got better at tasks just by dreaming about them. Thus, a sleep researcher at Harvard Medical School, Robert Stickgold holds that dreaming is much more complex than rehearsal. I totally agree with his statement that sleep makes us to integrate and consolidate knowledge and during sleep our brains are making sense of the world, discoving new associations among existing memories, looking for patterns, formulating rules. Stickgold also think this is how we create meaning. This makes me think a lot. Although we rarely remember our dreams, but dreaming practically happens in our brains during sleep. Even if we are not aware of what is happening in dreams, we probably all had felt before that we once better understand some complicated problems after nights of dreaming.
After reading this article, I started to think the dreaming as a sort of thinking activity on another level just as Barrett contends that the purpose of dreaming is as broad as all waking thought and says dreams as really just thinking in a different biochemical state. Dreams is also worring what we are worrying about in waking life, however levels differ, it often solves problems in a fancy way, unconsciously. And so it is, ancestors believed that dreams predicted the future. But we all don't understand dreaming completely, even though it is so basic to human existence. It consumes years of our lives, certainly plays a important role in our lives. In this area, we need more research.
At last, I highly recommend this article to anyone interested in more information on this topic, you will know the stuff of dreams more deep inside.
