Everyone does it, even you do it but we all do it unconsciously, we dream. Dreams are a sequence of images, images and thoughts that pass through a person’s sleeping mind. They represent unconscious desires and wishes. There are many different types of dreams, they help us experience extraordinary things we usually don’t or they make us fear our reality.
You know those moments where you’re awake but you are not all there in the room with your body. Well that is an example of daydreaming. Daydreaming is when you’re awake but you’re in between the unconscious mind and the conscious mind. While you are experiencing that hypnotic trance your mind wanders to the best of its imagination (Hohne,K.2020) . Sometimes while daydreaming your mind will go back to relive a moment from the past or it will simultaneously give you a foreshadow of the future you wish to come. Daydreaming occurs when we are feeling bored, stressed, frustrated, or when we need to remove our minds from our current life to another. Your consciousness is the only thing that keeps pulling you back to the reality of your life. 70 to 120 minutes throughout your day is spent in that trance state of daydreaming. We daydream to help us realize our goals, and keep us organized.
Lucid Dreaming is where the dreamer knows that they are dreaming. Oftentimes during lucid dreams the dreamer can control the dream, the characters, and the setting of the dream. You are able to recognize your thoughts and emotions while lucid dreaming. While sleeping your brain cycles through rapid eye movement also known as REM and non-rapid eye movement which is known as non-REM (Neunez, K. 2019) . During non-rapid eye movement your heartbeat, brain waves, and eye movements are relatively slow, while rapid eye movement dreaming is when your brain is very active, your heartbeat and eye movement increase. Lucid dreaming occurs when you are having a rapid eye movement dream. The ability to have and control a lucid dream is an important way to initiate the ability to have power over your thoughts and influence events.
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Have you ever woken up with the feeling that you need to change something or perhaps everything in your life? That is an effect from having a life changing dream. These dreams are so vivid, and impactful that they push your conscious self to do something about it. All dreams are personal no one else knows unless they are told about it, which is why we dream to help us get an escape from our realities. Sometimes the dream you are having is a “reality check” for what needs to be done to help better your life in the best ways possible. Many people think when they have dreams like that it is just a dream, although if you do something the dream indicated for you to do then it just might change your life for the better.
The most common daily dream everyone experiences is a normal dream. A normal dream gives insights from the unconscious mind. Normal dreams are your strongest and most desired wishes. The thought of the day before also has an influence on the dream you have that night. The normal dreams that you have can become a lucid dream at any time, it happens as soon as you realize that you are dreaming. Study shows that normal dreaming is a way for us to remember all the things we’ve learned and to process out the memories we no longer need. Although you may not remember some dreams, you did dream because it is part of the sleep cycle process.
Nightmares are just normal dreams, but with a little scary twist. You have nightmares because you don’t know you’re dreaming, so your unconscious mind processes everything as though it is actually happening. Your sensory systems are triggered during that process and it causes the nightmare to be very vivid making everything ten times scarier than it needs to be. Children have nightmares more than adults because they are more vulnerable than most adults. Nightmares are always wake up calls for some people to learn to let go of the toxic things in their lives. Some people don’t know they’re on the wrong path and the nightmare they have can recur to help them figure out how to get on the right path. Nightmares are usually caused by stress, anxiety or even depresion, but nightmares can also be the reasoning of those things. Some researchers call nightmares “ threat rehearsal” because it’s when we face possible threats from our real life (Breus, M. 2020).
Recurring dreams are dreams that keep happening over and over for weeks, months, and even sometimes years. Sometimes recurring dreams can be quite frightening, they can cause the mind’s consciousness to not understand important aspects of transformations that should be occurring. These dreams reflect on what you are failing to recognize in your daily day to day life. Women are more likely to have recurring dreams than men because women tend to stress more than men do on a daily basis. Recurring dreams usually start at a young age but can develop anytime and it sticks around for the rest of one’s life. These dreams often happen because of something traumatic that happened in your life, and with recurring dreams comes tidal wave dreams which is the dream that holds all the emotions such as fear, sadness, anger, anxiety, etc. from that traumatic incident that happened to you. If a recurring dream were to just suddenly vanish then it can come back during any stressful period you have in your life.
Dreams are something that is difficult to remember but if you wanted to you could do it. Although while we are asleep the process that allows us to remember things long-term shut down until you wake, which is why the majority of the time we can’t recall what had happened in our dream. If you were to wake up straight from the dream then you have a higher chance to remember what just happened in your dream. If you were to wake up from a lucid REM dream you would have a higher chance in recalling the dream, because your brain is active during lucid dreams so your long-term brain cycle is in motion. The emotions in the dream also allow you to remember your dreams, that’s why you can remember your recurring dreams over and over because the intensity of the emotion you’re feeling during that dream keeps coming back with every time it replays in your unconscious mind. Same goes for if you were to have a nightmare you can remember it because of the high levels of fear you are feeling while dreaming.
Another way you can remember your dream without having to be scared or have high emotions is by repeating to yourself that you want to remember your dream, and letting it be your last thought as you fall asleep. As soon as you wake up the next morning avoid focusing on anything other than your dream, and try to recall an image or an emotion you felt or seen eventually your dream will come to you.
Without dreams how would our minds know what we are doing wrong and try to correct our mistakes. We wouldn’t have any goals to chase if dreams were not a part of our daily lives. Dreams bring out your creative side, they give you solutions in unique ways helping you through all that needs help. Everyone experiences their dreams at a personal level whether they want to or not. It was brought up in your unconscious mind for a reason to let you dwell on it and learn from the experience it presented.
References
- Daydreams and their clinical implications – Frontiers in Psychology
- Lucid dreaming: a state of consciousness with features of both waking and non-lucid dreaming – National Center for Biotechnology Information
- What is Lucid Dreaming? – National Sleep Foundation
- How to Daydream: Techniques and Benefits – Verywell Mind
