What are dreams?

[RainDreamer]

I remember it is often said hat dreams are what the brain do to process information of the day and commit it to memory. But I just had a terrifying nightmare, and none of the details in it related to anything I have seen the day before.

The dream started out with me apparently sitting on a deck of a tall ship out in the sea. I was looking straight ahead and see my mother in front of me, talking to a bunch of people, but at the same time, she was also sitting beside me on my right side and slightly out of view, in a different dress. For some reason, my mind register the scene in front of me was something akin to a picture naturally, and asked my mother who was right next to me "when was this taken?". She told me "it was this morning", and then goes off grilling me about how I never pay attention and remembering thing, while her hands gesture came into my field of view, breaking a part of the scene I see ahead, where I see blue-white light in hexagon cells projected on her hand and wrist. Then the whole scene is gone, and I see straight ahead of the ship.

It was moving straight toward a series of tiny, tiny islands near the shore, and there were people just going about on it, apparently swimmer/ beach goers. My mind was blank at that time and was just trying to process what I am seeing. The ship didn't slow down. It start going straight over the first few islands with apparent ease while people runs away from it. But as it reaches the final island, the people there were lying down, apparently sleeping/sunbathing and wasn't noticing the ship. And it ploughed right into them. I remember the ship starting to rumble and tremble, with scream everywhere as I closed my eyes and some liquid spayed on my face before the ship comes to a complete stop. Only then I noticed how loud the ship's horn was, and I was terrified to open my eyes to see what was the aftermath of what happened.

Then I woke up.

Now, dissecting the detail and thinking about it rationally, I know there are a lot of impossibilities to make it ever a real scene. But I can't figure out why the hell my mind was constructing those images. It has no relation to whatever I have experienced recently. Where did that come out from? How did I remember it? And why, in those moments of my nightmare, it seemed so real?

Edit:

I might have been a captain of the ship. Not something I know in the nightmare, but what I figure out as I try to piece the details.

Edited October 8, 2015 by RainDreamer

[GoSlash27]

RainDreamer,

Dreams are a very fascinating manifestation of the wiring of your brain.

Here's the way I think of it:

Your brain is actually composed of several subsystems, and dreams come from the "lizard- brain" that rules your emotional responses.

When your lizard- brain is wrestling with a problem that it's unhappy with, it will occasionally babble incoherently about it and flag it "urgent". Your human brain will then take these babblings and attempt to transcribe them into something it understands by assigning symbols to them (situations, objects, and actions).

You *personally* know what these symbols represent to you, so it's often possible to assign meanings to them and puzzle out the message.

The key is that your interpretation is yours alone. You assign emotions to symbols that are unique to you in your situation, so nobody else can decode it for you.

So at the risk of sounding overly- guru-ey, this question is one that only you can answer and you *do* have the answer.

What are the major stressors in your life? How do you feel about the symbols in this dream? How do the feelings and symbols relate to the stressors? Once you sort that out, it's fairly easy to decode the message. It's usually something along the lines of "I'm worried about such- and- such problem, and I'm not dealing with it in a productive manner".

Best,

-Slashy

Edited October 9, 2015 by GoSlash27

[RainDreamer]

Hmm...I don't think it would do much good to psychoanalyse my dream by myself, since I doubt I can make sense of it even if I know the meaning of the symbols. Though it is fascinating, and terrifying, how my brain managed to construct an experience I never have been in before.

[LordFerret]

What dreams are is a good question, but it is a thing we do not know a whole lot about yet. One thing about dreams however is showing itself more certain, tied to the research of why we dream, which is the brain working on turning short-term memory gathered while awake to long-term memory. Apparently, while we're not explicitly aware of it, our brain has the ability to record everything it senses - sight, sound, taste, touch, smell, etc. Current research focused on the molecular neurogenetics of the developing eye and brain have shown both evidence and the mechanism of this.

[problemecium]

Things I've dreamed recently:

- Being John Wilkes Booth, except in some kind of steampunk universe. I had to face the reality of an impending death sentence while trying to defend my actions and the idea that Lincoln had really been acting tyrannically in court.

- Being in a universe similar to Guardians of the Galaxy and helping track down a space pirate.

- Having my dad visit my college dorm, except I had slept in till 5pm and, feeling sweaty, was on my way to the pool to cool off despite the fact that my dorm room was mounted on a pole above a swamp like one of those houses in Louisiana. And at the end it started raining right when I was about to leave.

- A really awesome future version of Kerbal Space Program with much better graphics and terrain generation. The KSC was built spanning a fjord with beautiful cliffs and waterfalls. Oh, except that wasn't actually the KSC, that was just some government building. The KSC proper was a winnebago parked a few blocks away.

In conclusion, I've found that dreams aren't so much related to what you were doing that same day as prior experiences in general, particularly topics about which you've thought a lot, even if they're not things you did in real life. I've watched Guardians of the Galaxy multiple times, I've played a lot of KSP, and I actually was feeling sweaty this morning when I woke up (that one was from today). I'm not so sure about the John Wilkes Booth dream, but I suppose I do play Devil's Advocate a lot so maybe I was trying to challenge myself.

Edited October 9, 2015 by parameciumkid