Sweet dreams are made of…?
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There continues to be a dispute between scientists on what is the purpose and meaning of dreams but they do agree on one thing: we all dream every night.
We generally dream from three to six times per night with each one lasting between five and twenty minutes. But studies have shown that 95% of dreams aren't remembered when we wake up.
It's also been shown that we generally dream in silent movies - touch, smell, taste are very rarely invoked in dreams.
There is growing evidence that dreams can be based on memories formed in the day, that are transferred into long-term storage in our brain overnight.
We know what they are: dreams are a combination of images and scenes that develop in our minds while we sleep.
If you're like me, dreams can be about literally anything from something funny or romantic, or even terrifying or weird. While studies have documented that 95% of dreams are not usually remembered, scientists generally believe that people dream anywhere from three to six times per night with each one lasting between five and twenty minutes.
But with their weird mixture of the familiar and the bizarre, where do they come from and what do they mean?
Why do our brains take these journeys, and why do they contain such outlandish twists and turns? Unfortunately for armchair psychoanalysts, Sigmund Freud’s attempts to interpret our dreams remain disputed even today. Nevertheless, neuroscientists and psychologists have recently made big strides in understanding the way the brain builds our dreams and the factors that shape their curious stories.
Anyone who has ever awoken feeling amazed by their night’s dream only to forget its contents by the time they reach the shower will understand the difficulties of studying such a short-lived state of mind. Some of the best attempts to catalogue dream features either asked participants to jot them down as soon as they woke up every morning or, better still, invited volunteers to sleep in a lab, where they were awoken and immediately questioned at intervals in the night. Such experiments have shown that our dreams tend to be silent movies – with just half containing traces of sounds. It is even more unusual to enjoy a meal or feel damp grass beneath your feet – taste, smell and touch appearing only very rarely.
A more successful scientific approach has been to look at the brain’s activity during sleep for clues to the making of our dreams. Of particular interest is the idea that sleep helps to cement our memories for future recall. After first recording an event in the hippocampus – which can be thought of as the human memory’s printing press – the brain then transfers its contents to the cortex, where it files the recollection for long-term storage.
This has led some psychologists to suspect that some aspects of the memory may surface in our dreams as the different pieces of information are passed across the brain. Studying participants’ diaries of real-life events and comparing them with their dream records, his team has found that memories enter our dreams in two separate stages. They first float into our consciousness on the night after the event itself, which might reflect the initial recording of the memory, and then they reappear between five and seven days later, which may be a sign of consolidation.
If you’re after a more peaceful night, you might want to take inspiration from Hervey de Saint-Denys, an early dream researcher in the 19th century who found that certain scents could direct his dreams. To prevent his own expectations from clouding the results, he asked his servant to sprinkle a few drops of perfume on his pillow on random nights as he slept. Sure enough, he found that it led his dreams to events associated with that particular scent. More generally, recent studies confirm that sweet smells can spark emotionally positive dreams.
Then again, if you are like me, you may prefer to let your subconscious write your nightly adventures. As unsettling and upsetting as they can sometimes be, it is their mystery and insight into oneself that makes dreams so interesting.