Thread: Dreams

I often dream about logic and math problems. Usually it involves some symbolic manifest content.

In one I was sorting different sized packages into shelves; I woke up in the middle of it and realized I understood a problem I had been trying in vain to solve for several weeks. Sure enough I sat down and worked it out on a couple of pages and BAM it was solved!

Most research on dreams I have seen indicates that they are your brains way of sorting data and deciding what you need to remember. Commiting new motor skills or ideas to memory. The manifest content (what you actually see in your dream) is rather irrelevant and usually based on things you have seen or experienced recently, but not always.

The reason we need sleep is not to rest our bodies, but to experience dreams. People who are deprived of REM sleep but not otherwise (that is they get 8 hours of sleep with no dreams) show the same fatigue as people who have simply not slept.

The brain is pretty darn neat.

Originally Posted by SoySoldier

The reason we need sleep is not to rest our bodies, but to experience dreams. People who are deprived of REM sleep but not otherwise (that is they get 8 hours of sleep with no dreams) show the same fatigue as people who have simply not slept.

The brain is pretty darn neat.

I can say this happens to me from time to time. It is usually due to stress in my case though in way way or another but even if I do sleep at all, I'll feel as if I didn't get any. I've been having either no dreams or bad dreams the past few nights, probably because I do feel stressed about various things in my life right now (i.e. trying to figure how how to pay for school, which school to go to, or just go massively into debt with student loans, etc.)

The other night I had a nightmare that I just got into my car at night and someone randomly got in the passenger seat and shot me dead...freaked the hell out of me because it took me a few seconds to realize that it was a dream and I woke up.

I've heard some dreams are some of your hidden desires or feelings on certain issues. I've never looked into it, but thinking about it now, maybe I should.

Originally Posted by Keiron

I've heard some dreams are some of your hidden desires or feelings on certain issues. I've never looked into it, but thinking about it now, maybe I should.

That idea is very Freudian and is not really accepted by the majority of modern era psychology. The invention of the fMRI has shed a lot of light on what a brain is doing. But it (the brain) is such a complex system (non-linear-dynamic-system if you want to google it) that it is really hard to tell/predict what is happening. But there are still psychologists (social and paranormal) who believe that dreams are symbolic of desires etc. I hope not, because my math dreams dont seem to indicate I desire nothing except to solve really complex problems.

I myself tend to be an empirical evidence kinda of guy...

Brains are really cool.

most of my dreams are inappropriate

On weekend mornings, i love waking up, thinking about something, then drifting back to sleep for 15-20 minutes and having a dream about it... MUAHAHAhahahah

NOBODY wants to get into a "who's dreams are more fucked up?" contest with me. I'll win hands down.

I mean... The A-Team shows up in my dreams every now and then just for the hell of it.