So my sister and I were watching House (I love that show) and in the episode there was this drug that supposedly prevented migraines from happening. Well my sister asked me a good question since I have an insatiable curiosity for all things.
What is a headache? (What does this have to do with dreams you ask... I'm getting there. I like to tell things chronologically)
If you did not know the brain itself does not feel pain, it has no pain receptors. But you must be saying that you feel pain IN your brain when you have a headache. Correct! But it isn't your brain. There is a layer around your brain, the blood vessels in your brain and the muscles in your head that all feel pain and it is this that is the cause you your pain more or less (there are different types of headaches [vascular/neurological....others).
So I was stoked to find out what a headache really was but that got me thinking about other things that I do not know the cause for and the first thing that came to mind was dreams.
Way back when, people thought dreams were the realm of spirits and other such stuff, but Freud thought otherwise. He thought that dreams were the gateway into the unconscious mind. Others disagreed with him later on when they thought they found evidence of dreams being related to REM(Rapid Eye Movement) sleep and being made in the brain stem (Which was later on proved wrong by brain injured people who couldn't have REM sleep but still dreamed and so it is now thought that there are from the forebrain). [BTW REM sleep is the best place for dream to occur but not the only one]
A man by name of Jie Zhang thought it was basically stuff from your short term memory being sorted and stored into your long term memory. But it has yet to be proven.(This is what I was taught and comes into play at the end of my post)
From everything I've read there are multiple theories as to what dreams actually are. People just do not know... Here are some of the theories out there as to why we dream:
During the night there may be many external stimuli bombarding the senses, but the mind interprets the stimulus and makes it a part of a dream in order to ensure continued sleep. The mind will, however, awaken an individual if they are in danger or if trained to respond to certain sounds, such as a baby crying.
Dreams allow the repressed parts of the mind to be satisfied through fantasy while keeping the conscious mind from thoughts that would suddenly cause one to awaken from shock.
Freud suggested that bad dreams let the brain learn to gain control over emotions resulting from distressing experiences.
Jung suggested that dreams may compensate for one-sided attitudes held in waking consciousness.
Ferenczi proposed that the dream, when told, may communicate something that is not being said outright.
Dreams are like the cleaning-up operations of computers when they are off-line, removing parasitic nodes and other "junk" from the mind during sleep.[18][19]
Dreams create new ideas through the generation of random thought mutations. Some of these may be rejected by the mind as useless, while others may be seen as valuable and retained. Blechner calls this the theory of "Oneiric Darwinism."
Dreams regulate mood.
Hartmann says dreams may function like psychotherapy, by "making connections in a safe place" and allowing the dreamer to integrate thoughts that may be dissociated during waking life.
More recent research by Griffin has led to the formulation of the 'expectation fulfillment theory of dreaming', which suggests that dreaming metaphorically completes patterns of emotional expectation and lowers stress levels.
Also there is a scientifically proven thing called lucid dreaming in which you become aware you are in a dream and can affect the dream scape and your actions within the dream. CONTINUED IN SECOND POST (First was too long)
Mabus
Posted:
Fri Aug 15, 2008 12:32 am
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The point of all this information... Not only do we know little about our own minds and how they work, but there is no proven theory as to why we dream yet my science teacher clearly told us Zhang's theory and I accepted it as true. I find this to be a gross misconduct of teaching because he did not state the fact that there was no evidence to support this.
Now I know what some of you are thinking or will think, this happens all the time (Religion [whichever one you may/may not believe in] vs. Darwin's Theory, Religion vs. Big Bang Theory, Religion vs. most other theories, Science vs. other Science vs even more other Science as well). My only beef with it is that most if not all the other ones actually state there is an alternate theory and that these theories haven't been proven.
He should have said something like this,"While this theory has yet to be proven, by today's standard it is believed that dreams are the brains way of sorting , ordering, and encoding short-term memories into long-term ones. This is not the only theory but at the moment it is the most sound of the theories out there." Then maybe went on to explain the other theories.
The way we teach each other is very flawed and needs to be organized better. But this can be said for many things in our world and when you look at it even though we are very connected we are also very disconnected from each other. What are your thoughts?
(Oh and I will side with science over organised religion for the sole reason science can be proven and organised religion cannot. And since most people I know are Christian and may or may not spout something about God or the Bible or Jesus... I cannot trust a book that was supposedly written over 2000 years ago and has had a ridiculous amount of edits and versions created/destroyed/secreted away. Also I cannot accept the fact that a white man was born to middle eastern mother (even if he wasn't conceived by normal means this is just white empowerment, a subtle implication that God is white (colour of the father ~= colour of the son, that's "about equals"[the tilde(~) should be over the equals sign]), which an all powerful/all knowing being would not need to be anything, but enough about that).
Sorry if this sound like I'm ragging on people who follow the Bible, but I'm not I just do not know enough about other books of faith to comment on them. I'm agnostic by the way. [Agnostic = one who neither believes nor disbelieves in God; one who believes that there is not enough evidence either way])
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Gary
Posted:
Fri Aug 22, 2008 3:33 am
Ultima Weapon
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Im not sure if theres a question there...
But i would love to know what dreams are really... cause shrinks use them to diagnose you too so they must be something which suggest to me...
Dreams allow the repressed parts of the mind to be satisfied through fantasy while keeping the conscious mind from thoughts that would suddenly cause one to awaken from shock.
Does anyone lucid dream? Just before you wake up (outof REM sleep), sometimes, some people (myself included) REALISE they are dreaming. This gives you a degree of control over what happens in your dreams!
Well some of the questions were about how we learn in our society (kinda hidden in the end), just general thoughts about dreams and such, different theories (which you support and why) augments over said theories (cause if you cannot argue your side then do you truly believe in it?)
And all that jazz!
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wingzero
Posted:
Sat Aug 23, 2008 7:10 pm
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i've lucid dreamed before, it's quite weird to realise you're dreaming and your thoughts can controll your actions in a dream...
the thing i missed, and that might be because there's no way of proving these exist, was the dreams in which you can see the future, i've had those several times before, and i can't explain them...
but if you were to put those kinda dreams together with the others, would that cancel out the theories of dreams beeing used by your brain to store short term memory into long term, as you're seeing things that have yet to happen, or does it only tell us that dreams have multiple uses, and not just 1?
maybe all of those theories are right, and dreams are just a combination of them all
i don't know enough about dreams to ,make my own theory though
I think these "future" (I didn't use quotations marks to seem like an ass BTW) are more like you subconscious hinting to your conscious mind about things it's alread knows is going to happen. Like when it's very warm and muggy then the air temp drops, the clouds roll in, it gets a bit darker and the wind starts to blow hard (a storm is coming obviously). From what I've heard and read about if you believe in something to the utmost (like say you think your sick, like really believe your sick) you mind can make your body sick (psychosomatic).
But lucid dreams can be fun, I once had one where I put on a balaclava (what most criminals where when robbing a store usually black with 2 eye holes) and I could breathe underwater, it was awesome. Then I realised I was dream and I started consciously adding things like sunken ships and ruins in the water to find.
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Actually what you call lucid dreams are a state of the brain called the theta state of conciousness in which you are completely relaxed and centered in the mystical realm where ordinary feelings and sensations are altered in this state you are more likely to experience a psychic or paranormal occurence and contact with the otherworld is most common though people who aren't practiced in meditation can only enter this state for a few moments before they go to sleep and if you want you can write me off as crazy but I know what I'm talking about.
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Mabus
Posted:
Thu Aug 28, 2008 11:36 pm
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Age: 20
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Actually what you call lucid dreams are a state of the brain called the theta state of conciousness in which you are completely relaxed and centered in the mystical realm where ordinary feelings and sensations are altered in this state you are more likely to experience a psychic or paranormal occurence and contact with the otherworld is most common though people who aren't practiced in meditation can only enter this state for a few moments before they go to sleep and if you want you can write me off as crazy but I know what I'm talking about.
Why would I write you off as crazy. I think meditation can make you able to do thing that normally you would not be able to do. Meditation is a known as many things throughout the world like visualization before a sports game and stuff, running through everything, divers take deep breathes for a long period of time before the free dive, but also this helps focus the mind on task and makes them do extra-ordinary things.
Now as for only a few moments of lucid dreaming I've had a huge sequence of it. It's usually before I wake up or am waking up I enter that state in which I know I dreaming. Though sometimes it's hard to actually shape the whole dream to your liking, I find my mind going more with my emotions at that time.
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Well everyone dreams differently but I usually can only enter it for a few seconds before I fall asleep but I'm getting better at it entering that state during meditation
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Mabus
Posted:
Fri Aug 29, 2008 4:45 pm
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Well everyone dreams differently but I usually can only enter it for a few seconds before I fall asleep but I'm getting better at it entering that state during meditation
Meditation is something I could never do because their is always something going on in my mind, I am probably the most curious person in the world (a little hyperbole). Which sucks!
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You're not alone its a common problem the trick is to keep your mind focused on one thing or try using a drum keeping your mind focused on maintaining a steady rythim will help you meditate
_________________ "One has studied your history. Terrible wars have been fought where millions have died for one idea, freedom. And it seems that something that means so much to so many people would be worth having." Bicentennial Man
"Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today." Malcolm X
For all those men who say "Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free". Here's an update for you 80% of women are against marriage, why? Because women realize its not worth buying an entire pig, just to get a little sausage...and if you're among those 80% add this to your sig.
flare star
Posted:
Thu Sep 11, 2008 11:59 pm
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...well the only things I really know to be proven about dreams is that you cannot dream up anything that you've never experienced in any senses: if all you have ever sensed was nature, then you cannot possibly inmagine a city, sure you can inmagine an area with plenty of people, but that's still far from a city...
...a better example might be that if you were born blind and never saw a thing in your life, it is impossible for you to dream up any images...you can dream sounds, tastes etc. just not images...
...this shows that dreams come from directly your brain and your brain only, which I enjoyed learning as it kicks away all that spiritual mumbo-jumbo like spiritual communication through dreams...
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I never said anything about spiritual connections through dreams though if you follow shamanism omens can occur in dreams and spirituality isn't mumbo-jumbo its a serious life path that alot of people follow (myself included). I've also had several dreams that were set in places I've never been to in my life, were about things that I've never experienced, and/or about people I've never met before, now its possible they've come from past lives but that would be part of the "spiritual mumbo-jumbo" as you called it so explain that.
_________________ "One has studied your history. Terrible wars have been fought where millions have died for one idea, freedom. And it seems that something that means so much to so many people would be worth having." Bicentennial Man
"Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today." Malcolm X
For all those men who say "Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free". Here's an update for you 80% of women are against marriage, why? Because women realize its not worth buying an entire pig, just to get a little sausage...and if you're among those 80% add this to your sig.
I lucid dreamed this morning. I love it, but it freaks me out a bit. Sometimes you wake up exhausted because you've basically lived a whole day already! Well, that and the fact I'm a severe insomniac.
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