5 interesting facts about the psychology of vivid dreams
Are vivid dreams just representative of our repressed memories? Or are they a symbolic interpretation of our everyday waking life? This question must have hovered around your head once or twice in your life. While extensive research has been conducted on many levels, no classified judgment has been concluded for the psychology that goes behind our dreams.
Most theories based on this research tend to explain why people dream, but hardly there is any literature about the psychology and interpretation of our vivid dreams. People spend one by third of their lives sleeping and that’s when you immerse yourself in the world of imagination- Dreaming. So it is only reasonable to want to know more about its psychology. Keep reading to find out some interesting facts related to the psychology of dreaming.
What are vivid dreams?
Dreams are a succession of sensations, emotions, ideas, and images that occur involuntarily in a person’s mind during certain stages of sleep. Dreams occur in the rapid eye movement (REM) stage of sleep because this is when brain activity is high and most resembles that of being awake.
When in REM sleep, profound rest stages are a typical time for snoring. Despite what might be expected, dreams happen only at the last REM phase of each cycle. It would appear that you don’t snore when you dream, as these conditions show up on various rest stages.
Most people don’t even remember or just have a vague picture of what they had dreamt of but at times, these dreams can be so intense that they linger above your head even after you wake up, often referred to as vivid dreams. These can be both positive and negative, fantasy or realistic. Vivid dreams that enhance the feeling of joy and excitement in your body often leave you wanting to go back and continue the dream from where you left off when you wake up.
Similarly, some dreams are so unrealistically fantastic that you might not be able to comprehend how your brain had conjured such strange scenarios. However, some vivid dreams can also be quite upsetting and interfere with one’s quality of sleep.
A vivid dream can hold countless meanings. By studying dream patterns, one can analyze the symbolic elements present in our dreams. Neurocognitive research indicates that dreams are representative of our repressed memories or might be a way of how we perceive the stuff that goes around in our daily lives. However, vivid dreams are not necessarily a recollection of what you have recently encountered in real-life activities.
Interesting Facts
Violent dreams can be a warning sign
New studies have suggested that a rare sleep disorder exists in which people act out their vivid dreams physically and often make use of violent gestures such as thrashes, screams, and kicks. This type of sleep disorder can also be representative of brain disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and dementia
The main symptom of this REM sleep disorder is the person enacting the dreams that can often result in the person injuring or harming themselves severely. Researchers conducted in the past have also shown a link between dream enacting behaviors and a few neurodegenerative ailments.
Men and women may dream differently
Researchers have found that there are also some differences between men and women when it comes to the content of their dreams along with their psychological and physical differences. Several studies found out that men reported dreaming about weapons significantly more often than women did, while women dreamed about references to clothing more often than men.
Women tend to have slightly longer dreams that feature more characters. When it comes to the characters that typically appear in dreams, men dream about other men twice as often as they do about women, while women tend to dream about both sexes equally.
Men’s dreams tend to have more aggressive content and physical activity, while women’s dreams contain more rejection and exclusion, as well as more conversation than physical activity, another study suggests. Another study by a renowned psychologist showed that men are more likely than women to dream about women and women are more likely to have experienced nightmares.
Dreams can help us solve daily issues
You must have observed that if you were ever stressed about a particular issue and then decided to go to sleep, after waking up you feel extremely fresh and have innovative solutions for the issue. According to popular research, healthy sleeping hours can help us solve issues that have plagued us in broad daylight.
The visual and illogical aspects of the dreams enable the person to go think out of the box and come up with such solutions that he never could have thought about without it. Vivid dreams have evolved and now can be a source of helping the brain reboot and help us solve problems.
Vivid dreams as direct mental expressions
Freud believed that dreams by nature disguised their meaning. In contrast, some other researchers believe that vivid dreams expressed an individual’s unconscious state through a language of symbols and metaphors. This “language” was natural to the unconscious state, but difficult to understand because it varied so much from waking language
He believed that dreams served two functions: to compensate for imbalances in the dreamers’ psyche and to provide prospective images of the future, which allowed the dreamer to anticipate future events.
We only dream about the people we are familiar with
The faces we see in our dreams are always the ones that we have seen in real life as well. Experts believe that our brain cannot re-invent new faces that will then appear in our dreams. This does not mean that you must know the person by close; they can also serve up as the extra role in your dreams