Science Investigating Dreams (Part 2 of Mysteries of The Human Brain)

Evolution happening as we sleep.

Photo by Tran Phu on Unsplash

Dreams. What are they, and where do they come from? Some people have the greatest of them, while others have predominantly nightmares. Another brain mystery.

Every professional would form their own opinion, depending on what they learned at their college or university. But are they facts or “conclusions” made by controlled studies? If they are the result of said studies, wouldn't the environment in which researchers conducted them matter?

It’s assumed that people who suffered a traumatic experience or injury will have more nightmares than those who haven’t.

Unless you’re a writer or a screenplay creator, ugly dreams are extremely unpleasant, and even those storytellers would rather not have them.

But it’s pretty much a given that sometimes they’re inevitable. Something you ate, an argument before bed, a bad news phone call, and so on. To have them in a continuum could be a symptom of a greater problem.

Freud, Jung, and others specialized in dreams of all sorts. Researchers, scientists, and psychologists have written books, conducted research, and tried to solve the entanglement of dreams, but we are still far from definitively knowing what causes one or the other.

The clinical definition of dreams stands at: “A dream is a succession of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that usually occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep.” re; Bircham.edu.

There have been dream studies of all kinds with the best technology available, only to differentiate in their interpretation. Oneirology is the science that studies dreams and uses instrumentation such as fMRIs and EGGs as the most precise tools.

Oneirology overlaps with neurology and can vary from quantifying dreams to analysing brain waves during dreaming to studying the effects of drugs and neurotransmitters on sleeping or dreaming.

Salvador Dalí was known to express Freud’s influence on the inspirations and dreams of his paintings. He effectively stated, “I paint what I dream.”

Thomas Edison found his creativity in a state called “Hypnagogia”. 

According to the University of Oxford, they describe hypnagogia as the transition between wakefulness and sleep. During this state, it’s common to experience visual, audio, or other types of hallucinations. It’s also common to experience muscle jerks and sleep paralysis. Some people purposefully try to induce hypnagogia to stimulate creativity.” 

Filmmaker Richard Linklater of “Waking Life” and “Before Sunrise” fame succeeded in making a great production about his own dream experiences.

Even more fascinating is the notion of Lucid Dreaming, where the subject engages in channelling where creativity and imagination bond into one.

 Luminaries such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Christopher Nolan, Maynard James Keenan, James Cameron, Edgar Cayce, and Nikola Tesla all adhered to the aforementioned concept. That their ability to lucid dream is or was responsible for the success they had in their respective fields.

One thing we know, we are all in a WIP (work in progress) realm. We are still trying to discover and unveil the mysteries of the human brain. And few things are as fascinating as discovering more about ourselves and what makes us tick.

~o~

If you enjoy my posts and would like to buy me a coffee, I’d gladly accept.