Sleep kind of fascinates me, especially dreams.
In fact, anything the human brain and its subconscious is capable of is quite incredible in my opinion. Given that the brain is effectively a collection of cells and electrical impulses it is quite amazing that said biological computer evolved as it did, to allow humans the feelings of conciousness, emotion, learning and the ability to achieve first hand experience.
Source: XKCD web comic
The subconscious mind is even more perplexing, especially during sleep when many of the social constraints our society has in place are released. At this point the subconscious and imagination of you brains can go wild. Of course, not everyone remembers their dreams, and even fewer release they are dreaming at the time. Even fewer still can actually control their own dreams, a process known as lucid dreaming.
Rather unusually for me, I’ve been remembering quite a few of my own dreams recently, and they’ve ranged from mild and pleasant to truly horrific. In light of this, and to satisfy my ever unsatisfied curiosity and hunt for knowledge, I have done a bit of reading around the subject. It turns out that not only are there many, many very common (almost universal) dreams amongst people, but that there is also quite a firm amount of evidence that the dreams we experience in sleep somehow relate to our concious waking lives.
This seems a bit superstitious, bizarre and almost unbelievable at first thought, but if you think about it cleverly, it does make sense. Our subconscious has the same memories, emotions and thoughts to work with as our concious minds, so logically, the two states may be somewhat related, if only in a metaphorically sense. So, I looked up common dreams that people have based on a lot of different sources.
- Being naked – Apparently this one means you’re exposed in concious life, or you may feel you’re revealed a bit too much about yourself in real life.
- Falling – Ahh… falling is probably the most frequent of the negative common dreams it seems. According to many sources the falling dreams refer to you feeling insecure in some aspects of your life. It can be related to not feeling like you have a safety net in life to fall back on in a particular situation, which is quite an interested thought, and related (metaphorically) heavily to the dream itself.
- Drowning – People who are particular overworked, stressed and on edge can feel like they are metaphorically ‘drowning’ in an overflow of information, thoughts, emotion and stress. Drowning dreams it seems, tend to come from these particular ‘stress’ related emotions… phew.
- Lost and/or trapped – Like drowning dreams, this can also be stress related, but according to what I’ve read, this can also mean you are significantly confused or can not understand a certain situation, or feel you do not even have the ability to understand or solve it.
These are many of the common negative dreams. There are of course positive opposite dreams to these, which based on other source tend to relate to the opposite equivalent emotions as well.
In fact, there is quite a lot of information about common dreams available.
So, do you think your dreams are at all related to your real life? Have you ever had these so called common dreams in situations which match up with their supposed explanations?
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