Dreams are dreams and reality is reality. Too real dreams. I can't distinguish a dream from reality. Lucid dreaming, scientific research

In one of the earliest experiments conducted by our research group, we tested traditional performance that the perception of time in a dream is different from the perception of it in reality. According to the technique we developed, we asked subjects during lucid dream make a movement with your eyes, then after a 10-second pause (counting: one thousand one, one thousand two, etc.) make a second movement with your eyes. We found that in all cases the estimate of the time interval in the lucid dream coincided within a few seconds with its estimate in the waking state and was thus quite close to the real time between signals. From this it was concluded that the estimate of time in lucid dreams is very close to real ones, that is, it takes almost the same amount of time to perform any action in them as in the waking state.

This conclusion may come as a surprise, since many of you may have lived years and even lifetimes in a dream. I believe that this effect is achieved in dreams by the same stage trick that creates the illusion of the passage of time in the cinema or theater. If the lights go out on a screen, on a stage, or in a dream, and the clock strikes midnight, and a few moments later the bright morning sun shines through the window and the alarm clock rings, we assume (we pretend without realizing that we are pretending) that many hours have passed, even if "we know" that it only took a few seconds.

The method of using the eyes to signal a person in a state of lucid dreaming has demonstrated a strict correspondence between the change in direction of gaze during sleep and the actual movement of the eyes under closed eyelids. Researchers who did not use lucid dreamers in their experiments had to rely on the likelihood of a correspondence between the subjects' eye movements and their reported sleep actions. As a result, they tended to obtain only weak correlations between eye movements during sleep and during waking hours. The reason for the strong connection between eye movements in sleep and in the waking state is that we use the same visual system our body. One of the most bright examples The connection between physiology and sleep activities is sexual activity during sleep. In 1983, we undertook a study to determine the extent to which sexual activity during lucid REM dreaming was reflected in physiological parameters.

A woman was chosen for the experiment because women were more likely to report orgasm in their dreams. She observed various physiological indicators that are usually affected by sexual arousal: breathing, heart rate, vaginal muscle tone and amplitude of vaginal pulsations. In the experiment, she was required to give a special signal with her eyes following situations: when she realizes that she is dreaming, when sexual activity begins (in her sleep), and when she has an orgasm.

According to her, she fulfilled the conditions of the task exactly. Analysis of the recordings revealed a significant correlation between what she did in the dream and all but one physiological indicator. During the 15 seconds that she defined as orgasm, her vaginal muscle activity, vaginal pulsation amplitude, and respiratory rate reached their highest levels of the entire night, and were significantly higher than during the rest of the REM period. The heart rate, contrary to expectations, increased very slightly.

After this, we conducted similar experiments with two men. In both cases there was a sharp increase in breathing, but again no significant changes heart rate. It is noteworthy that although both dreamers reported intense orgasm in their lucid dreams, neither experienced ejaculation, unlike the common adolescent wet dreams that are often not accompanied by erotic dreams.

Activities during sleep directly affect the brain and body

From the experiments described above, it follows that the events in which you become a participant in a dream have an effect on your brain (and, to a lesser extent, on your body) that is in many ways similar to that of similar events in reality. Additional Research confirm this conclusion. When lucid dreamers hold their breath or breathe faster during sleep, this is directly reflected in their real breathing. Moreover, changes in brain activity caused by the transition from singing to counting (singing involves more right hemisphere, and when counting - left) in the waking state, are almost exactly reproduced in lucid dreams. That is, for our brain it makes no difference whether this or that action is performed in a dream or in reality. This finding explains why dreams seem so real. To the brain they are indeed real.

We continue to study the relationships between human activity in dreams and his physiology in order to obtain detailed diagram interactions between mind and body during dreams, for everyone physiological systems, measurable. Such a scheme could provide great support to experimental sleep psychology and psychosomatic medicine. Indeed, the direct influence of dream activity on physiology makes it possible to use lucid dreaming to improve performance. immune system. In any case, the physiological effects caused by dreams show that we cannot distance ourselves from them as the bastard children of our imagination. And although our culture tries to ignore dreams, the events experienced in them are as real as in real life. And if we want to improve our lives, it would be right to do this with our dreams.

Social values ​​and lucid dreams

You often hear people interested in lucid dreaming complain about being isolated because, as one writes, “I can’t talk to anyone about it: everyone thinks I’m crazy and looks at me like I’m crazy when I try to talk about it.” what I do in my sleep." Our culture does not provide for any social support for those who study various states consciousness. This aversion is probably rooted in the behaviorist approach in psychology, which views all animals, including humans, as “black boxes” whose actions depend entirely on external influences. The contents of an animal’s “consciousness” are considered immeasurable, and thus not subject to scientific research.

In my opinion, one of the main tricks psychological counseling is to see the client's problem as a type of dream- caused by confusion, which a third-party specialist helps to dispel. In this sense, the work of an intelligent psychologist is such an activity that “enlightens” the mind. It, by reducing the dope of illusions, sobers up, or in another sense, awakens from psychic sleep. I already started talking about what kind of dream this is in, and today I continue to reveal the topic from a slightly different angle. If your mind is confused by doubts about the real, you can perceive everything described below as an allegory.

Have you ever thought about the criteria of the real? What exactly distinguishes reality from illusion? How does reality become real in our eyes?

We can say that the reality of a dream is illusory because it is not what it seems. Unsteady and unstable, it seems to fool us, pretending to be the solid reality of the day, encouraging us to take a serious attitude with the entire arsenal of “adult” emotions, as long as we believe in it. In our dreams we confuse reality physical world with a fragile dream picture.

And yet, while we sleep, the reality of the dream does not arouse suspicion, its image absorbs as all-encompassing as the images of everyday life. And only upon awakening, the darkness dissipates - and all the problems that arose in the dream go away with it. But as long as the dream lasts, it seems real and is taken seriously.

The point that I want to emphasize here is the dreamer’s deep confidence in what is happening. Being in a dream, he seems to “know” that he is in real world. And here we have to admit that all his solid knowledge is nothing more than strong faith.

At night we believe in the reality of dreams, during the day - in the reality of everyday life. And this faith is essentially identical. We simply take what is happening for granted, as if everything is a priori clear with this world. Neither at night nor during the day do we have any questions about reality. Right up to awakening there is a similar drama and intensity of passions. One remains uncritically and selflessly absorbed in dreams.

That is, we “know” that the reality of the day is real in exactly the same way as we “know” that the reality of a dream is real while it is being dreamed. We have no objective criteria for what is “real.” We simply believe in this world. Deeply, unconsciously, with conviction. And we call our strong faith knowledge.

About ropes and snakes

In fact, sleep differs from everyday life only in its instability. Dreams are temporary. But our life in the context of cosmic terms is no more stable. Everything we know will pass. And if the stability of the world speaks of its authenticity, then our world is real to the same relative extent as the world of dreams.

I already voiced this idea on the site in an article about: “You can confidently “know” anything. But this belief itself has a mental structure. We really don’t know anything, because our confidence in anything is only a strong, unconditional faith.”

I often give my clients a well-known analogy, where a person who sees a rope mistakes it for a snake and experiences genuine fear. He “knows” as firmly as he can what is in front of him deadly danger. She is real to him.

The role of the psychologist is precisely to remove the client from his restless dreams awaken. This task is not easy, because most dreams are shown to us in the “cinema” of the unconscious, from where only a certain background mood, some vague pain for oneself and one’s life “echoes” to the surface of consciousness.

And here almost everything comes down to being able to see the root of the problem. If you have experience in exploring personal mental depths and are sensitive enough to listen to your own gut, you can be your own psychologist. In a sense, this is tantamount to becoming the object of your own research.

To focus attention on the source of experiences, questions such as “What am I feeling now?”, “What am I thinking about?”, “What do I now “know” about my life) may be appropriate? Projections dissipate with their direct awareness, and reality is freed from the drama with which it was covered by dreams inspired by the mind.

Where are all these “real” events?

There are plenty of examples of the dispersal of psychic dreams in everyone’s life. In such a dream-inspired “reality,” separations become the end of the world, or an empty, meaningless future. Someone else's death is mistaken for one's own. Behind someone's uninvolved calm one dreams of cold, treacherous indifference. Small victories bring dreams of your own greatness. The fleeting encourages one to believe in hallucinations of personal inferiority. Etc.

In this vein, our entire everyday life is still the same illusion, because, like a dream, it is not what it seems. We mistake the chimeras of our mind for real events. We can make a reservation and say that only our attitude towards life is illusory, and life itself is real. But the fact is that we do not know life beyond our own relationship to it.

Upon awakening, we realize that the dream is an illusion, because we brought it to ourselves. What is different about everyday life? Where are all these “real” events? Here and now, at this present moment, all our confidence in the events of the current reality is still the same dreams. We sleep in reality and we dream about our lives - we dream about events, relationships, we dream about ourselves.

No one is obliged to expose life, as Buddhist monks and yogi hermits do, up to the stage of enlightenment. Everyone is free to choose the intensity of practice independently. Some people are destined to rush ahead of the locomotive, while others find it easier to “not bother” at all. But, as I see it, the current stage of elaboration for everyone is those very everyday events and experiences that are perceived as problematic.

And even a thousand sobering reliefs from hacked illusions are not enough for most of us to feel this glaring instability of personal conviction about what is real and what is not. We only exchange one dream for another - in best case scenario more or less realistic. Somehow this is how the “local” earthly path of spiritual maturation apparently runs. From childhood illusions we move to sophisticated ones, and then to “lucid dreams.”

Dreaming is not a super ability and everyone can do it, but scientific minds around the world still don’t know where dreams come from and what they mean? Parallel reality? Past life? Fears? Every night we see dreams, and each time they evoke completely different emotions, sometimes they are pleasant that we don’t want to wake up, sometimes they fill us with horror and fear, and sometimes we don’t remember them at all, remembering only fragments the next day. Dreams have no chronology, and most often we forget them, leaving only a pleasant or not very pleasant feeling. This is why it is very difficult to study dreams from a scientific point of view.

Many psychologists argue that dreams do not serve any physical purpose; they are more often a psychological component of us. However, some scientists believe that dreams are connected with our essence and nature, they transfer our emotions and subconscious mind to new level. These scientists are exploring not only the question: Why do we dream, but also how they relate to reality.

There is one interesting research about the theory of sleep: there is an opinion that only some of our ancestors were able to see dreams, which is why they survived and succumbed to evolution. We found 10 of the most interesting and popular theories about where dreams come from.

10. Dreams help organize memories.

A number of studies confirm the benefits of dreams for systematizing and storing information. When we sleep and dream, it allows our brain to redirect the data accumulated during the day to the long-term archive section. Neuroscience researchers have found that throughout the day, memories are stored in the hippocampus, a region of the brain associated with long-term memory. When we sleep, memories are sent to the cerebral cortex, which processes new information and is responsible for cognitive functions and knowledge.

Sleep gives us time to redistribute memories to different parts of the brain so that the most important things are recorded and available for recall if necessary. According to research, before memories are sent to the cerebral cortex, our hippocampus replays the last day again, sometimes from the end rather than from the beginning.

9. Dreams are therapeutic

We've all once had a dream in which everything seemed very familiar. Or who is not familiar with the situation when, after watching a horror movie, in a dream we are tormented by scary dark figures reminiscent of monsters from that very movie? Dreams help us deal with strong emotions such as fear, sadness or love. Psychologists suggest that dreams help separate emotions from immediate events. This decoupling makes it easier for us to process sensory experiences because our brains are able to make connections between new emotions and past experiences. Scientists have found that these connections are different from those that we form during full wakefulness.

These relationships allow us to develop new perspectives, viewing situations from different angles, and help us cope with stressful or traumatic events. Some researchers believe that dream analysis can be in an effective way get to the core of people's anger, sadness, fear or happiness; while other experts believe that dreams are a safe territory for resolving deepest psychological problems and exploring your deepest insecurities and doubts.

8. Dreams combat anxiety and fear

In a 2009 study, while working with patients suffering from depression and anxiety, researchers discovered an interesting relationship between dreams and cognitive biases (systematic errors in thinking and pattern deviations). A team of 5 scientists studied 2 groups of students. The first group consisted of 35 healthy people, and the second group consisted of 20 students with a tendency to depression and anxious behavior. All participants in the experiments were awakened after 10 minutes in the phase REM sleep and after 10 minutes slow sleep. After waking up, study participants took tests to check memory, mood and self-esteem.

The project leaders found that students with a tendency toward depression and nervousness most often had dreams whose plots were related to aggression, and they were precisely the victims of their dreams. Young people with a more stable psyche, on the contrary, experienced such dreams much less often. It turns out that studying REM sleep may be very useful for patients with depression, and it is through this type of physiological state You can work on emotions related to self-esteem, sadness and anger.

7. Dreams are related to our well-being

Studies during which subjects for a long time were forbidden to dream, revealed in the subjects severe consequences. Participants in the experiments were awakened immediately during the onset of the REM sleep phase, which is directly associated with dreams. As a result healthy people began to experience growing nervous tension, problems with concentration, coordination and typing excess weight. In addition, some of them experienced hallucinations.

Perhaps some of these side effects easily explained by general fatigue, and not a purely lack of dreams. However, repeated studies have proven that most of these unpleasant consequences is directly related to depriving subjects of the REM sleep phase, during which we go to dreamland.

6. Lack of dreams may indicate mental disorders

Chronic sleep problems are familiar to 50-80% of patients diagnosed with mental disorders, while only 10% of American citizens suffer from sleep problems. According to scientific research Harvard University 2009 between the ability to dream and such mental problems, How bipolar disorder, there is a direct connection. The leaders of the experiments came to the conclusion that both adults and children who experience sleep disorders are at risk of subsequently becoming patients in psychiatric clinics.

Interruption of REM sleep directly affects the production of stress hormones and the activity of neurotransmitters different groups, which ultimately disrupts the regulation of emotions and introduces changes in thought processes. Long lasting hormonal imbalance and detrimental effects on the functioning of neurotransmitters can lead to mental disorders. And although these research results sound quite alarming, they also have positive side, since new data can be used in medical purposes. It appears that treating sleep disorders may alleviate the symptoms of some mental illness or even prevent the occurrence of a number of unhealthy conditions.

5. Information Processing Theory

According to one study, during REM sleep we process new concepts and associate them with existing knowledge or other ideas of a similar nature. Scientists believe that dreams arise precisely when new conceptual ideas begin to take shape in our heads, which usually occurs in the form of fragmentary sounds and images together with motor activity.

Our brain deciphers these manifestations and tries to find a way to connect them together. Research findings on this topic suggest that this is the reason why all our dreams are so strange, confusing and fantastic. During sleep, our imagination becomes especially active thanks to information that has been stored in our head for a long time, and that has recently arrived. When we try to connect new data with existing knowledge, we interpret it in new ways in order to adequately perceive the world around us in the future.

4. The theory of sleep from the position of psychoanalysts

It would be wrong to post about dreams without mentioning Freud. Behind last years Many of the claims made by the famous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud have been refuted more than once, but they still remain an interesting topic of discussion and have greatly influenced modern literature and music. Freud specialized in the meaning of dreams and in identifying subconscious thoughts and desires from our dreams.

He believed that humans are always driven by aggression and the instinct of reproduction, which are suppressed by our consciousness and manifest themselves in our subconscious thoughts during dreams. The eminent scientist believed that our dreams express suppressed feelings, among which he also mentioned sexual attraction to your own parents. According to Freud's theory, dreams are nothing more than a distorted proxy for hidden, repressed and unconscious desires.

3. Model of activation and synthesis

The neurobiological dream activation and synthesis hypothesis, first proposed in 1977, explains how our brain creates mental images from signals. According to this theory, the trigger in the process of dreaming is not our experiences and memories, but biological reactions to the activation of certain sections of the limbic system of the brain (for example, the amygdala).

When these areas of the brain are especially active during sleep, we synthesize and interpret existing information in the form of dreams. Thus, dreams are a manifestation of basic biological activity in the brain. Followers of this theory do not believe that our dreams have any important meaning. However, they believe that decoding biological signals (that is, dreams) often leads to very significant events - the emergence of new ideas.

2. Theory about adaptation

This hypothesis consists of 2 parts: one is related to threats, and the other is related to lack of sleep. A number of psychologists believe that sleep allows animals to stay away from danger. For example, when an animal is sleeping, it usually prefers to spend this time in a safe and calm environment, finds a more secluded place, and only then goes to rest. Scientists believe that the rest period protects living organisms from harm that we can cause to ourselves due to our own mistakes. This behavioral strategy, reinforced by natural selection, keeps the animal alive.

As for the second part of the adaptation theory, here we'll talk about interruption of sleep at the REM stage. Researchers have noticed that if a person is not allowed to enter REM sleep for just one night, he will certainly spend more time on it the very next night to compensate for the resulting deficit. This phenomenon is called REM sleep rebound. This biological response indicates that fast phase is indispensable for the proper functioning of the brain, and that animals that did not develop such a skill slowly died out during the process of evolution. Natural selection has programmed humans to sleep and dream so that we can successfully adapt to our environment and do less harm to ourselves.

1. Hazard modeling theory

Danger simulation theory states that dreams allow us to prepare for potential future threats. A Finnish neuroscientist and psychologist from the University of Turku found that simulating threats during dreams helps a person rehearse the necessary cognitive mechanisms involved in appropriately responding to danger and finding ways to avoid threats. All this ultimately contributes to the successful survival and reproductive advantage of both the species as a whole and a specific individual. The Turku research team studied this idea by analyzing the dreams of children living in dangerous and safe environments.

It turned out that those children who lived in a hostile environment, and whose physical well-being was constantly in danger, were prone to more restless and anxious dreams, and they had a well-developed threat modeling system. Those who lived in safe conditions, had more peaceful dreams, and they had weak system reproduction and simulation of dangerous situations.

Then new studies were conducted, again on psychologically traumatized and non-traumatized children. The results of additional experiments turned out to be even more convincing than the conclusions of the first scientific work. According to the second study, children who were exposed to stressful conditions while awake tended to have significantly more dreams, and these dreams were rich in violence and threats. In turn, children with healthy psyche living in comfort and prosperity have seen much less dreams, and these dreams were much more calm and peaceful.

Hello, I am 23 years old, not married, no children.
For about seven months I have been worried about this problem - I have very real and strange dreams, I cannot distinguish a dream from reality, several times during the day the question arises: “Am I dreaming now?”

And sometimes I spend a lot of time trying to figure it out: I remember the chronology of events and how I got to the place where I am now; I observe the behavior of people around me and try to find something unrealistic in what is happening.
I have dreams every night, but sometimes it happens that I don’t remember the whole dream, but only fragments. But usually I remember the smallest details of a dream, even little things down to the smell in the room or the color of my manicure. Constantly I wake up in a dream, then wake up again and again. I don’t know how to explain it correctly, so I’ll tell you about my dream today.
I dreamed that I was walking down the street with my dog, there were no people on the street and the weather was very hot. Then I noticed the silence around, the absence of passers-by, and I realized that now it was actually winter, I realized that this was a dream. I wake up, go to the kitchen, drink coffee, go to the store, there I start talking to some people, but I don’t see their faces, just voices, together with me they return to my home and there are more and more of them, I’m scared here too I notice that I am in my old apartment, from which I moved four years ago, and I understand that this is a dream. I wake up from the phone ringing, my mother calls and says that I urgently need to come to her, that she has some problems with the plumbing and everything is flooded, I decided to sleep for another five minutes before going to bed, set the alarm clock and fall asleep already when it’s light. Only after calling my mother did I realize that it was a dream and that she had not called me.
And so every night, I wake up in my dreams many times, there are very strange multi-colored ones and not at all real dreams, there are scary ones, and there are also completely ordinary ones like walking the dog.
I wake up even more tired than I fell asleep, my head hurts from eternal thoughts about sleep and reality. And it has been going on there for more than six months.
About a year ago, my beloved person passed away, now I have almost recovered from this, I don’t know whether the dreams are caused by stress from the loss or something else, but I never dream about my beloved person. There are dreams like that I’m waiting for him from work or, for example, I’m trying to call him, but I’ve never seen him in a dream.
I didn’t tell anyone about this problem, I thought it would pass with time, but I’m already very tired, I can’t sleep, it feels like I’m not sleeping at all.
Please advise me something.

Psychologist's answer:

Hello Irina!

Yes, indeed, sleep disturbance is most likely caused by the psychological trauma that occurred due to the loss of a loved one. The death of loved ones and loved ones is always a serious stress for a person. If the departure of your loved one was somehow connected with you, or you feel guilty, then the influence of grief is very strong. As you know, grief goes through certain stages, as a result of which a person comes to terms with the loss and perceives it as the past. These are the stages of shock, denial, searching for those to blame and reasons, a deep feeling of loneliness and depression, which ends by the year and the person begins to see his future separately from the deceased, and memories do not cause pain, but only bright, good feelings. If you linger at any of the first stages, grief turns into severe mental disorders, for example, anxiety disorder, intrusive thoughts and actions and depression. Sleep disturbance is one of the striking symptoms of these disorders. Your dream is precisely a sleep disorder. Perhaps simple sedatives before bed will help you fall asleep soundly and not dream. But in fact, it is important to understand what exactly led you to this disorder and which one (anxious, depressive, OCD).
To do this, you need to contact a psychotherapist who, combining psychotherapeutic sessions and drug treatment, will help you find the cause and overcome the problem. Perhaps personal meetings with a psychologist, personal consultation and conversation will help. But most likely, you will need exactly medicinal assistance which can only be provided by a doctor. In any case, write to us.

The science

Dream is the only “area” of human civilization that cannot be mapped. People have spent thousands of years trying to understand why our brain is capable of creating strange and otherworldly landscapes and situations during sleep.

Today scientists explained what happens to our body when we fall asleep, and why we need sleep at all. As it turns out, there are some strange connections between reality and surreal images of the dream world.

The dreams of lonely people are brighter and richer

All people dream, but in completely different ways. This was discovered by a neurologist in 2001. Patrick McNamara, exploring the connection between social relationships and dreams.

His team of scientists invited him for research 300 students, which were divided into groups according to their attachment abilities. They first answered questions about how comfortable they felt being in a relationship with someone, or maybe they prefer to avoid relationships altogether? Thus, the state of attachment was assessed as “reliable” or “insecure.”

Students who were uncomfortable in relationships and therefore tended to avoid them altogether reported that dreamed more every night than the group whose attachment state was “secure.” Moreover, the insecurely attached group had more nightmares and their dreams were more vivid than the other group.

Since the area of ​​our brain called anterior temporal lobe important for feelings of attachment and for REM sleep stages, enhanced dreams, apparently replace feelings of affection.

Video games cause lucid dreams

What are lucid dreams?

Lucid dreaming – the ability to realize that you are in a dream. As soon as you realize that this is a dream, you begin to control what happens around you and do whatever you want. It is not surprising that each of us wants this when going to sleep, but we are not always able to get into lucid dreams.

Thousands of books have been written that teach how to induce lucid dreams if desired. However, as it turned out, the simplest way to learn to have such dreams is to play computer games occasionally.

Jayne Gackenbach from Grant MacEwan University believes that the ability to control actions when playing virtual reality coincides with the ability to control what happens in a dream. Thus, It's easier for gamers to learn to lucid dream.

Jane also discovered that Gamers are much less likely to have nightmares, because when they feel a threat in a dream, they immediately take action to turn it away from themselves, as in games, and do not try to escape.

Animals dream and even remember them

The long-standing question of why we dream seems to have already been answered. thanks to the rats. Researcher Matthew Wilson from Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that when rats were trained to run in a circular path, their brain activity began to manifest itself in a special way. This was recorded using a scanner.

Wilson later scanned the brains of rats while they slept and found that Almost half of the animals showed the same pattern of brain activity, when they were in a stage of REM sleep that coincided with the model while moving in the wheel. This means that the rats continued to run in their sleep.

A dog runs in a dream (video):

Scientists have suggested that the brain of rats saves information, playing it again in a dream, and at the same speed as in reality. Wilson is convinced that one of the main functions of dreams is consolidation of memories. This is why we remember better the information we receive immediately before bed.

People with amnesia have the strangest dreams

If dreams help you store memories, what should you do if you have amnesia? It turns out that people who have lost their memory have very weird dreams. There are several types of memory, and amnesiacs cannot remember some events, special facts or dates. It is interesting that in a dream some things can come back to them, for example, some skills, but in real life they do not remember these things at all.

During the experiments, people suffering from amnesia were told about the game "Tetris", however they They didn’t remember at all what kind of game it was. In the middle of the night they were woken up and asked to tell what they saw in their dreams. Three out of five subjects answered that they saw "falling, overturning blocks".

An ordinary person in a dream, even with the strangest dreams, mostly sees in a dream objects familiar to him. A person with amnesia can see objects that are very strange to him, but he cannot remember where he saw them in reality.

Strange dreams are just a job of sorting through memories

Amnesia research allowed Dr. Dr. Robert Stickgold put forward another hypothesis regarding dreams. He tried to answer the question of why we see strange dreams. Stickgold revealed that amnesiacs retain an image of an event in the subconscious, even if they cannot consciously pull it out of the depths of their memory. For some reason, the brain reproduces this image during sleep.

Why do I have strange dreams?

According to his theory, strange dreams are the brain's attempt to sort different signals in search of connections. For example, you dream that you are in a restaurant with your 5th grade soccer coach, the chairs you are sitting on are made of jelly, and your dog is your waiter.

Your brain pulls out your dog memory file and compares it to what you remember about your high school trainer to figure out How do these two memories relate?. That is, according to Dr. Stickgold, your brain "is looking for cross connections" . Sometimes these connections coincide with reality, sometimes not.

Other studies have shown that the strangest dreams are associated with increased activity in the right tonsil, an area also relevant to the formation of memories. These studies support the idea that the stranger the dreams, the more difficult it is for the brain to find connections between different memories.

Are prophetic dreams just a coincidence?

Seeing the future in a dream

In the 1960s Medical Center Maimonides held a series in New York unusual experiments. One of the experiments was related to the ability to predict the future. Participants were divided into two groups: one group stayed awake and focused on a specific image. The second group was sleeping at that time.

Scientists woke up sleeping participants while they were in the REM stage of sleep and asked them to tell what they saw in their dreams. The strangest thing is that most of the participants in the second group described the images that the first group saw.

Another example is also from the 1960s. After heavy rain, a school building in the village was damaged as a result of a coal mine collapse Aberfan, South Wales, UK. More than a hundred people, most of whom were children, died. Psychiatrist John Barker went to Aberfan and asked its inhabitants if anyone had dreamed about this event before it happened. 30 village residents said they dreamed of a disaster. There are millions of such examples, and you probably saw the future in your dreams.

What are prophetic dreams?

Some scientists argue that this kind of prediction is not nothing but coincidences. Various factors come together and there is a chance that someone has these factors in their dreams will coincide with what will happen in reality.

It's one of those things that impossible to prove, so most of us will still believe in something supernatural than in banal coincidence. Who knows, maybe someday we will learn to predict the future using dreams?

We remember only vivid dreams

It turns out that we can dream not only during the REM stage of sleep, but in any of the five stages, although Dreams are more vivid during REM sleep. Every night we may have several dozen dreams, but most of them we do not remember.

We don't remember dreams mainly because they are quite boring. A person is more likely to remember bright and a strange dream than something routine. Most dreams are related to everyday activities that you did the day before, for example, you may often dream about yourself ironing or checking email.

As in the case of the memories of rats who repeated their actions in their sleep, our the brain is trying to repeat what happened to us, in order to consolidate memories and learn something.

But the most crazy and scary dreams are remembered just like strange and scary events in life. For example, seeing a naked person in a crowd of people is an oddity that you will remember for a long time. You won't remember hundreds of people around, but you will probably remember the face of a naked man for a long time.

How to remember dreams?

Some people claim that they don't dream, when in fact they just don't remember them. Sometimes you dream of something very interesting that you would like to remember and tell to your loved ones, but very quickly after waking up the dream disappears.

To remember your dreams, psychologists advise immediately after waking up to try do not open your eyes or move for a while, mentally replaying in your head what you dreamed about during the night. You need to train every day.

To see vivid and positive dreams, it is also recommended set yourself correct routine day, get a good night's sleep, do not remember all the problems of the day before going to bed, but leave their solution to the morning.

You can change your dreams with the help of smells

It is well known that external stimuli, such as lights, smells or the sound of an alarm clock, may interfere with sleep, but Some factors affect overall sleep quality, turning pleasant dream into a nightmare and vice versa. Smells, for example, can have a strong influence on what exactly your dream is about.

Smells in dreams

In the study, researchers allowed participants to fall asleep and then fed different types of food through a nasal tube. chemical substances with smell rotten eggs, roses or no scent at all. They then woke up the participants and asked them what exactly they had seen in their dreams.

Those who smelled rotten eggs reported that in their dreams felt sharp decline strength and mood, although they don’t remember any smells. For example, one person said that he dreamed of a beautiful Chinese woman, but suddenly she suddenly seemed very unpleasant to him, although he did not notice any special reasons for this. The sensations in the dream changed sharply from pleasant to unpleasant.

Nightmares have a detrimental effect on your mood

Anxiety? Depression? Nervousness? You may have had nightmares. By at least, this was the conclusion of a group of scientists who asked 147 students to fill out a questionnaire every morning for 2 weeks to track how often do they have nightmares?. After 2 weeks, the researchers conducted special tests to evaluate psychological condition of people.

Scientists have discovered a strong connection between the number of nightmares a person has and his mood during the day. The more nightmares people had, the worse they were rated mental condition. It is difficult to say whether depression was the cause of the nightmares, or whether after the nightmares the person had Bad mood, but one thing is clear that the real mental state and the nature of dreams have a strong relationship.

Dreams and schizophrenia

Some people believe that dreams are very reminiscent of delusional states that schizophrenics experience—both are associated with a specific area of ​​the brain. In other words, the brains of schizophrenics are simply does not switch from dream to reality during the day. That is, every night when we fall asleep, we plunge into a state of schizophrenia. They even came up with a special term to describe this condition - "our night madness".

Illusory dreams Almost every person can see, but a schizophrenic will see such “dreams” in reality, while being awake. His brain contains a mixture of mismatched memories, which occurs not only in a dream, but also in reality.