Get Inspired: The way you dream can change your life or health🌙 🦉

Hi, ,

The silent movie inside your brain is telling you something?

We have been dreaming since we were little, we have nightmares, we have fun, and we receive different information during the night. Did you think that maybe dreams are the after-life? Or what you dream of can give you clues for the future? Many psychoanalysts, neurologists, writers, and artists have found questions inside dreams and challenges. They can represent this at their best, through their passion.

I will present you with some ideas that complement each other or trigger a debate about how you dream and how it impacts your life.

Unusual ideas about dreams

Dreams evolved to assist perceptual generalization
Dreams evolved to defend neural territory from encroachment
Dreams are related to your real life experiences
Dreams activate the visual system of your brain

When you dream faces, you light up the facial recognition part of the brain. On the other hand, a dream containing a speech lights up your brain’s Wernicke area - responsible for speech comprehension.

Source:
Eagleman & Vaughan (2020),
BioArXiv Hoel(2021) Patterns

Serial awakening paradigm

In the non-REM stage of sleep, people reported that they had a conscious experience. While they dream in REM sleep, they did not report having anything going on when they were woken up.
Insight: The difference between dreaming and lack of dreams is the activity from back of the brain. When you don’t dream it means you experience reflective thinking, so you are rational and it’s associated with the front of the brain.

Sigmund Freud theory

Dreaming is the manifestation of repressed beliefs, motivations, and desires. In your daily life you unconsciously gather insights that might become vivid in dreams.

While it’s almost impossible to test this idea, we should try to understand our dreams and maybe interpret them, if needed or just for fun.

Neurocognitive interpretation
Overfitted brain hypothesis - dreams evolve to assist perceptual generalisation in the brain. (Erik Hoel)
During the day your brain see and stores new events, experiences. Dreaming is the moment when you catch new perceptual experiences.

Dreams evolved to defend neural territory from encroachment. This theory applies to visual cortex. (David Eagleman)

Lucid dreaming
Happens when you dream and you are aware of this. In some cases, you wake up but you can turn into that dream and play it, remember it.
Even if it’s rare, there are people that guide their own behavior within their dream or at least for some portion of time.

It’s hard for scientists to study lucid dreaming in labs because the ability to lucid dream on demand is very difficult, very few people can do it.

Recent studies developed by Ursula Voss and colleagues in Switzerland discovered that the lucid dreaming state is between normal conscious wakefulness and the REM state of non-lucid dreaming.

The biggest difference is that there is more activity in the frontal parts of the brain that are associated with reflective thinking, with the ability to control attention and with the ability to engage in voluntary action.

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