February 11, 2004
A: FROM MENTOR NHA LE IN TX
I can try to explain dreams as i understand it. But my
understanding of dreams is in fact very limited. I can
provide some basics for you to leap from. THe study of
brain is called neuroscience, and i think dream is studied
there as well. I took a class in psychoanalysis about
Sigmund Freud and we also discussed about dream. He
believed dreams function to relieve unfulfilled desires.
Sometimes things that you can't have in the daytime appear
in dreams where your wishes are fulfilled. Or sometimes
dreams are in line with physical stimulus such as the phone
rings and in your dreams you hear some ringing. Anyway,
that's tangent to your question, so i'll answer it more
scientifically. In fact i studied more about dream in
psychology than in any physiology or science class. When
we sleep, we gradually enters different stages of sleep,
and dreams occur in the REM stage (rapid eye movement),
Many researches have shown that if people are forced to
awaken before they get to this dream part and not allowed
to dream, their mental functionings such as being alert,
accurate and fast suffer. So a function of dream might be
to sort out the neural connections in our brain, making
sense of all our storage information, and to rejuvenate and
refresh it for the days ahead. Sleeping helps to release
chemicals that relax the body, and allow healing to occur.
There might be a more thorough explanation for your
interesting question, and more questions are sprung from it
as well, such as do we dream every night and why can't we
recall many of them. But i can only say that much, hoping
you can research more and tell us. Thanks.
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A: FROM MENTOR JOAN LUSK IN RI
There are a lot of opinions on the origin, function and meaning of dreams - so there's plenty of research remaining to be done. You might want to study cognitive science, psychology or brain science - the structural labels to describe the area are changing, which seems to me to be a sign that our understanding is changing. I found one site that seems to cover a lot of territory is a fairly unbiased way, mentioning conflicting points of view:
http://www.epub.org.br/cm/n02/mente/sonhos1_i.htm There are a number of recent books for the general reader on how the mind works, even on whether it's reasonable to speak of "mind" as distinct from "brain", but I can't rustle up a good bibliography on my own. the foonotes in the web site I mention here will point you towards more than you want to read!
Sweet dreams.