How does dream occur

They are an enduring source of mystery for scientists and psychological doctors. Why do dreams occur? What causes them? Can we control them? What do they mean? Dreams: Do they represent our unconsious desires? There are several theories about why we dream. Are dreams merely part of the sleep cycle, or do they serve some other purpose? From evidence and new research methodologies, researchers have speculated that dreaming serves the following functions:.

Much that remains unknown about dreams. They are by nature difficult to study in a laboratory, but technology and new research techniques may help improve our understanding of dreams.

Dreams most likely happen during REM sleep. Stage 1 : Light sleep, slow eye movement, and reduced muscle activity. This stage forms 4 to 5 percent of total sleep. Stage 2 : Eye movement stops and brain waves become slower, with occasional bursts of rapid waves called sleep spindles.

This stage forms 45 to 55 percent of total sleep. Stage 3 : Extremely slow brain waves called delta waves begin to appear, interspersed with smaller, faster waves. This accounts for 4 to 6 percent of total sleep.

Stage 4 : The brain produces delta waves almost exclusively. People awakened while in deep sleep do not adjust immediately and often feel disoriented for several minutes after waking up. This forms 12 to 15 percent of total sleep. Stage 5 : This stage is known as rapid eye movement REM. Breathing becomes more rapid, irregular, and shallow, eyes jerk rapidly in various directions, and limb muscles become temporarily paralyzed.

Heart rate increases, blood pressure rises, and males develop penile erections. When people awaken during REM sleep, they often describe bizarre and illogical tales. These are dreams. This stage accounts for 20 to 25 percent of total sleep time. Neuroscience offers explanations linked to the rapid eye movement REM phase of sleep as a likely candidate for the cause of dreaming. Dreams are a universal human experience that can be described as a state of consciousness characterized by sensory, cognitive and emotional occurrences during sleep.

The dreamer has reduced control over the content, visual images and activation of the memory. There is no cognitive state that has been as extensively studied and yet as frequently misunderstood as dreaming. There are significant differences between the neuroscientific and psychoanalytic approaches to dream analysis. Neuroscientists are interested in the structures involved in dream production, dream organization, and narratability.

However, psychoanalysis concentrates on the meaning of dreams and placing them in the context of relationships in the history of the dreamer.

Reports of dreams tend to be full of emotional and vivid experiences that contain themes, concerns, dream figures, and objects that correspond closely to waking life.

Nightmares are distressing dreams that cause the dreamer to feel a number of disturbing emotions. Common reactions to a nightmare include fear and anxiety.

Lucid dreaming is the dreamer is aware that they are dreaming. They may have some control over their dream. This measure of control can vary between lucid dreams. They often occur in the middle of a regular dream when the sleeping person realizes suddenly that they are dreaming. Some people experience lucid dreaming at random, while others have reported being able to increase their capacity to control their dreams.

For example, during exam time, students may dream about course content. People in a relationship may dream of their partner.

Web developers may see programming code. In other words, they may not wake up, remember images, and attach a storyline to it.

A lucid dream is one in which you are aware that you are dreaming even though you're still asleep. Lucid dreaming is thought to be a combination state of both consciousness and REM sleep, during which you can often direct or control the dream content. Researchers say that people can use various techniques to learn how to lucid dream, including "mnemonic induction of lucid dreams" MILD and "senses initiated lucid dreams" SSILD , which involve waking up after five hours and repeating a phrase like "I will remember my dreaming," or focusing on the stimuli sights, sounds, sensations in your sleep environment, respectively.

Approximately half of all people can remember experiencing at least one instance of lucid dreaming, and some individuals are able to have lucid dreams quite frequently. Over a period of more than 40 years, researcher Calvin S. Hall, PhD, collected over 50, dream accounts from college students. These reports were made available to the public during the s by Hall's student William Domhoff.

The dream accounts revealed that many emotions are experienced during dreams. There are several factors that can impact the emotional content of dreams, including anxiety, stress, and certain medications. One study found that external stimuli, including good and bad smells, can play a role in positive and negative dreams. The most common emotion experienced in dreams is anxiety, and negative emotions, in general, are much more common than positive ones.

In one study of people who have been blind since birth, researchers found that they still seemed to experience visual imagery in their dreams, and they also had eye movements that correlated to visual dream recall.

Although their eye movements were fewer during REM than the sighted participants of the study, the blind participants reported the same dream sensations, including visual content. REM sleep is characterized by paralysis of the voluntary muscles. The phenomenon is known as REM atonia and prevents you from acting out your dreams while you're asleep. Basically, because motor neurons are not stimulated, your body does not move.

In some cases, this paralysis can even carry over into the waking state for as long as 10 minutes, a condition known as sleep paralysis. While the experience can be frightening, experts advise that it is perfectly normal and should last only a few minutes before normal muscle control returns.

While dreams are often heavily influenced by our personal experiences, researchers have found that certain dream themes are very common across different cultures.

For example, people from all over the world frequently dream about being chased, being attacked, or falling. Other common dream experiences include feeling frozen and unable to move, arriving late, flying, and being naked in public. Ever wonder what your personality type means? Sign up to find out more in our Healthy Mind newsletter. In: Handbook of Clinical Neurology. Vol Elsevier; vii. National Institute of Neurological Disorders.

Brain basics: Understanding sleep. Updated August 13, National Sleep Foundation. The prevailing theory is that dreaming helps us consolidate and analyze our memories like skills and habits and helps us with priming our ability to respond in a certain way.

In the s, Freud introduced dream interpretation, but we have never been able to substantiate his claims. We do know that people with post-traumatic stress syndrome PTSD are more likely to have nightmares.

So dreaming can accompany psychiatric conditions. Yet normal people have nightmares, too, so opinions are divided. One study suggests that dreams stem more from your imagination the memories, abstract thoughts and wishes pumped up from deep within your brain than from perception the vivid sensory experiences you collect in your forebrain. But there is so much more to discover.

For example, we know that nightmares are a manifestation of tension for people with PTSD, because they recur around their traumatic experience. You should also see a doctor if you have symptoms of REM behavioral disorder. Share this story. Download the app today!

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