DREAM ON

DREAM ON

"Each night when we sleep, our minds are liberated. Absent the restraints and adherence to logic and thought, we can freely mix fact and fiction, reality and fantasy, we are free to dream." P.I.B.

I've heard it said that we all dream every night, but just don't remember most of them upon waking. Some dreams seem very vivid and real, invoking pleasing thoughts, some conjure up painful images that awaken us in the middle of the night, covered in sweat. Yet others are like fleeting glimpses or memories and seem to evaporate from our minds, as we desperately try to hold onto them when we open our eyes. Some mornings when we awaken, we are able to recount our dreams in great detail, and other times we are at a loss to recall more than a few details.
Its seems like all but the most vivid or horrific of our dreams, quickly fade from our conscious memories within minutes after we awake, a sort of dream amnesia, almost as if their content is created for and reserved by our subconscious memory. Sometimes if we recount them right after awakening we can transfer the images from short term to long term memory, thereby retaining them. Some people suggest keeping a “dream journal”, close at hand to record the elusive thoughts before they evaporate into the vapor.
Dreams seem to be a combination of our past experiences, thoughts, and emotions. The images may have a direct meaning to us, or be metaphorical. Dreams are a mental cocktail of our hopes, our desires and our fears. Sometimes profound but often nonsensical, our dreams, and even our need for dreaming, is not fully understood. Perhaps they represent a form of self exploration.
Time and reality can be altered in our dreams as we mix people and places from our past with current happenings in our lives. I believe our brains are such a powerful and complex organs that they never really rest or shut down (until we die), instead our stored and primal thoughts take over when the cognitive portion of our brain relaxes. Even in this state we can still measure electrical activity of our neurons.
Scientists have established that dreaming only occurs during the REM portion of our sleep and is often accompanied by rapid eye movement. Sometimes we have re-occurring dreams that repeat themselves over a period of months or years. We seem to have little or no conscious control over the content of our dreams, but rather we are carried off and immersed in them as unwilling participants every night.
We also dream during our daylight and waking hours but these "daydreams" are more directed, structured, and controlled. Here, we imagine, plan, and hope, our dreams are carefully orchestrated by our conscious thought and tempered by reality. Just like our night dreams I feel people need to dream. Our minds require an outlet for our pent up thoughts, that can't be expressed during our waking hours filed with the demands of life and conscious thought.
There have been books written that attempt to interpret our dreams, but I'm not sure if these are not mere attempts at explaining why and what we actually dream about. Our minds are so complex, and our dreams so varied and unique, I wonder how anyone else can interpret their meaning when it is a mystery even to the dreamer. Others suggest that our dreams are premonitions or some primal déjà vu'.
One thing is for sure, even if our bodies are in bondage, we all are free to dream.
P.I.B.
“Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.”

William Dement, in Newsweek, 1959