Dreams inspire fun and adventure

May all your dreams come true! is a common platitude we often hear. However, all our dreams do not come true and some of the dreams we have are not very favourable. For instance, if you have a dream in which you fall from a ladder, you do not wish to see such a dream coming true.

What are dreams? Are they wish fulfilments or simply some mental activities taking place when we sleep. A dream is normally defined as a series of images, events and feelings in our mind while we are asleep.

From whatever angle you look at them, dreams appear to be common experiences. They are so common that there is scarcely anybody who has not had dreams. Even modern psychology has not spoken the last word on dreams. Psychologists say that dreams are a certain type of psychological activity or experience which occur during sleep.

Rapid Eye Movement

Modern research shows that dreams are the ways our conscious mind communicates with us. We have dreams during the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep. Although the real purpose of dreams is still unknown, they are closely associated with human psychology. According to many psychologists, during an average lifespan a human being spends six years in dreaming which is equivalent to two hours every night.

Sigmund Freud was perhaps the first psychoanalyst who developed the most comprehensive and systematic theory of dreams. He saw dreams as the 'royal road to the unconscious.' Modern psychologists and scientists have differed from Freud. Today dream research is done in modern laboratories. One such laboratory is at the Department of Psychology, Andhra University in Visakhapatnam, India.

Carl Jung, the celebrated Swiss psychiatrist came out with a new theory of dreams. According to him, there are two layers of the unconscious. The first layer - the personal unconscious - houses material that is not within our conscious awareness. The second layer - the collective unconscious - is a storehouse of latent memory traces inherited from the past. They are shared by the entire human race. Such 'archetypes' or ancestral memories show up frequently in our dreams. They are often manifested in symbols.

Archetypal symbols

Jung said that an understanding of archetypal symbols help us to understand our dreams. He also said that dreams compensated for one-sided feelings borne in the conscious. However, Ferenczi, a Hungarian psychoanalyst, says that a dream bears something that cannot be expressed outright.

Many philosophers and psychologists have been trying to understand the process of dreaming. For most of them dreams were very puzzling. They wondered why we did not dream when we were conscious of ourselves and our surroundings. What is more, when we dream we seem to be conscious of everything that transpires in our dreams.

Traditional Indian thought has recognised dream as a separate form of thought and consciousness. Accordingly, we have dreams (Swapna) along with sleep (Shushpti), awareness (Prajna) and alertness (Jagrat).

Neurologists too have attempted to interpret and explain dreams on the basis of internal stimulation of brain activity. However, these attempts have not been successful so far. Neurological findings about the working of the brain do not bear out Freud's views. The focus of dream study has shifted to the neurological bases of dreams and the ebb and flow of neurotransmitters. Robert Stickgold, a Harvard sleep scientist, says, "there is precious little on which dream researchers agree."

Dream interpretation

If psychologists, psychoanalysts and neurologists have failed to come to a conclusion about dreams, we are back to square one. Human beings and even some other mammals will continue to have sweet dreams or nightmares. It will take some more time to understand what dreams are made of. Even dream interpretation calls for more research.

With all such uncertainties, there are some facts we have to accept as far as dreams are concerned. For instance, when we dream we are happily unaware of other activities around us. When the dream is over we usually remember very little of it. In this respect, dreams differ from daydreams which are conscious activities taking place when our senses are on the alert.

Dreams come to us without any conscious effort. Most of us do not even make an attempt to interpret them. Most dream interpreting books are akin to fairy tales. They are similar to astrological predictions published in some newspapers. Most dreams may inspire some fun, adventure, wish fulfilment or even deep personal insight. William Shakespeare in Macbeth said that sleep and dreams are "the chief nourishers in life's feast." The Bard is closer to the truth than some modern psychologists.