Have you ever wondered why do we dream? Why some of our dreams are so easy to interpret, but others are so strange? Why do we need to have these “virtual” experiences? What is the reason we keep having them?
I think that the main reason of a dream is to blow off some steam for our brain. Why? Because most of the time we can’t express those thoughts (yes, dreams come from our thoughts). We either try to ignore the inappropriate thoughts (like sexual fantasies) or maybe we have thoughts that express some desires we have (like being a basketball superstar) and obviously they can’t be brought into our reality that easy (maybe at all). In these cases, our brain creates the experience in an environment where no one can see and judge it. Doing this, it brings some feelings we might have if the desire would come to life, and moreover, our brain can now take a break from that particular thought or desire.
Those are the dreams we can easily interpret. What about the strange dreams? Well, this is complicated. The dreams we think of being strange, actually make perfect sense for our unconscious mind. Every experience we had in all our life is stored in our unconscious. With all this enormous amount of data, our mind can do whatever it wants as long as it creates some relaxing sensation. I think that the only purpose of our dreams is to eliminate some things that are too uncomfortable to ignore (feelings that need to be felt). Nightmares are somehow related, but not the same and I’ll talk about those in a later post.
What’s the strangest dream you had?