When you dream at night,
can't anything happen next? Yes, of
course, it can, dreams are stories we tell ourselves when we sleep. Dreams are
collections of clips, images, feelings, and memories that involuntarily occur
during the REM (rapid eye movement) stage of rest. We typically have many
dreams per night and our dreams last longer as sleep draws to a close.
Scientists think that
everyone dreams, but there is a small group that reports that they never
remember experiencing dreams. I suspect they are wrong. Dreams typically involve elements from our
conscious lives. We dream of people or familiar locations but these often take
on an illusory feel. Dreams are often interesting and can allow us to act out
certain situations that would never be possible when we are awake. Dreams
aren’t always positive—negative dreams referred to as "nightmares,"
can create feelings of terror, anxiety, or despair, and can lead to
psychological distress or sleep problems like insomnia.
Why humans dream remains one
of behavioural science's great unanswered questions. Researchers have offered
many theories including memory consolidation or emotional regulation. For some
their dream world seems real. These people may believe that they are the
creator or the genius behind every bell, whistle, and sparrow they see in their dreams?
The ability of our dreams to
appear real has led many thinkers—philosopher René Descartes (1641) being the
most prominent Western example—to wonder whether the world we experience while
awake might itself be a dream. If the dream world feels just as real as the
waking one (at least while we are in it), how can we know for sure that we’re
not currently living in a dream—a dream from which we may one day wake up?
One way that philosophers
have tried to dispel such worries is by appealing to differences between the
dream world and the waking one. For instance, our waking world has a coherence
that the dream world often lacks. You may recall that in the feature film Inception,
the characters learn to recognize that they’re dreaming by asking themselves
how they came to be in a certain situation, then realizing that they can’t
remember because the dream just dropped them there.
But does the integrity of our
waking world guarantee that it’s real?
The logic of
our waking world does give us evidence that our waking world is not merely an invention of our
creativity. Correctly, it gives us proof that when we are conscious,
something is causing our experience that is autonomous of the event
itself. For instance, the comparative continuity of objects and environments
we encounter in waking life appears to be explained by the fact there is something real and enduring that our experiences are reflecting.
However, the permanence of these objects and environments we encounter when we are awake is
no guarantee that this world is as real. A high
degree of permanence is also found in the worlds of video games, in which the
“environments” and “objects” one interacts with are merely the creations of
computer code. Physics teaches us
that the objects we experience as being solid are actually made up almost
entirely of empty space. And the results of quantum mechanical experiments
indicate that, under certain conditions, the building blocks of matter do not
behave as discrete particles at all, but rather as waves of probability.
Nevertheless, people continue
mining their nighttime reveries for clues to their inner lives, for creative
insight, and even for premonitions. Are you limited by what you dreamt the
night before? There is a probability that you are not limited.
