Why+Do+We+Dream

=Why Do We dream?= by Adrian Magadia

The scientific study of dreaming is known as Oneirology. However this did not really exist in history. This because you cannot hold a dream. It is difficult to measure and record data of a dream .You cannot see other people's dreams which makes this field of study difficult. If you try to ask someone what they dreamt the results are almost always unreliable because people tend to forget them or it is just a blurry vision in their head. Fun fact, it is estimated that we forget 95% of the dreams we have especially in the first ten minutes of having them.

However, in 1952, researches in the University of Chicago found a unique type of electrical activity that occurs during a certain stage of a person sleeping. When researches woke people up at this stage, the subjects usaually tended to say that they were dreaming during that period of time. Also, during this stage of sleep peoples eyeballs start to go crazy and look all over the place under the eye lids. You will notice this if you look at someone asleep. This is all called REM sleep. The electrical charges that are created during rem sleep travel to the thalamus which relay them to the cerebral cortex, the outer layer of the brain that is responsible for learning, thinking, and organizing information.

The cool thing about rem sleep is that if you compare the electrical charges in your brain during rem sleep it almost exactly mimics the charges when you are awake. This is also known as paradoxidal sleep. The only difference is that the chemicals made in the brain like norepinephrine(multiple roles like hormones and nuerotransmitters also known as non-adrenaline), serotonin(primarily found in the GI tract, platelets, and in the central nervous system of humans and animals to regulate intestinal movements), and histamine(an organic nitrogen compound involved in local immune responses) are close to completely prevented which causes the muscles to stop moving.

This is why you can dream about flying or running around fighting ninjas but your body doesn't move. However in some cases, people sleep walk and move around during complete rem sleep. It is also possible for you to wake up but your body is not able to move. This can also be reversed. You can also be inside a dream and know that your dreaming. This is known as lucid dream. You have full control over what you do in the dream like dinner with the president or run on water. There are many possible theories on why we dream like reverse learning, the continual-activtion dream, or activation synthesis theory. These are all variations on the idea that while we sleep, the unconcious part of our brain is busy organizing memories and strenghtining ideas that we will need in the future like facts of Greg Mendel or when homework is do while getting rid of junk information that we do not need in our brain. The concious part of the brain detects electrical impulses but does not know what it means.

Therefore the concious part of your brain(cotex) tries to make a cohesive story creating a dream. This is why dreams are usually random because they are not suppose to make sense ,they are are not an actual message from the brain it is just the result of the cortex of the brain trying to organize things back in the unconcious. In a unrelated example, it is like a college student organizing another students homework because he/she is asleep. So basically, dreams actually do not have a purpose, they are just an accidental result of a more important process going on behind the concious brain. Some researches do not agree with this because they think dreaming is used to prepare us for threats in the real world. They think this because the most occuring feeling during dreams are negative such as abandonment,anger, or the most common is anxiety. This theory of other researches start back in early human civilazation. For example, the cave man, they did not know what they were going to encounter the next day. So for preperation, the brain would prepare us by simulating moments of anxiety to prepare us in the real world. So people, who had bad dreams were better with coping with real life situations.

The theories about dreaming is still undecided. There are many reasons why we might dream. Which makes dreams still a mystery.