Almost everyone is either amazed or perplexed by dreams...
As science has not yet categorically settled the true mechanism and meaning of dreams and other fields of wisdom offer no logical reason for it, it is only natural that dreams continue to mesmerize as well as mystify majority of people. Young ones are especially hugely confounded about dreams. They have a natural instinct to get to the logicality of anything important in their lives and surely, dreams are always making them precarious.
Somehow, dreams have had a long history of influencing some very critical elements of popular culture. Often, subconsciously at least, dreams step into the domain of actual and real action and behaviours of people, even though they seem exclusively intangible and virtual. Human brain is actually wired to accept virtualism as a close copy of realism and that is why, ghosts, angels, aliens and gods come natural to most people. They have larger acceptance for most and dreams are also similar entity for most.
Interestingly, many wise and arrived people have in the past hinted at human life-living itself being a dream. Such close situation of dream with life is a pointer to the fact that most people believe, dreams are surely very meaningful and it definitively has some hidden meaning for us.
Then, most motivators ask people to dream and dream big. This way, people are asked to relate dreams with imagination and creation of a virtual model of attainments and success, which everyone should strive to turn into reality.
Though nothing is a definitive answer, still some personal inquisitiveness and experiences can help understanding dreams better. Somehow, dreams have their mechanism buried deep into the subconscious minds, which most of us have little control of. As majority part of our lives is subconscious, we seem to have a natural affinity with dreams as something real. First, let us understand dream mechanism first.
Dreams happen when we are in REM (Rapid Eye Movement) Sleep, or deep sleep. This stage of sleep has stages of deep sleep and then alternate semi-deep sleep. Science confirms that when we are in REM sleep, our brain is most active and what it does, when we are in deep sleep, is process all information, we received in day time and attempt to streamline them or put them in some perspective. Our brain is our singular resource of survival and excellence. So, even when we are asleep, our brain is not only awake, but most active. It seems, when we are in sleep, our brain is dealing with information piled up in the huge field of subconscious… why?
Since 4 million years, when we lived in caves or under open sky, our active brain, during our sleep protected us from certain death. It actively sensed any danger and suitably sent us warning signals, may be through dreams, often awaking us through a set stage of ‘dead end’ in our dreams. Also, as brain is our survival tool, it always signals us to optimize our chances of living. Dreams somehow seem to link up info from subconscious mind to the conscious one and vice-versa.
Multitude of brain signals, correlating sensory inputs and our subconscious brain facts get so randomly mixed up. The brain is a survival mechanism, so it promptly and intelligently summarizes all facts and presents to us a possible ‘cohesive story’, which our brain thinks can be helpful to us in our discretion for better judgment…
Believe it, not only in dreams, even when we are awake, the same thing happens. Often, we do not have enough information about a situation we face and as our brain is a survival mechanism, it randomly correlates available info from subconscious mind and then attempts to present to the conscious mind a possible ‘theory’ of judgment. That is why, many times, we are stupidly illogical in our conclusions yet never accepting the same. Our brain does it all for us...
So, what it seems is, to deal with dreams, we have to make a very conscious and confidently decisive attempt to delve into our entire life and life incidents… think of all those possible elements, which we have not yet resolved in your mind. They are very much part of our subconscious mind domain.
Think and ask yourself, “Are there any fragments of life-living experiences and memories, or of present, which need my conscious attention for resolution and settlement.” You are your best judge.
If you have been an apprehensive person or have been in some sort of anxiety or over-reactiveness with some issues of life and living, you should sit and think about them. Remember, your ‘active’ brain has no business doing things, which you have already resolved and stored as ‘pleasant memories’. It is designed for survival signalling and it always reminds us, if we have some unsettled life-living experiences, which we have not consciously marked as ‘pleasant memories’… take a grip on your life and your dreams shall become source of joys and excellence….
The crucial acceptance is – compared to our conscious mind space, our subconscious mind space is like a football field, whereas conscious domain is only like the goalpost. So imagine the soccer field and accept that at most part of the game, most activities are in the middle of the field, seldom at the goalpost. A goal is rare. In our lives too, most activities take place in subconscious domain. That is why, for many, life too is like a dream.
We may not yet say definitely about dreams but one thing we can accept that in our lives, if we strive to evolve our personality and thinking in such a way that we enhance the domain of ‘conscious self’ in our lives, we shall then surely curb the domain of subconscious.
If you make a resolve to have most of your actions and behaviours only after consciously thinking about them, not in a reactionary way but in holistic and receptive way, your dreams shall become less confusing. Dreams shall come but the element of randomization and awkwardness shall fizzle out. You shall yourself see that higher awareness in your part about life-living actions and behaviours shall make your dreams happy and less confusing. Surely, life shall look less like a dream as dreams shall become more like life you are in control of....
There is another way we can look at our dreams. For that let us ask ourselves – ‘How much real are movies we see?’
Sure, they are mostly fiction and unreal but have grains and elements of real life incidents, experiences and truth. Dreams also have grains and elements of real life things but they are largely as unreal as movies...
Then, there are movies, based on real life persons or stories. Similarly, some dreams also can be close to real like these movies.
The crucial point is – the process and mechanism of dreams are very real as they are the function of our brain. However, they are not related with actual and real things in our lives as the weaving of sequences and chain of scenes in the dreams are not coherent and orderly...
Why? The answer involves lengthy detailing about conscious and subconscious minds. In short, what makes our dreams incoherent and unreal is the fact that when we are in sleep, our brain sources the grains and elements of real experiences from the domains of both conscious as well as the subconscious. As the domain of subconscious is many times more than that of conscious and what lies in subconscious, we are never aware of; the final ‘movie-making’ (dreams) by our ‘Producer-Director-Script Writer’ (brain) sounds incoherent and unreal to us.
Our brain handles 90% of tasks, we never feel and get aware of. Also, our brain processes many thousands bits of information every second, we have no idea about. They are all in our subconscious. Science believes, sleep and dreams are times when our stupid brain attempts to align and streamline hell loads of info in our subconscious, with our conscious mind...
Sadly, majority of our life-living uncertainties are creation of our subconscious mind and as we are never aware of such happenings, we all ascribe so many ‘un-interpretable’ incidents of our lives as Destinies or God’s Will. Dreams, gods, ghosts, destinies are all ‘mega-hit’ movies made by this brilliantly stupid ‘director’ called brain...
Interesting thing is – I always believe everyone should spare some time to know in detail about how our dreams are the bizarre workmanship of our stupid brains. Once we accept and understand this hypothesis, we come to the very strange realities which our brain creates for us. Once we understand the functioning of brain, we shall know that what we see, understand and accept as ‘real and actual’ in our daily lives and popular worldview, are actually only virtual.... they are not as real and actual as we think they are...
Unfortunately, or let us say happily, as science has not so far deciphered everything about brain functioning and how our brains create our consciousness and cognitions, we are also not having a singular and objectively logical answer about our dreams. Still, some very interesting probable theories are there about dreams, consciousness and cognition...
Most people are very much fascinated and bewildered by their dreams but only a handful wish to go into details of knowledge about brain functioning, which not only shall unravel loads very interesting about dreams but also huge wisdom about life and living experiences....
We should be friends with our brains first, then only we can know, what is real and what is unreal in our lives, as we see and feel them...
Here it is important to tell something about introspection, which has definitive connection with our dreams. Introspection, especially self-introspection is not an easy thing to do. In fact it does not even come up as an entry into long list of life-living priorities in contemporary complex life, with so much pressure of multi-tasking in fast-changing milieus on daily basis. Somehow, actions so much dominate our daily lives that thinking somehow relegates to back seat and continuously procrastinated.
All wisdoms, from science to spiritualism and from philosophy to psychology, advise us to have a time-space window for ‘exclusive self-dialogue’ to ruminate over daily happenings. The simple reason is – Most of our daily actions are guided by the rote brain, where our subconscious mind, used to an auto-mode ‘action-reaction’, does things for us. The true self, the conscious self, this very defining sense of a definitive ‘I’ is hugely missing in most of our daily tasks. We all need a healthy ‘open talk’ with this ‘I’...
Usually, it is our brains, which does this task of ‘self-retrospection’ for us, when we are in sleeps. Very few of us know why we sleep and why we dream. Science now knows a bit about them. We now accept that sleep is not required because we are tired. We sleep because our brain needs quality and undisturbed time to mend itself, realign the daily inputs of huge information and put them in some sort of Order and Perspective.
The dreams we have, is because of this process. Our sleep and dreams have meaning and purpose and it is – Introspection, Rumination and Realignment of subconscious with conscious and finding a pattern of purposefulness.
However, many people can’t make out any sense from their sleep and dream patterns. These failures are somehow related with our lack of conscious self-retrospection and self-dialogue, when we are awake and not dreaming...! Those, who know and practice the artistry of highly conscious self-retrospection and self-dialogue, have better life-management and life-engineering. They are also able to sniff out meaningful signals from their dreams.
Of course, the primary requisite for this artistry is quality leisure and lonely time for all of us. In the maddening clutter culture around us, with so much complex life-living challenges and this ever-dominant zeal to maximize happiness and attainments, we sacrifice the most precious thing called leisure and loneliness. The great Greek thinker Plato said, ‘The purpose of education and wisdom is to understand the importance of leisure in life’.
My eBook, ‘Be Lonely, Be Your Best’ deals with all such life-living wellness issues. The purpose of this book is to make people aware about crucial ideas about life and living, which are essential for our wellness and excellence.
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