Do you remember what you dreamed last night? Think about it: For something almost all of us do every night, remembering your dreams is a difficult task. Studies show that we forget about 95% of a dream and almost immediately.
And this does not just stop there, since making sense of your dreams can be even more difficult This is why sleep therapy has become increasingly popular. Although we spend about two hours a night dreaming, we know very little about what dreams are and why we experience them.
We know that dreams are a type of hallucination and that we have them most often during stage five of REM sleep, the deepest stage of sleep. We also know that dreams play an important role in regulating our metabolism, blood pressure, and brain function. However, a critical question for which we still do not have a good answer is…
The logic we use to navigate waking life doesn’t stand a chance against dreams. Dreams seem to be based on recent experiences and problems we face, but there is still no consensus among mental health professionals about what the purpose of dreams is. Below I tell you the most accepted answers.
1. Your dreams can be ways to cope with emotional pain in your life
While you sleep, your brain functions on a much more emotional level than when awake This can allow your brain to make connections about your feelings that your conscious self wouldn’t, in the same way that psychedelic drugs, meditative trances, or hypnosis work.
2. Helps practice for future challenges
Your amygdala is one of the most active areas of your brain when you are dreaming. This part of your brain is responsible for the fight or flight response. This activity suggests that dreams could be the way your brain simulates future threats to prepare for them ; an instinctive biological survival mechanism that allows you to “learn how to avoid being eaten by a tiger without having to physically confront the actual threat.” A fascinating conceptualization of the purpose of our dreams.
3. Helps classify and store memories
Dreams can be a way of Sort out which of your memories are important enough such as to store them so that you can remember them efficiently later and which ones should be delegated to the subconscious or unconscious memory system.
What is Sleep Therapy?
Sleep therapy is the process of unraveling what dreams mean in relation to our waking lives The dream interpretation process is symbolic and uniquely tailored to the dreamer. It is a collaborative process that is based on Freudian interpretation, Jungian symbols, transpersonal theory, and object-relational introjections.
The goal of dream therapy is not necessarily to arrive at an unambiguous interpretation of a given dream, but rather to find meaning, usability, and emotional substance for the client through their dreams. For this reason, you may not be able to perform substantive dream analysis simply by looking for symbols in your dream in a “dream dictionary”.
It may be important to interpret your dreams under the guidance of an experienced psychotherapist or dream therapist. Psychotherapists are generally already trained to detect subconscious indicators of problems. Because dreams are often so abstract, detecting these indicators is more complex, but is still similar to the process of individual therapy.
Sleep therapy is rich in material and in many cases can be a journey of empowerment The topic of dream interpretation has inspired the writing of hundreds of books and doctoral theses. Dreams are powerful. They make us feel strong emotions and remember seemingly forgotten experiences.
While dreams alone may seem completely abstract, dream analysis helps you understand them within the context of your life. This dream interpretation process is used by both psychotherapists and dream therapists as it can be instrumental in helping patients understand themselves and their deepest desires.
How is it useful for me to learn to interpret dreams?
These are the main benefits of this process.
1. Learn to interpret dreams
It is of great helps us know ourselves better helps us decipher our fears and then understand and overcome them.
2. It can help us find the answers to our problems
It is a source of knowledge not exploited by the person who dreams, and allows the quality of life to be improved.
3. It can help our loved ones!
In the case of children, some often suffer from nightmares that torment them and do not let them rest! Interpretation and dialogue with children is of great help to calm the level of anxiety and reduce the number of nightmares.
Without going too far, understanding our children’s dreams can be of great help to understand what they are going through and what they do not tell us out of fear or shame. It is known that children often dream about their aggressors in the case of violence, so knowing how to interpret dreams gives us an advantage in preventing.
4. It can promote a better family and couple relationship
Create a deeper bond by talking about your dreams In this case, the Senoi tribe, described by its discoverer in 1930 as a peaceful and very happy society. This tribe has the peculiarity of analyzing dreams many centuries ago thanks to the work of the psychoanalysts Freud and Jung. In this tribe, all the members usually meet to comment on their dreams, and then discuss them in order to help the person overcome their fears.
5. We learn to remember more about our dreams
This leads to a greater development of creativity and consolidation of learning According to Dr. Sara Mednick, taking a nap during REM sleep promotes productivity and creativity! As if that were not enough, dreams prepare us for future events, so remembering and understanding them will make us more accurate in choosing a life project.
Examples of great dream scorers are: Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison induces lucid dreams!, Authors of great works such as: Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde, Frankenstein, Paul McCartney and the song Yesterday!
There are potentially infinite benefits in life to understanding more about our dreams, our unconscious mind, as Freud would say: The Royal Way to the Unconscious. In other words, the perfect way to enter a person’s unconscious.
