Psychology of Sleep & Dreams

Psychology of Sleep & Dreams
by Gregg Prescott, M.S.



Dreams are a coping mechanism to prevent mental overload. They occur during the REM stage of sleep and have many different facets. They can help your subconscious memory unload that day’s (or possibly recent) underlying unfinished frustrations and repressed emotions such as worries or concerns; they can serve as premonitions, they can be a sign to change something in your life or they may merely be an over-riding thought from a recent activity.

We don’t recall most of our dreams, which is partially attributed to the catharsis our dreams give us by having the opportunity to unload certain worries or concerns without mentally remembering and subsequently reliving them in our dream state. At that point, our minds are satisfied with the unconscious resolution of the dream, so we tend not to remember them.

Conversely, when we’re very satisfied in most areas of our life, we’ll tend to have positive and enjoyable dreams.

There’s so much more to dreams such as a physiological aspect that involves the autonomic arousal system and various schools of thought such as the expectation fulfillment theory, but we don’t need to go there in this article!

Many in this field believe dreams are symbolic representations and/or metaphors of what’s going on our conscious mind, and may come out in various metaphors and symbols within our dreams. For example, if a man secretly wanted to have sex with his secretary, the dream might be represented by the man dreaming about his secretary pushing a file cabinet drawer in and out. The in-and-out motion represents a sexual movement, without actually dreaming of the real thing. In this school of thought, everything has some kind of meaning in our dream, including colors, sounds, smells, temperature, etc, but the emotions behind the dream is the imperative driving force to why we dream.

The reason we dream in metaphors and symbols is because the dreams may be interpreted or confused by our memory’s conscious mind as reality.

Right now, it's very common for people to have dreams about 2012 regarding family and saftey. Many dreams in this genre may also include some form of military representation, which could represent one's faith (or lack of faith) in our current government system. These type of dreams often involve a catastrophic event or the prelude to one.

If you're experiencing these types of dreams, then your subconscious mind is telling you that you haven't found a viable resolution to this problem. At this point, one may begin to ponder other scenarios or options in which the subconcious and conscious mind can both agree upon.

source: http://www.maya12-21-2012.com/misc.html