Dreams are a mystery to everyone, but do they mean anything? Can they tell you about yourself or help you solve problems? The answer might be yes, at least according to many theories.
Dr. Greg Mahr is a Henry Ford Health psychiatrist who works with the sleep research program. He’s also co-authored a book called “The Wisdom of Dreams: Science Synchronicity and the Language of the Soul.”
According to Dr. Mahr dreams are likely to have at least a biologic function.
“From an evolutionary perspective, they’re clearly important because we devote a lot of physical energy and emotional energy and expose ourselves to risks by dreaming because we’re paralyzed when we dream,” said Mahr.
If you think about it, in prehistoric times, when safety at night was questionable, being paralyzed during part of the sleep cycle could put a person at a significant disadvantage.
Dr. Mahr thinks this really raises the question of what benefit dreams serve. One theory is that dreams are tied to our memory.
“Emotional processing of memories, and a way of linking emotions and memories and emotions with our daily experiences,” is what Mahr believes dreams might do.
Everyone dreams several times a night during REM sleep. But you may have noticed you rarely remember your dreams unless you wake up during one.
According to Dr. Mahr here’s why, “For physiologic reasons, our dream sleep stages become much longer as the night goes on, so we tend to recall the last dreams before we wake up, one because we wake up, and two because that was a long REM phase.”
However, according to Mahr, even when you do recall a dream, holding onto the memory is difficult.
“They’re hard to remember because they operate by a different kind of logic, and weird things happen that don’t make sense to our waking mind,” said Mahr.
It’s a shame we don’t remember more of our dreams because there are many notable examples of dreams providing creative inspiration. Paul McCartney woke up with the melody for the song “Yesterday, the theme for the book “Frankenstein,” and the idea behind the Twilight saga, which were all born in dreams.
If creativity can be inspired in dreams, what if we could control or direct our dreams?
That’s where the idea behind lucid dreaming comes from.
“Lucid dreaming means being conscious that you’re dreaming during the dream,” said Mahr.
Once someone is aware of a lucid dream, they can develop the ability to steer their dream, for example, by asking the people in the dream why they are there, allowing them to develop extra insight into the dream.
The bottom line is that while the science of using and interpreting our dreams is not well developed, if you pay attention, you can gain insight.