Last night, Lucy dreamt that she was doing a presentation and the slides wouldn’t change. This kind of makes sense. Clearly, she was concerned about an upcoming presentation that she had to do and it was being played out in her dreams. Another time she was in a bathroom which was just a glass box on roller-skates skating around Aberdeen. This is a bit weird, but is probably an indication of feeling exposed or vulnerable. However, another time she dreamt that she was on the cart surfer game from Club Penguin trying to find Salazar Slytherin’s locket before Draco. This is nonsensical.
So, how do dreams work? How do we go from dreaming about things that are happening in our waking lives to attempting to ride a cart over water? And why do we only remember certain dreams?
Turns out, nobody knows!
When we sleep we go through five different stages. These range from the stage when you are just drifting off to snoozeland to a later stage called REM sleep, which is where you dream (cue miss Ariana ‘you’re such a dream to meeeee’).
The REM stage typically happens 90 minutes after you fall asleep and has multiple notable changes that make it different from the other stages that you experience. Mainly, you will have increased brain activity and eye movement, allowing for the most intense dreams that you will experience during the night.
Experts suggest that we dream 4-6 times a night, so why do we only remember the one which our alarm managed to be the soundtrack to (if we’re lucky)?
Well, we have multiple REM cycles throughout the night, which get longer and more intense towards the end of your sleep. It is most common to wake up naturally during your last REM cycle, due to its length, meaning that you will most likely wake up whilst you are having your most vivid dream. The other dreams that you’ve had throughout the night are simply thrown to the way side when you wake up remembering that you had just married Mr. Harry Styles.
So, why do we dream!?
Sigmund Freud (whose park we visited in Vienna, it was pretty ugly) theorised that dreams are a fulfilment of repressed wishes that we may not even be aware of ourselves. Dreams are all about our unconscious minds, and these desires are played out when we are asleep. Sounds okay? Well, he also believed that pretty much everything in our dreams is a symbol of our sexuality, even large open spaces and climbing ladders (we will leave you to figure that one out).
It is also theorised that dreams are essentially a filter for our memories, and remove all of the useless things our brain has picked up on throughout the day. Dreaming is your brain having a massive clear-out of old mascaras and socks with holes in them whilst choosing what useless dried-up pen it wants to keep. The random elements that pop into your dreams for a millisecond could just be your brain erasing or planning to file the memory for a later date.
Other theories suggest that dreaming could be our way of processing emotions. Research has shown that those who get more REM sleep are better at processing emotions which – could – mean that the intense dreams that we experience in this stage are our brain’s way of handling emotional situations.
When you think about it, dreams are pretty wild. We live out crazy scenarios that we have no control over, it’s crazy! Also, nobody knows what it all means! It’s a real-life mystery!
Idiot approved!
Our weirdest dreams:
Lucy – Pearl Krab was trying to get me to go down a massive slide into a shark tank. When I finally got the confidence to brave the slide all the shark/whale hybrids looked like Pearl and were laughing at me for being scared. They also all had bows on their heads x
Iona – I was at a 1975 concert and somebody wanted a scrunchie. I went home looking for a ruler (?) and my uncle was there and some headphones growing out of the ground. I went back to the concert and it was now Scooby Doo themed x