The brain is an incredibly complex piece of computational biology, and consciousness remains one of the most stubborn of riddles. In other words, our dreams are the brain's way of taking new information and incorporating it into our storehouse of memories. One of the most plausible current theories for dreaming is that dreams are involved in memory consolidation. The simple truth is, that as it currently stands, we do not know why we dream. There is certainly no good reason to think that dreams are 'unopened letters from the unconscious'. The core problem with the belief in dream interpretation is the assumption that dreams hold a hidden message. There is certainly no good reason to assume that any of these explanations have any bearing on reality.Ī dream uninterpreted is like a letter unopened - The Talmud While entire systems of dream interpretation exist, be they based on the work of Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud or Fritz Perlz, it is important to remember that these too are based on little more than conjecture, assumptions, and a creative use of metaphor. However, the basis for modern dream interpretation shares more in common with ancient superstitious thinking than science. There is zero evidence or reason why such interpretations would have any relation to reality.Įvery now and then people stumble across a 'dream interpretation expert', often these are scientists or psychologists who offer what seem to be a more reasonable and modern explanation of dream symbolism. While these answers may sound appealing, or even occasionally reasonable, they are based on nothing more than the author's imagination. Worse still, some dream dictionaries even go as far as to claim dreams offer a clairvoyant glimpse of the future:ĭream of crows? one may soon receive bad news. The worst offenders are the 'dream dictionaries' which offer bite-sized explanations for any dream theme one can imagine ĭream of falling? - feeling out of control.ĭream of being chased? - trying to escape a repressed memory. The vast majority of dream interpretation books and websites are absolute hokum, offering little more than fictional explanations based on irrational and superstitious thinking. It's certainly peculiar that humans throughout history share a belief that dreams hold cryptic messages, but is this fact or fiction? Indeed, if one googles the word 'dreams' one will be bombarded with links to websites claiming they are able to help us to interpret the secret messages hidden in dreams. LYTCHETT MATRAVERS, POOLE, UNITED KINGDOM, Ma/ / - More than any other belief, the idea that dreams can be interpreted is one of the most universally held. Every culture has developed beliefs regarding lucid dreams & how dream interpretation works.

And then we know that they're communicating out.Since the dawn of time people have been fascinated by their dreams. 'So if you become lucid in a dream and you want to communicate, then when people are dreaming, they just look left-right, left-right, really dramatically. In REM sleep, 'every muscle in your body is completely paralyzed, except you can twitch and you can move your eyes,' Konkoly tells Scott Simon on Weekend Edition. They were studying rapid-eye-movement sleep, which is the stage of sleep where people dream most vividly. 'But we were wondering, can we also communicate in? Can we ask people questions that they could actually hear in their dreams that we could kind of have a more meaningful conversation?' student at Northwestern University who is the first author on the study published this month in Current Biology.

'Since the '80s, we've known that lucid dreamers can communicate out of dreams by using these signals,' says Karen Konkoly, a Ph.D. Sleepers would respond by moving their eyes or twitching their faces in a certain way to indicate their answers. In separate experiments, scientists in the U.S., France, Germany and the Netherlands asked people simple questions while they slept.

Specifically, with people who are lucid dreaming - that is, dreaming while being aware you're dreaming. Researchers say two-way communication is possible with people who are asleep and dreaming.

Lucid dreams meaning