Sander Van Der Linden's Article 'The Science Behind Dreaming'

The article “The Science Behind Dreaming” from Scientific American by Sander van der Linden, gave us a little insight on why we dream. On average, you experience around 150,000 normal dreams by the age of 70. This does not include the occasional nightmare. There is no proven fact on why we dream what we dream. However, there were and still are a lot of theorists out there that believe our sub-conscious dreams are connected to our unconscious wishes. It wasn’t until the end of the nineteenth century Sigmund Freud created probably the most famous theory about this. Freud called this theory the “unconscious wish fulfillment theory”. He proposed that the dreams the dreamers are having are wishes that they unconsciously want to be fulfilled (Linden

Lucid dreaming is any dream in which you are aware you are dreaming. A lucid dream is the common everyday dream where the dreamer has no intention of waking up to end the dream. A lucid nightmare is when the dreamer knows that the nightmare is happening but cannot wake because of nightmare themes. The nightmare themes are usually demonic figures that inflict terror on the dreamer’s dream (McNamara 2012). Every aspect from our dreams have been seen, done, or heard at some point in the dreamer’s life. The dreamer has seen every “character” in the dream and the person was put into a pocket in your brain and is released into your dream. So if you reimagine someone in your dream and you two are riding off into the sunset together while fireworks are going off in the background and you wake up and have no idea who your Prince Charming was, most likely he is a stranger who you’ve crossed paths with at some point in time. The words that are being spoken in a dream are also not made up. It’s sort of the same as the character; instead of the images that have already been seen, it’s the dialogue that’s already been heard. Either the dreamer has said it or has been heard from some foreign object. McNamara (2012) stated that dreams are showing off the minds mental capacity (2012). Even though when a dreamer knows that he or she is lucid dreaming, they believe they can do things that they couldn’t do in everyday life. Some examples are having superpowers, completing changing he or she’s personality. Also, in some cases the lucid dreamer can change the dream and have complete control of it. Going back to the dream characters, they have more power in the dream then the actual dreamer. The dreamer has an attachment to the character in their mind. For an example take a husband and wife. They have been married for 15