Vivid Dreams: Why Do We Dream?

We have all experienced it: the vivid dreams that are inescapable. Are you trapped somewhere, with spiders or leeches crawling all over your skin, unable to move? Maybe you are running down a long, endless hallway, chased by an unknown being. Humans have been dreaming as long as they have been breathing. More recent research has shown when during the sleep cycle humans are able to dream and when we are unable to dream. However, what really is a dream? Dreams are a sequence of images, emotions, and thoughts passing through a sleeping person’s mind. Humans spend six years of their lives in a world of hallucinations, a vivid parallel universe filled with creativity, fears and wishes. Why do people dream? While this question persists even today,

Carl Jung saw dreams as a way of communicating with the subconscious of one’s self. Dreams are a window to the unconscious, or all of the aspects of the one’s complete personality that are not under one’s conscious control (Dallett, 1973). The unconscious includes innate capabilities that have not yet become conscious, as well as any feelings or thoughts that were at a time conscious but have now been now repressed. Jung believed different dreams arose from different levels of the “psyche,” or the whole personality or being. The psyche consists of two levels: the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. The personal unconscious consists of the all the content that has been repressed because it is so incompatible with the conscious that the mind refuses to acknowledge it (Dallett, 1973). The deepest level is the collective unconscious, which consists of innate predispositions to think or act in certain ways. These predispositions create psychological ramifications that lead to patterns of behavior that are then reflected through images of the collective unconscious. Beneath the images are archetypes, or energy charges that give direction to thought perception and behavior. More simply put, the archetype is the programming of the brain that is designed to help it to work in certain ways and with specific psychological outputs. The collective unconscious is the result of

Dreaming takes place in the same region of the pons that generates rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. This region also produces random stimuli that activates the frontal lobe and directs it to make sense of the neural activity, primarily in the form of ponto-geniculo-occipital (PGO) spikes (Domhoff, 2005). Positron-Emission tomography (PET) scans of people sleeping showed increased activity in the “emotional brain” (centered in limbic system) with no activity in the planning or logical thinking frontal lobe regions. (Myers, 2014). If damage were to occur in these regions, dreaming could be temporarily or even permanently