Why do we dream at night: can we have prophetic dreams?

Healthy sleep is a necessary part of life. Without sleep, no human body can survive for more than a few days. Poor quality of sleep or lack of it inevitably leads to mental disorders, irritability, and problems concentrating. An important element of sleep is dreams. During night dreams, the brain is unloaded, and information received during wakefulness is sorted and processed. This frees up space for new emotions and knowledge.

Dreams occur every night; they reflect the world of desires, anxieties and everyday worries of a person. Many people are interested in what dreams portend, why some people see vivid emotional dreams all the time, while others cannot remember anything about traveling to the world of dreams. Let's figure it out.

How does brain activity change during sleep?

After falling asleep, a person begins to see certain images. Even ancient people tried to understand the mechanics of their appearance, interpret their meaning, and learn to manage this process. During the Middle Ages, the opinions of “experts” varied greatly. Some called dreams the machinations of devilish forces, others - messages from angels.

Esotericists, psychologists, and doctors tried to interpret the meaning of dreams. The nature of the appearance of dreams remains completely unexplored to this day. But scientists still found out something:

1. To those uninitiated in the mysteries of brain activity, it seems that while falling asleep the brain turns off and stops functioning. This is only an appearance; in fact, this organ works constantly, and even during a person’s oblivion.
2. After the body enters a state of sleep, the brain reduces its sensitivity to external stimuli. Instead of responding to what is happening around - seeing, hearing, feeling, the central organ of the nervous system processes the experience gained during the day.

3. In dreams, some details that seemed significant fade into the background, and previously underestimated moments of what happened to a person during wakefulness become discernible.

There are many cases in history when a person came to a decision on an important matter in a dream.

In a situation where a person does not sleep well, this vital function of the brain is disrupted. The information received is not remembered, and as a result of the problem created, memory deteriorates significantly.

In deep and shallow sleep

In life and in the clinic, we are already accustomed to judging the depth of sleep by the presence of dreams. Usually, an abundance of dreams indicates shallow sleep. The vast majority of modern researchers believe that dreams are more often observed during the period of active sleep, when the activity of the cortex and other parts of the brain increases and, consequently, the depth of sleep decreases.

The majority of people studied (92.6%) indicated the coincidence of dreams and shallow sleep and, conversely, the absence of dreams during good deep sleep.

Dream World

Night scenes are completely different. Having identified the main features of visions, we can classify night dreams into groups:

1. Household (empty). They are a reflection of everyday life and do not carry any special meaning.
2. Encrypted information.

3. Symbols. Such visions have no direct connection with everyday life. Events and characters appear in bizarre forms.
4. Predictions. After them, similar events occur in real life. The dream and subsequent reality are interconnected.

In some folk cultures, there is a belief that important dreams occur depending on a certain pattern, for example, only on certain days. Also, significant images appear in the last minutes before awakening. It doesn’t have to be the early morning hours; a person can wake up from sleep at any moment of the night. Such visions are filled with special meanings and, possibly, solutions to problems that are relevant to the dreamer.

Frequency of dreams by profession

To trace the extent to which the frequency of dreams depends on human activity, let’s consider how often adults, practically healthy people of different professions see them.

The table clearly shows that the percentage of dreams out of the number of dreams that fall asleep is much higher among people with mental work (teachers, doctors, students) and much less among people engaged in manual labor (unskilled workers and nurses). For the same person, depending on stress, work activity, family, household and other characteristics, the frequency of dreams may be different. In this case, both the functional state of the nervous system and the nature of the activity or the nature of external conditions matter.

What is a dream?

A dream is an image that appears in the subconscious of the sleeper. Even when a person sleeps, his connection with reality remains. The famous psychiatrist Sigmund Freud believed that a dream reveals a person’s unrealized and even unconscious desires. When you fall asleep, your brain switches to a different mode of activity. Neurons, nerve cells begin processing events and emotions, information received during the day. It is this physiological process that forms the pictures of night dreams.

The ancient Greek philosopher and thinker Aristotle wrote in his writings that the harmony of nature and man is manifested in a dream.

Why is sleep so important for our health?

For some reason, some individuals consider sleep a pointless waste of time. Every year, scientists make more and more new discoveries related to this physiological process, which indicate its enormous importance for our body. The dream has a very clear and regular structure, and not a single minute of time is wasted.

How many hours do you need to sleep to feel good? This question does not have a clear answer, because all organisms recover differently. As a general rule, adults are recommended to get 7 to 8 hours of rest at night. But some individuals replenish their strength in 6 hours, while others need more sleep - 9 or more hours.

If a person has sleep disorders, then his body suffers from this with the following manifestations:

• the activity of all systems and organs is disrupted;
• the risk of developing hypertension (high blood pressure), heart and vascular diseases increases;
• Depression often occurs due to chronic lack of sleep;
• Obesity and diabetes may develop;
• absent-mindedness, aggressiveness appear, the person becomes less vigilant, which is fraught with the risk of getting into an accident or becoming an alcoholic and similar negative consequences).

How dreams are formed

People dream all the time, after the subconscious mind has adjusted to processing impressions, i.e. immediately after falling asleep and before waking up. Different stages have some differences.

75% of the total duration of rest is occupied by the phase of slow, or deep sleep. It is this period that is characterized by a person’s ability to stand up, speak, and walk in a dream. Visions at such a moment are without bright colors, they do not have much meaning, and are practically not remembered.

REM, or shallow sleep, is quite short; its distinctive feature is the movements of the eyeballs under the eyelids. This indicates that the brain is processing emotions and impressions received during interaction with the environment. At such moments, colorful dreams occur, with interesting plots, accompanied by strong feelings of the sleeper.

If a person lies down to rest for a short time during the day, the REM sleep phase may not occur.

For physical and mental stress

For people with mental work, with moderate physical activity, the number of occurrences of dreams decreases. Persons who systematically engage in physical education or physical labor dream less often, on average, by 10-15% than those who do not engage in physical labor or physical education. However, with heavy physical exertion, a certain increase in the appearance of dreams is expected for both people with mental work and people with physical work. Only in the former the frequency grows faster than in the latter. With physical fatigue, dreams appear almost every night in people of all professions and nervous constitutions. But even here, sometimes there were cases when a very sound sleep without dreams occurred.

Is it good or bad to dream every night?

Some people may wonder if it is good to have any dreams consistently every night. There is an assumption that this is a sign of sleep quality problems. The reason for this may be stressful situations, various disorders of the nervous system.

Frequent night visions are an alarming signal, because a person’s oblivion in this case is not deep, because during the slow-wave sleep phase a person simply does not remember his dreams. The dreamer cannot fully rest every night, experiencing many storylines of his visions and storing them in memory. Subsequently, such a violation can negatively affect health.

Recommendations for improving sleep quality

To improve the quality of your sleep and achieve complete relaxation, pay attention to the following recommendations from experts:

If these recommendations do not have the desired effect, then you should seek advice from a specialist, especially if you have symptoms such as increased fatigue, sleepiness during the day, causeless anxiety and irritability.

People who are endowed with a good imagination and lead an active lifestyle can dream often, and this is considered the norm. However, if dreams come every night, then you should pay attention to the state of the central nervous system.

More interesting information on the topic in the video:

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Nightmarish and good dreams

Sometimes people may have scary dreams. Children especially suffer from nightmares. At this age, the human psyche is still adapting to life. Adults themselves can cause nightmares for children when they scare them in order to protect them from possible danger. Such methods of education frighten children, cause feelings of anxiety and restlessness, and they cause frightening night visions.

For an adult, the causes of nightmares are:

• stressful situations;
• overeating before going on a night's rest;
• mental disorders;
• alcohol abuse;
• taking medications.

Regular scary dreams can trigger the development of depression.

The good news for a person who periodically encounters nightmare images is that they sometimes help find a way out of a difficult situation and help them survive unpleasant moments in real life.

Good dreams calm you down and reduce anxiety about everyday problems. They can help you realize your own dreams, inspire, and make plans.

How to stop having bad dreams

If the causes of nightmares every night are determined, then you need to find ways to get rid of them. A labor-intensive but effective method is working on yourself.

1. After analyzing the dream, turn on your imagination and turn an alarming situation into a comical one. Come up with a scenario in which monsters will no longer frighten, but will become ridiculous and funny.
2. Try to depict the dream on paper. The man may not be an artist, but he is capable of drawing frightening visions. Then burn the creation and, imagining that you are parting with the negative, scatter the ashes on the street.
3. Every person has some phobias. And if you focus on them, subconsciously wait for the development of frightening situations, then the condition for the formation of nightmares is obvious. We need to unlearn fantasizing and predicting non-existent moments.
4. Keep a dream diary in which to describe the “movie” you saw at night. From the cycle of nightmares, a logical chain of plot lines will be built in the subconscious.
5. If traumatic night situations are a consequence of real conflicts and stress, then in order to avoid nightmares, you need to take steps to resolve them in reality.

If you cannot cope with nightmare dreams on your own, then in order for the obsession to stop, you will need the help of a psychologist.

Recommendations for insomnia aimed at relaxing the body are also suitable for frequent nightmares.

1. An evening aroma bath or aroma lamp in the bedroom with relaxing essential oils will have a calming effect.
2. Tea with soothing infusions, a spoonful of honey with a glass of warm milk will set the body up for peaceful rest.
3. Ventilating the bedroom during the day and in the evening will certainly create a comfortable microclimate in the room.
4. Sleeping linen and bedding are allowed from natural fabrics - in synthetics the body does not breathe and does not rest.
5. Instead of watching TV before bed, it is better to read a beautiful love story, a romantic novel, that is, the brain should not be overloaded, much less traumatized by negative content.
6. Computer games are contraindicated before immersing yourself in the arms of Morpheus; moreover, the glow of the screen has a destructive effect on melatonin, the main sleep hormone.
7. Take your last snack no later than 2-3 hours before your dream. And do not abuse fatty and spicy foods at dinner.
8. Try to fall asleep before midnight (ideally at 10 p.m.), because sleep during this period of time is the most productive and beneficial.

Particular attention should be paid to children's complaints. Often the root of children's nightmares lies in family conflicts, acts of child abuse both in the family and in social groups. Children should not read scary fairy tales with monsters and other scary characters at night. If smooth, respectful relationships reign in the family, and the child feels that he is loved and surrounded by care, then children's night fears disappear without a trace with age.

Every person can have bad, scary dreams. However, if they are repeated with enviable consistency, then two tasks are at stake. The first is to find the cause of the negative phenomenon, and the second is to develop a healthy psyche, increase stress resistance, and get rid of bad habits. And then you can forget about nightmares forever.

Prophetic dreams

There are such visions that are then embodied in the events of a person’s real life. People are curious about their future, wanting to guess future events. Any events that coincide with the plot of the dream are automatically considered predicted in night dreams. Then the dream is declared prophetic.

Modern scientists have determined that dream prediction is nothing more than the result of the work of the gray matter. By processing past experiences, the brain during sleep takes into account those details that were missed during wakefulness. As you process these non-obvious moments, your subconscious mind predicts how events in your life might unfold in the future. The brain produces “predictions” in the form of images that are dreamed.

Classification of dreams and their meanings

In the book “The Language of Dreams. Bridge to the Unknown" author Rita Lev describes her many years of research into dreams, techniques and methods of working with them. The author recommends preparing for a sleep analysis in advance.

How to understand your dream

A dream is such a vague picture that often a person cannot remember the details of even the most vivid plot after waking up. To exclude this and be able to interpret your dreams, you need to use the following rules:

1. Please note that a person always dreams about himself, and all the people from it must be correctly associated with the personality of the sleeper.
2. Before going to bed, place a pen and a piece of paper at the head of your bed.
3. Prepare yourself in advance to memorize the plot, and go to sleep with this thought.
4. When you wake up in the morning, write down everything you remember, even if fragments of thoughts seem incomprehensible and ridiculous. Try to colorfully describe and name everything that you dreamed at night.
5. Identify the most vivid images and feelings that come to mind. Write them down.

Now it’s time to figure out what the subconscious “whispered” under the cover of darkness.

Why are dreams not remembered?

Some people constantly have vivid dreams, others do not remember their dreams, and some people believe that they never dream. When a person has a healthy rest, a calm life, then dreams are remembered less. During a comfortable, quiet rest and in deep sleep, visions are recorded by the brain only before waking up in the morning. If the rest is anxious, the person is in nervous tension, waking up often, then the number of memorable dreams increases.

How often do people see dreams and the reasons for their occurrence?

At first glance, it is very simple to solve this issue - interview as many people as possible; However, with such a survey, there are some difficulties that do not allow an accurate answer to the question posed.

Dreams are somewhat more common in women than in men. As for patients, their frequency was different than that of healthy people. If in healthy people the presence of dreams was noted in approximately 70% of cases, then in patients - in 78.2%, and with different diseases, the number of dreams per night varied greatly. At the same time, we were unable to find a person who had never had dreams throughout his entire life. If we compare the frequency of dreams in various diseases, it turns out that in acute and somatic diseases dreams were observed in 100% of cases. They were somewhat less common for chronic illnesses - about 93%. This shows that the frequency of their occurrence is directly dependent on the severity and severity of infectious and somatic diseases. Among ailments of the nervous system, dreams were most often recorded in patients suffering from neuroses and less often in mental disorders. At the same time, it was noticed that the more severe the patient’s condition, the less often he saw dreams.

A sharp increase in the number of dreams per night was also noted when staying in unfavorable conditions:

The same thing was noticed in acute diseases such as:

Is it normal to have dreams every day?

Should you always have dreams? During sleep, our body relaxes and gains strength. But the brain continues to work, since it controls the functioning of all organs. It analyzes the information accumulated by a person during the day, so a healthy person should dream every day. But he may simply not remember them.

Blind people also dream. It’s just that in their dreams, instead of some images, there will be smells or sensations.

So, everyday dreams at night are normal. And also, to make your dreams pleasant, try to relax before going to bed, turning off your phone, computer and TV, and think only about pleasant things.

Facts and guesses about dreams

People have been thinking about the meaning and secret meaning of dreams since ancient times.
Until now, human consciousness has not been studied to such an extent that it is possible to confidently explain the mechanisms of the occurrence of dreams, their causes and the influence of dreams on real life. Psychologists tend to believe that a dream is a reaction of consciousness to those mental and emotional processes that took place during wakefulness. However, a direct connection has not yet been traced, especially since many dreams are very quickly forgotten. There are special teachings about the interpretation of dreams based on certain patterns. Interpretation of dreams is one of the important components of predicting the future. However, skeptics argue that it is almost impossible to identify certain patterns and connections between dreams and real life, since people react differently to the same phenomena, and therefore, even if two people dream something similar, this does not mean at all that similar events will happen to them.

Many famous psychologists have tried to identify patterns associated with dreams. Among them, for example, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, who believed that dreams are an attempt by the subconscious to communicate important information.

Psychology identifies several main motives for dreams, which can be divided into two groups. The first is associated with various desires and dreams, including hidden and suppressed ones. For example, children often fly in their dreams because they subconsciously strive to become more mature, “taller.” The second group consists of unresolved contradictions, conflicts and current experiences: if you are deeply experiencing a break with a loved one, there is a high probability of seeing him in a dream.