A dream refers to images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that usually occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep.
It is a series of thoughts, images, and sensations that occur in the mind during sleep.
They can be vivid and imaginative, and often feel like a real experience while we are asleep.
Dreams can be influenced by our subconscious thoughts, emotions, and experiences.
Dreaming is a normal part of the sleep cycle and can occur during different stages of sleep.
It may serve a purpose in processing emotions, memories, and helping us make sense of our waking experiences.
People spend about two hours dreaming per night, and each dream lasts around 5 to 20 minutes, although the dreamer may perceive the dream as being much longer than this.
The scientific study of dreams is called oneirology.
It is not known where in the brain dreams originate.
Dreams purpose is not clear.
Dreaming and sleep are intertwined.
Dreams occur mainly in the rapid-eye movement (REM) stage of sleep—when brain activity is high and resembles that of being awake.
Humans dream during non-REM sleep, also, and not all REM awakenings elicit dream reports.
After antiquity, the passive hearing of visitation dreams largely gave way to visualized narratives in which the dreamer becomes a character who actively participates.
People from varying parts of the world demonstrated similarity in their dream content.
One of the most common emotions experienced in dreams is anxiety, and other emotions include abandonment, anger, fear, joy, and happiness.
Negative emotions are much more common than positive ones.
Sexual dreams occur no more than 8-10% of the time and are more prevalent in young to mid-teens.
Sexual dreams may result in orgasms or nocturnal emissions, and are colloquially known as “wet dreams”.
The visual nature of dreams is generally highly phantasmagoric: Meaning different locations and objects in dreams continuously blend into each other.
The visuals including locations, people, and objects are generally reflective of a person’s memories and experiences.
Conversation can take on highly exaggerated and bizarre forms.
Some dreams have elaborate stories wherein the dreamer enters entirely new, complex worlds and awakes with ideas, thoughts and feelings never experienced prior to the dream.
People who are blind from birth do not have visual dreams. Their dream contents are related to other senses, such as hearing, touch, smell, and taste, whichever are present since birth.
Image creation in the brain involves significant neural activity downstream from eye intake.
It is held that visual imagery of dreams is produced by activation during sleep of the same structures that generate complex visual imagery in waking perception.
Some brain regions fully active during waking are, during REM sleep, activated only in a partial or fragmentary way.
Some suggest a dream represents the brain’s effort to make sense of sparse and distorted information, combining haphazard input with whatever other activity are already occurring and synthesize a story that makes sense of the information.
Neuroscientists suggest often bizarre dream content is the result of your interpreter trying to create a story out of random neural signaling.
Sigmund Freud, theorized that dreams reflect the dreamer’s unconscious mind and specifically that dream is shaped by unconscious wish fulfillment.
Studies suggest most people believe dreams reveal meaningful hidden truths.
People attribute more importance to dream content than to similar thought content that occurs while they are awake.
Americans were more likely to report that they would intentionally miss their flight if they dreamt of their plane crashing than if they thought of their plane crashing the night before flying, while awake.
People are more likely to perceive dreams to be meaningful when the content of dreams was in accordance with their beliefs and desires while awake.
It is common for people to feel their dreams are predicting subsequent life events.
Psychologists have explained these experiences in terms of memory biases, namely that a selective memory for accurate predictions and distorted memory, so that dreams are retrospectively fitted onto life experiences.
Because dreams are multi faceted it is easy to find connections between dream content and real events.
A veridical dream term is used to indicate dreams that reveal or contain truths not yet known to the dreamer.
Artists found dreams to offer creative expression.
Lucid dreaming is the conscious perception of one’s state while dreaming.
Lucid dreaming may often have some degree of control over their own actions within the dream or the characters and environment of the dream.
A lucid dream is any dream during which the dreamer knows they are dreaming.
Lucid dreams are dreams in which the dreamer is aware that they are dreaming while the dream is occurring.
This awareness can sometimes allow the dreamer to exert some control over the dream’s content and environment.
Some lucid dreamers can influence or direct the dream narrative.
Lucid dreams are often described as being particularly vivid and realistic.
Some individuals use lucid dreaming to solve problems, be creative , or to overcome nightmares.
Communication between two dreamers has also been documented.
The recollection of dreams is extremely unreliable.
Recollecting dreams can be trained.
Dreams can usually be recalled if a person is awakened while dreaming.
Women tend to have more frequent dream recall than men.
Dreams that are difficult to recall may be characterized with being associated with relatively little affect.
Factors such as salience, arousal, and interference play a role in dream recall.
Often, a dream may be recalled upon viewing or hearing a random trigger or stimulus.
Dream content that is salient: novel, intense, or unusual, is more easily remembered.
Adults report remembering around two dreams per week, on average.
Unless a dream is particularly vivid and if one wakes during or immediately after it, the content of the dream is typically not remembered.
People who have more vivid, intense or unusual dreams show better recall.
The continuity of consciousness is related to recall.
Individuals who have vivid and unusual experiences during the day tend to have more memorable dream content and hence better dream recall.
People who score high on measures of personality traits associated with creativity, imagination, and fantasy, such as openness to experience, daydreaming, fantasy proneness, absorption, and hypnotic susceptibility, tend to show more frequent dream recall.
People who report more bizarre experiences during the day, have more frequent dream recall and also report more frequent nightmares.
Dreams of absent-minded transgression (DAMT) are dreams wherein the dreamer absent-mindedly performs an action that he or she has been trying to stop-quitting smoking.
Dreams of absent-minded transgression may be associated with feelings of guilt.
Dreamlike states shortly after falling asleep and shortly before awakening, and dreams during stage 2 of NREM-sleep, also occur, but are shorter than REM-dreams.
A daydream refers to visionary fantasy, especially one of happy, pleasant thoughts, hopes or ambitions, imagined as coming to pass, and experienced while awake.
Daydreaming can be constructive in some contexts.
Any examples of people in creative or artistic careers, such as composers, novelists and filmmakers, developing new ideas occur through daydreaming.
Similarly, research scientists, mathematicians and physicists have developed new ideas by daydreaming about their subject areas.
A hallucination is a perception in the absence of a stimulus.
Hallucinations are perceptions in a conscious and awake state, in the absence of external stimuli, and have qualities of real perception, in that they are vivid, substantial, and located in external objective space.
This definition distinguishes hallucinations from the related phenomena of dreaming, which does not involve wakefulness.
A nightmare is an unpleasant dream that can cause a strong negative emotional response from the mind, typically fear or horror, but also despair, anxiety and great sadness.
The dream may contain situations of danger, discomfort, psychological or physical terror. Sufferers usually awaken in a state of distress and may be unable to return to sleep for a prolonged period of time.
A night terror, also known as a sleep terror, is a parasomnia disorder that predominantly affects children, causing feelings of terror or dread.
Night terrors should not be confused with nightmares, which are bad dreams that cause the feeling of horror or fear.
One theory of déjà vu attributes the feeling of having previously seen or experienced something to having dreamed about a similar situation or place, and forgetting about it until one seems to be mysteriously reminded of the situation or the place while awake.