05/02/2021
Neuroscience’s current view is that dreams represent a secondary phenomenon or perhaps an epiphenomenon. They are like exhaust fumes from the engine of our brain, a random discharge of our subconscious energy without any inherent meaning or purpose to them.
Well - this is not entirely true. Dreams are timeless and yet essential to our memory. Specifically, in the dream state, our dynamics of sleep is generated by the lower brain stem - the part of our brain where doesn’t reside any sense of time. Our brain seems to abandon any need to discriminate the “real” from the unreal to the impossible. During sleep, there is no predictable cause and effect. Our dreamy experiences are completely separate and distinguishable from wakefulness because we have no sense of time in our dreams - there is no begging or ending and the terms like now, then, before, during, after, earlier, later etc have no intrinsic meaning or value to the experience of the one dreaming.
Freud believed that dreams represented the “royal highway” to unconsciousness. In other words, our dreams allow us to generate an experience for our brain that appears to be timeless - albeit closer to our true uninhabited essence. Recurring dreams, nightmares and night terrors all repressed our memories that have been tagged onto our synaptic structures like a glue. When we are awake, we can consciously suppress them but during sleep they are let loose and this is when they enact themselves. Those fear and anxiety laden memories would need to be dealt with properly by enacting then when we are awake that is our conscious state; this is the only way to untag them from our subconscious memories. This is the only way that they will stop bugging you in your sleep. Euphoric memories on the other hand are our brains way of coping with bad times and sad realities of our past life - whereby oppressed happiness bounces back to give our tired and exhausted brain some peace of mind.
More later on the neuroscience of dreams.۔۔
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