What Happens when We Dream?

We all dream, even when we have no memory of it when we wake up. Our dreams and nightmares have a utility and are very often, as Freud said “the royal road to the unconscious”.

When you wake up, your husband tells you an incredible story of a chase with aliens. As for you, you spent the night locked in a dark room with a colleague whom you cannot stand.

Our dreams are as mysterious as they are frightening, as fascinating as they are confusing. Contrary to what a plethora of literature on the subject suggests, a universal interpretation of dreams is impossible.

What is at work in our dreams, what takes place there, is too much influenced by our unconscious and our experience. Dreaming is actually essential to our psychic balance, even when our dreams are unpleasant …

When do we dream? Understanding the different phases of sleep!

Our sleep is made up of several cycles of approximately 90 minutes each which will follow one another and be repeated during the night. There are several types of sleep:

• The phase of falling asleep: it corresponds to a phase of letting go, the state of consciousness decreases but we are not yet really sleeping.
• Light slow sleep: It represents nearly 50% of total sleep time. It is then easy to be woken up by an outside noise, but already the eye and muscle movements begin to reduce.
• Slow, deep sleep: Brain activity is reduced to a minimum, the body is truly at rest and this is the phase during which our body recovers the best.
• REM sleep: Brain activity is intense, the eyes move and we alternate signs of deep sleep and wakefulness. It is during this phase that we dream! REM sleep represents 20 to 25% of total sleep and is particularly long at the end of the night.

From Freud to Jung: understanding dreams!

Interest in dreams did not start with the birth of psychoanalysis but the Freudian theory on the question, detailed in his book The Interpretation of Dreams, is the basis of many subsequent studies but also of a real war.

For Freud, “every dream is the (disguised) fulfillment of a (repressed) desire”. We would therefore dream to give reality to everything that our mind represses. For the psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology CG Jung, “the general function of dreams is to try to restore our psychological balance with the help of dreamlike material which, in a subtle way, restores the total balance of our whole psyche. “

The dream is therefore a function which will govern our psychic system, correct it and orient it. Whereas for Freud, the dream is systematically associated with a negative unconscious, for Jung, the dream is on the contrary a natural and useful phenomenon which enriches our consciousness.

Dreams, useful to our brain!

Doctors and neuroscientists have also been interested in the role of dreams. Thanks to the most recent imaging techniques, scientists have managed to partly explain the mechanism at work in the dreamer’s brain. And the least we can say is that the term “paradoxical” takes on its full meaning here, since part of the brain is asleep, while other areas, for example the one that produces the images, are awake.

As for the parietal and frontal cortex, that which governs in the critical mind, is itself totally muted. Hence those dreams whose strangeness strikes us when we wake up but which are nevertheless populated with familiar faces or familiar scenes! The main function of dreams is therefore to help us digest the events that have occurred during the day, in particular irrational, disturbing or enigmatic information.

Reference: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/sleeping-angels/200905/why-we-dream-and-what-happens-when-we-do

Photo de Andrea Piacquadio provenant de Pexels