Why Are We Dreaming?

I saw that there are lot of topics about their dreaming experiences and problems regarding to the dreams. But have you noticed that why are we dreaming. I believe that all the things happening in this universe is combined together. each of the natural phenomenas have a relationship among them. So dreaming for what?.

One of my physics lecturer said that dreams make human more civilized. He said that naturally the human is just a kind of a beast. The secret of civilization of human is dreaming. I mean that not the having hopes, just dreaming while in sleep. It may quite messy to you. I'll explain what I got. Normally humans have lot of cravings. These are common to the beasts also. But normally humans are not doing such things for overcome their cravings. For an example normally humans are having sex not in public while dogs not care about the place same thing. All men may feel a sexual feeling as they see any woman in the street, neighborer's house or any where else. But they may not going to overcome their cravings by having a sex with the woman.

They overcome these cravings by just dreaming. Dreaming is a powerful phenomena which controls the humans' feelings. Most of the people can satisfy just by dreaming. Therefore we say that humans are not beasts.

This vision may true if only animals cannot be dreaming. I never heard about whether the animals can dreaming or cannot. If they can they should be civilized. Can any body tell me that is there any clue for prove that the animals can see dreams? or is that vision true?

This post has been edited by ravimal: Jul 14 2008, 06:57 PM

How can dreams make us more civilized? Dogs dream, and they arent exactly the poster children for civility, "Hi!, Im Rover, I think I'll sniff your crotch now, and your sphincter smells fabulous by the way." Dreaming does not make us civilized, it allows us to know we have a sub-conscious that is working around the clock, processing external stimuli and internal chemical balances/off-balances manifesting them into a psychological reaction. Atleast thats my understanding, its kind of like a fever for your sub-conscious or conscious, depending on your brain.

My understanding is that we dream because although we are "asleep" our mind is never shut down. The only real difference is that you in a sense lose control of your current thoughts. Something I have a question about though is....Everyone says you will dream about whatever you are thinking about when you fall asleep. That never happens to me. There are tons of times that I have something on my mind and end up dreaming about something completely different.

Heres my two cents. For one, other animals dream. Have you ever watched a dog sleeping. I had a dog whose legs would move like he was running and he would bark in his sleep. Thats a sure sign of dreaming.

Dreams are basically the byproduct of our brain sorting out all the information it collected that day. Think of your brain as a library. When you are awake for the day, you collect a lot of information from your five senses, plus any emotion chemicals (Think of this as recieving a shipment of books being dumped into the center of the library in no necessary order). When you sleep your subconscious tries to tie in all this new information with the information already stored in your brain (The librarian is putting the books on the shelf, and cross-referencing them with the dewey-decimal system). Now your consciousness tries to make some sense of this information flying around in your head, so what you get are a few words from each book, or cross-reference.

Another thing dreams are good for is your subconscious having an outlet to vent your fears, frustrations or any strong feelings really.

Now while it is my strong belief that most dreams are like the first example, it is possible to have lucid dreams(where you know you're dreaming and can control the events happening), or even possibly precognitive dreams(dreams that foretell the future). I have a good example of a precog dream my sister had, but I will save that for another post.

Who defined civilized? Because I think the Native Americans had it right about how to live. Being one with the earth and all that jazz. We are not a superior species because we make all this technology that can destroy Earth. If we were truly civilized, no one would be worried about global warming, overpopulation or starvation. (Sorry, a little off subject)

I think you are partly right though. Because our brains evolved in a such a way that we had a use to store more and more information. And without dreams our mind would be an endless mess.

Here's a good link to explain animals dreaming- http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2001/dreaming.html

This post has been edited by dwolters: Jul 14 2008, 11:49 PM

do u kno where deja vu comes from and why it happens
well i dont kno but i've alaway guessed that its our subcontinents analyzing our daily behaviour then relayin it into aparttern or dream dat appears as if we hav already scene it b4 sort of like a 6scent

We dream because of our brain. We recollect past events or other things we know and put mix them into a scenario. How can you say dreams make you civilised if I dream of mowing down people with guns (when I'm Lucid, of course)?

I heard that dreams focus on some random thing that you saw or that happened to you, which you may or may not have noticed, but that beyond that they really had no significance. I feel like this may be true; sometimes I've dreamt about the stupidest, smallest little things that I saw just before I went to bed, and I couldn't understand why that thing popped up in my dream.

Follwoing this line of thought, it would seem that animals would dream, provided they had at least some level of higher cognition. I can't imagine an earthworm has the brain capacity to construct a dream, but a dog may be able to.

As for deja vu, I read that one theory for its cause is when thoughts travel down the "wrong" pathway in your brain. It is thought that when something new occurs, thoughts travel down a new path, but when something recurrs, the thoughts travel down a previously made path. If something new occurs but the thoughts take a path that was already made, then you think you've already been there before, even though you really haven't. No one knows if this is true or not, but it is a theory.

I always have the most amazing dreams, where I learn things I didn't know (while awake lol). I don't know, maybe it's because I eat to much the wrong food, or that my mind is all messed up, but my dreams are really crazy.. Right now I don't remember one of them, but when I do I'll post it here.

Generally, I just remember the dream for a few minutes after waking up, then it's all gone. So I have to write it down if I want to remember things about that dream.

There was this time were I was hired as a police officer, but I wouldn't do that in real life, I don't know but suddenly in the dream I was aware of a lot of things about policemen that I didn't know while awake. The other day also I had a very weird dream, it was a 2-part dream. The first time I saw a wall painting but couldn't read what was written. Then, few days ago I had the same dream, but this time I knew about the painting so I was waiting for the time to look at it.. and then I read it.. The name of my now fiancee was written in that wall She and I barely knew each other, but you see now we are about to get married

for me, dream is a reflection of "YOU" and not anybody else. Dream is coming from your feelings or emotions. Like when you dream about your girlfriend cheating on you is not about your girlfriend but tells you about something YOU feel about your girlfriend. If her character cheats on you in your dream, then it's about your fears or suspicions, and not necessarily a precognitive dream that your girlfriend is fooling around on you. Again every character of your dream is just a reflection of YOUR feelings, YOUR thoughts, YOUR desires, YOUR fears. that is dream form me.

you know, that actually makes total sense. I sometimes dream about my GF cheating on me, but I think that's maybe because that's my major fear, she dumping me because of what I feel about her. Most of the time though, I dream about things that happened in the day that made me go "wow" or "ouch" or something like that.