Dreams

Something that we all do every night–even if we don’t remember it clearly–mystifies me nearly every morning when I wake up:

Dreaming.?

Dreams have captivated humanity since the dawn of time, provoking thought, wonder, and inspiration from philosophers, artists, and scientists alike. Some societies, such as ancient Greece, viewed dreams as messages from their gods, while in others, they were seen as witchcraft or predicting the future. Though scientists have been studying dreams for centuries, even the information they’ve gathered cannot fully explain them.

Sometimes, I wake up from a terrible dream thanking God that it wasn’t real, spending the rest of the day grateful for my normal, sound life.?

Other times, I wake up from a positive dream, perhaps one where something happens that I’ve been longing for or that seems far too good to be true in my own life (achieving a high grade, seeing an old friend for the first time in years, moving into a large house on the beach), and I spend the rest of the day wishing it was real and wondering what I can do to return to that dream world.

So, do they have a purpose? Are they put in place as a reality check?

At their core, dreams can serve several functions. Some theories suggest that dreams help us process emotions and experiences from our real lives. During sleep, our brains sift through memories, filtering out what it deems as trivial and reinforcing what it deems important. This “cleaning up” inside our brains can lead to seemingly out-of-nowhere revelations about our feelings, fears, and desires, offering insights that might evade us during our waking lives.

I consider dreams during which terrible or stressful things happen, related to my appearance, my studies, my relationships, which are most likely induced by anxiety in my waking life. In a recent vivid dream, I stood in front of a bathroom mirror, removed my retainer, and discovered that my teeth had crumbled to pieces inside it. In my waking life, I had recently begun to re-adjust to my old retainer, which I feared might damage my teeth if they had moved out of place too much.

This makes me wonder, how simple and directly-correlated are our dreams? Did I have the crumbling teeth dream as a direct result of worrying that wearing my too-tight retainer might damage my teeth? This would be almost an exact parallel of my real life. Or is there a deeper meaning, such as an all-consuming stress or anxiety I was under.

Dreams are not solely a reflection of our fears; they can also be a canvas for our creativity. I’ve dreamt of outfits that don’t exist, or of being in stores in which the clothing is all exactly my style and fits me perfectly (these are hard to wake up from ). I’ve had dreams of paintings I’ve never seen before, which have in turn directed my creative process on a painting in real life.

Dreams, though mystifying and fantastical, can remind us of our humanity in an unexpected way, weaving together our experiences, emotions, fears, and desires into an imaginative storyline. They are a testament to the creativity and complexity of the mind. So, even as I drift off into the strangest of dreams, I appreciate all of the meaning and nuance behind it, even if I wake up mystified.