Albright

The last couple of nights have been very quiet on the dream front.  Either I haven't been dreaming much or the dreams have been so shallow I can't remember them by the time I'm awake enough to remember to remember.  I don't know whether it's the phase of the moon (new) or what.  A couple of fragments:  Night before last I was looking for something in the unruly pile of papers on my desk.  Last night I remember there were a pair of twins named Albright, each sailing their own single-handed yacht in support of a different cause.

Last evening (while awake), a group of us got to talking about dreams.  JB said that his most vivid dream memory was of a dream about dreaming.  In this dream it was revealed to him why we dream.  He seems to have accepted the dreams explanation as the truth.  Unfortunately, his explanation to the group wasn't articulate enough to persuade me, at least, that his was a true revelation.  I'm sure his vision in the dream was clear, but conveying these visions in words with the same force they have in the dream is no trivial task. 

The explanation for dreams that was revealed to him was that dreams are caused by some active part of the brain sending out random bursts of signals to prepare surrounding parts of the brain that are inactive to start doing processing.  At least that's what I understood him to say.  But the gist of what he was saying, and I thought he believed it, was that most dreams are random and that we shouldn't try to read too much into them.   Then, however, we started to talk about nightmares.  His wife described a recurrent nightmare she had had as a child whenever she was sick.

If I had to give an objective explanation for dreams, mine would probably not be that different from JB's.  I believe that dreams are our experience of the brain strengthening its associative connections.  As I understand it, there have been studies of sleep that show that REM sleep is important to learning, and that people awoken from REM sleep are much more likely to report having been dreaming.

Still, one thing I am coming to feel, at least partially as a result of keeping this blog, is that dreams are a mysterious and wonderful gift of experience.  When they are vivid, they seem every bit as real as waking life.  To ignore them, to write them off as unimportant - as just random - is I think to waste a wonderful part of life in this world.

Comments

[SENILI]

can you given of an example and explanation that briefly describe the meaning of dreams or you can given some information about the differents dreams.