dreams

We spend 1/3 of our lives sleeping. In a lifetime, an average person spends more than six years dreaming.. I've always been someone who has very vivid dreams almost every night. Sometimes they tie in very much with reality.. about something that's already happened or will be happening, and sometimes they are completely strange and surreal.

Until today, no one knows why people dream and how it actually works. But some scientists believe dreaming is a way the body stores away memories for future use. A study at Harvard medical school was made, which was carried out on a group of amnesiacs and a group of volunteers. Throughout the study, the two groups were given computer games to play with. The results showed that the amnesiacs dreamt of Tetris, even when they don't actually remember playing it. The next day, they were asked to play Tetris again. They couldn't recall ever playing this game and unlike the other control group, their skills did not improve. Dr Robert Stickgold, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, who conducted the research, said he believed that the brain used dreams as a way of filing away memories from the previous day.



When dreams seemed weird, it could be because the brain was trying to cross-reference new against old memories. Joe Griffin, author of "Dreaming Reality" says "dreams are nature's way of dissolving any emotional arousal left in our brains before we go to sleep... The reasons dreams are so hard to explain is that the dream switches off the arousal, so that the emotion it is based on becomes tucked away at the back of your mind.. That's why you can't work it out in the morning - the whole purpose of the dream is to make you forget that emotion."

Joe also adds: "The original concern that caused a dream might not be immediately obvious because it will have been translated using appropriate metaphors drawn from our own memories. This is why, even if you sense a dream is about a particular person, they won't appear like they do in real life. They will be metaphorically translated into someone or even something else, or a distorted version of themselves. Michael Schumacher, for instance, might appear as a grand prix car."