I have always wanted to know what dreams are.
Since primary school i had this crazy idea that when you sleep, you wake up (but in a different world). and this world is worped to the imagination of the dreamer. Then when they die, fall or go back to sleep, The dreamer in the other world will wake up. so you swap minds with another being in a strange world. And i thought that when you remember a dream u had. the dream was of what the "you" did in the other world. but i was in primary school then. I dont know what dreams are, but the most reasonable explaniation i think is that its just random things that you think about.

what are dreams. what are your theories?

soz if i put this thread in the wrong place, i dunno where else to put it. and sorry if a thread like this has been writen before

cool thread. dreams are your subconsious mind talking to you. yor brain wants to play with you and it does it by showing you images and taking you on adventures. think of your brain as a video game computer challenging you to do things. it's a live and other part of your brain that wants to keep you entertained. So dreams are a "natural organic movie" for you to watch and enjoy. it's a way for your brain to show you a good time.


OOBE are a whole different thing.

I would have to say that dreams are more than likely a way for your brain to process information, more than anything. Sometimes you may have a dream about something that happened during your day, then immediately after you will have a dream about something that happened 10 years ago. Somehow, the two situations were similar in a way and your brain compared the two.

This is probably the reason why something will make perfect sense in a dream but when you wake up, you're like "How does a shoelace make my MP3 player work better??????"

Brains are just weird....

Well I like your theory.

I always think of that Windows screen that says, "Saving your settings..." when you are shutting down. Sort of like sorting out all the information and getting rid of the rubbish to over simplify it just a tad. Occasionally I have a different experience which is more spiritual and I enter a different existential state, I am sure that this is not dreaming, it feels like that other world and I could be quite happy there. Sometimes I am shown things in this state, signs, since childhood I have had troubling recurring dreamlike experiences.

The first one I remember having related to airliners hitting a city, I started having this one in about 1991/2.

The second was a city falling into the sea, 1999/2000.

The third involved great storms and tornadoes, 1999/to date.

The fourth a meteor shower so intense that night becomes day, 1999/to date.

The fifth where all mechanical devices, cars, boats, aircraft and others fail and go haywire. 2006/to date.

The earliest 'dream' I had of this type, at about age 5 or 6 involved me floating up through the sky, above the clouds and on upwards until I saw a face, a face of such compelling power and stern demeanor that I immediately fell and upon waking felt myself actually impact into my bed as if I had been floating.

Go figure, all of those experiences are genuine. I don't claim that they mean anything but maybe they will be of interest to somebody.

I can tell you what I know:

Dreams organize your brain. Sort, file, and associate your learned experiences. I read this, and see no reason to dispute it. Dream deprivation also makes people go off-tilt, mentally. I've experienced this personally through experiment. Dream deprivation makes me a zombie.

Dreams can tell your conscious mind things about the body that the conscious isn't normally privy too: Such as reports from autonomic functions. Dreams are like "BIOS calls" to the inner workings in the body. Case: My dreams told me my teeth were going bad. They seemed fine. Later, they began to disintegrate due to diabetes. I was surprised to find that my dreams were warning me correctly, yet I had ignored them. :\

Dreams will show you the "future", but not every future that is shown comes to pass. I'm fairly sure I know how I will die, but not when. I've had enough events "reenact", but not all that fit the criteria of a proper "vision" have, and time has passed too far for the others to be viable.

Dreams let you communicate with loved ones. I just don't know if there's any real shared communication going on. It tends to feel rather "One-sided" on my part. I've had no way to verify this.

Dreams can be SHARED (corroborated enough to satisfy myself), and INVADED (corroborated so much I find it a game).

So what ARE they?

"The ability to bring usually unreachable data in to the waking consciousness."

Finally: The only dream experiment that I've done that holds up to the REPEATED rigors of scientific measure and scrutiny is "dream invasion". Its repeatable, and independently observable due to the sleepers reactions. But the only triggers I know are comfort and discomfort, and honestly: regardless of how cool it was to verify, the thoughts required to incite discomfort still made me feel bad.

But that doesn't mean I won't do it again. Its as if you could levitate stuff with your mind by hurting people. You'd have to keep secretly doing it to keep proving to yourself that yesterday wasn't a fluke, and that its real.

Originally posted by JimmyBlonde

The earliest 'dream' I had of this type, at about age 5 or 6 involved me floating up through the sky, above the clouds and on upwards until I saw a face, a face of such compelling power and stern demeanor that I immediately fell and upon waking felt myself actually impact into my bed as if I had been floating.
.

this falling sensation happens to me sometimes. like i have random dreams like riding and then falling off a bike, then as i hit the ground i wake up and feel a powerfull jolt that makes me reach out to stop myself from falling. then i realise it was the middle of the night and it was a dream. it used to happen alot last year but hasnt happened in a while.

as well as the above answers, dreams are pure escapism away from the stress of just trying to survive, i love dreaming im 27 years old and just had a dream that i was driving a truck that had rocket boosters on it, how immature but completely brilliant, i wish i could go back to sleep but ive got work in an hour damn it

To me a large part of dreams is that they are just your brain filing stuff away. I myself have dreamt future events, can't ever tell when they will occur until right before or as they are occuring, this is possibly just picking up the details you don't notice while awake. Some times the dream could be a future prediction that just didnt happen, have to keep in mind the future is always in motion that any number of people can have an effect on. They help you escape the rigors of the real world, IMO we are not really built to live the way do for the most part and that puts a stress on the mind.

Originally posted by missa_wiccan_chick
I like all the responses that were posted. Dreams are exactly what everyone said: At night, your brain uses dreams to not only sort the information of the day out, but it's also your subconcious telling you things

This is a good summation of the post, Missa. And I agree.

I think that the dream state is the STRONGEST LINK we currently have to metaphysical phenomenon, such as precience, and communication with other worlds.

When you are dreaming, you are balanced very precisely between the real world and some other metaphysical realm. You are like a radio antenna, picking up signals from somewhere else.

We sort information. We file. We escape. And we tune in to other worlds.

Although we know a lot about dreams, I would say we are still a very far distance from knowing near enough. In many ways, even after all the research and study, we are still pretty clueless.

(But then again, what do we really know about consciousness, either?)

Many native American tribes believed the dream world was the real world and this life was just an illusion. The only way to reach the real world while being alive was through dreams.

To me, it's just your brain processing your thoughts, completing thoughts that were stopped short earlier that you could not process before (like if something catches your attention but you get distracted and are not able to finish processing it at the time), or even prophetic.

I think dreams are just you thinking, but having no control of your thoughts.

Just like when you're thinking of something a lot before you drift off, you may end up dreaming about what you were thinking of, you just don't control where the thoughts lead.

Hence why one minute you may be playing with your dog and then all of a sudden your dog is a pirate taking you for a test drive in a new sportscar invented by your old best friend from high school who you haven't talked to in years, with the help of that guy who's name you don't know you drink with down at the pub. You could have been thinking about all those things before you went to sleep, and the voila, your brain takes over and starts MESSING WITH IT ALL. So you wake up and go, Wow, did I seriously just dream that?

I think it's the same thing as thinking about it, and imagining it, but you just have zero control over where the thoughts lead.

Sort of like your imagination is on auto-pilot, but at times it is also 4 years old, drunk and maybe just a little retarded.

To be honest, when I was a little kid the whole concept of dreams frightened me. The thought of being taken off to a whole other place that I can't control, and it could be ANYWHERE with ANYTHING or ANYONE.

Lord knows what I actually ended up dreaming about though. I probably dreamt of laying there in bed at night worried about what I was going to dream about.

Actually, I most definately dreamt of boobs. No doubt. Which just puts more weight to my theory of dreaming about the last thing that is on your mind before you drift off to sleep.

*is scientific*

The real question is, what is real? If everything we experience can be reduced to energy or a standing waveform, then dreams aren't really that different from our waking existence.

How do I even know that this is my waking existence? I've lived entire lives in dreams. I've been different people, animals, and more than I can even explain or understand. I often continue dreams. Like I'm bouncing back and forth between experiences. I've died in dreams, only to wake up in another dream, or wake up here.

Consider that our consciousness creates the brain and reality around us, rather than our brain creating consciousness. That would mean that life is an illusion and I'm not really an individual, unless I'm the only one who exists and all others are a part of me... and if that's case, in the grand scheme of things I'm really just talking to myself on this message board.

Maybe it is more fun not knowing how it all works. When you play a video game you don't want to see holes in the geometry or glitches in the game. It ruins the immersion.

Just a theory from an overly active imagination.

A few years ago my husband and I participated in a Dream Analysis Lecture/Seminar/Course...

It has always amazed me how accurate we have been in analyising people's dreams for them, be it family or friends the result is always the same...

Basically, as the body rests, the mind has full range of motion because it is not distracted by the intricacies of daily living. During sleep, the unused portions of the human brain become active. Most experiences in the dream state are filtered into dreams when your mind returns to your body before waking. Since the actual experience has no reference in space/time realities, the brain has to translate the events into stories and pictures that the conscious mind can understand....

The conscious mind uses the most recent reality experiences as a filter for the dream experience... Interpreting these experiences is what I know..

I've tried to get hubby to start analysing again, however he needs a good kick up the you know where to get motivated again... So, if anyone would like to give it a go write me your dreams.


[edit on 10/02/2008 by Paulene-abeth]

Most of the time I can put my dreams together!
For example...whatever I have thought, witnessed, listened to, smelt, watched on tv, read, within the past week all put together in some way!

It's the dreams that you cant interpret out of all of those things that usually mean a warning of something to come!