What Is A Dream?

Dreams are something everyone experiences whether it’s during our deep sleep at night, or dozing off during the day. Dreams can be scary to the point of waking us up in the middle of the night, or dreams can be so good it’s hard to wake up in the morning. What exactly is a dream? What exactly are we experiencing when we fall asleep? Dreams seem so normal, but are they really? Oranges start raining from the sky so I quickly run into my cookie house where my dog greets me with a cup of lemon juice; this seems like such a normal event while dreaming, but is it really all that normal? What throughout our day caused us to think up this random story? Most people wonder if something they dreamed about reveals new things about their life. “A psychologist,

In ancient times when they were just starting to explore dreams the main thought was that dreams were caused by spiritual or demonic powers. A famous philosopher, Sigmund Freud, “theorized that dreams represented an outlet for suppressed wishes” (Darby 132). The old philosopher “Aristotle asserts that the dream is of demonical, though not of divine nature, which indeed contains deep meaning, if it to be correctly interpreted” (Freud 2). According to the University of Santa Cruz, a dream is defined as a form of thinking when there is a certain minimal level of brain activity, as an experience, and as a memory. Dreams are a “form of thinking because it all happens within our brain, they are an experience because to us it feels very real, and dreams are a memory because when we stop dreaming we can still sometime remember it” (Dreams: FAQ). On the other hand Ernst Hartmann says that dreaming is a process of making connections; it makes connections in what I shall call the ‘nets of the mind’(3). In the big picture a dream is something everyone experiences “either during REM (rapid eye movement) stage of sleep or within the couple of hours right before we wake up” (Dreams: FAQ) it can even be mid-day while we’re just dozing