A Student's Perspective on Dreams and REM Sleep

Dreams

I'm at a party on a Saturday night. Everyone from the senior class is there and the few juniors that hang out with us. It is the first party of the year. All my friends are gathered in Dana Mottet's beach front house. Her parents were gone for the weekend and it was the perfect opportunity for a party. Also, her twenty-one year old brother decided to help us out in the drinking department by taking a trip to the liquor store. We all sat around thinking about how it's going to be the best year of our lives. I mean, after all, we are seniors and we rule the school. All of a sudden out of nowhere my best friend and I are out in the middle of the lake in her paddleboat. I look down into the water and I see something shiny at the bottom that keeps attracting my eye. I tried to ignore it but I couldn't, as I reach into the water to try and grab the mysterious object I get pulled in. All I remember is screaming and trying to get out of the water but I couldn't, something kept pulling me back down. After frantic screaming, everything stopped and became silent. I had drowned. The sound of my alarm clock kept going off, which woke me from my sleep. I realized that I just had a very strange dream.

Most mornings, I wake up remembering that something happened. It takes me awhile to realize what I remember was a dream. Sometimes they seem so real; I don't believe it was a dream. I have always wondered why we dream. It doesn't make much sense to me for us to think about almost real-life situations in our sleep. What is a dream? Why do we have them? How do our dreams relate to real-life?

The Webster's dictionary definition of a dream is a series of thoughts or visions during sleep. However, to begin understanding what this definition means, we must first start with a thing called rapid eye movement sleep or REM sleep. This means sometime during the eight hours a person is asleep, they will spend some of the time in REM sleep, where their eyes are moving at a fast pace.