Why do we sleep? And what about dreaming?

Author: Say Buzz. Category: Mad Science

Describing what the dreams are is incredibly difficult. The literature about it is really a lot and making a critics on Freud or other great personalities that tried to interpretate dreams is not the point of this article.

As Mad Science here i just want to give an idea about the “need of sleeping” and a point of view of what dreams represent as menthal activity.

Eight hours more or less a day. We spend in one year about 122 days sleeping, which means that in a ordinary life of 80 years, we spend almost 26 years sleeping. Can we accept this without thinking? For our body to sleep is like going in a standby state. The methabolism reaches a basal energetic consume and the body needs to lie and to not move. Thus sleeping is a resting period, that extraordinary goes with the night hours of the day, it is in connection with the circadian rhythm, so with the cicle of light that amazingly fits with a specific hormonal state regulated by the brain. The reason of sleeping is that the body needs time for a methabolic recharge. So the inactivity present during the sleep period is incredibly necessary for us to be able to live during the awake phase. Let’s say that we couldn’t live without sleeping.

In this standby period what really happens in our mind is also related to changes in the mental activity of the brain. Both in REM and NREM sleep, all perceptions coming from the outside have not the same impact than those during the awake phase.

For example just closing the eyes during the sleep means that the all activity of seeing is dicreased. So in the same way perceptions give less stimuli to the honiric thought, and the thought itself is not controlled by the rationality. So in this way other parts of our mind can be expressed.

Those can be strong sensations or they can be ancestral memories we have stored deeply in our mind and they take place during the uncontrolled menthal activity we’ve got basicly during REM sleep. In this way, dreams can have physiological role and as mental activity, they can also influence the awakeness and consequently our behaviours. Deciding something important after waking up I think it is not casual.

During the sleep there is a kind of fragmented thought that in a way methabolises what we have lived during the awakeness mixing it with memories of experiences of an intire life. Inside this, so deep emotive states emerge in contrast to the lowering of rational control.

I’d like to say that most of our important desitions in life are taken unconsciously during the sleep. Sleeping is life as well and even if we don’t have memory of our thoughts during it, we still think, plan, feel, imagine, love, hate, or fear. All those features are in connection with the deepest emotive states and all is mixed with last useless memories we have in mind. This relation creates a network of connections between differents sides of our brain activity, and this brings to an unorganized and unrational thought that anyway expresses our being.

Personifications of feelings, distortion of the reality, enhancement of deep sensations, fake stories in unknown places, people of our life and people not existing, in other words dreams are structrured allucinations. Great fears emerge sometimes as result of a deep sufference of the ego, and it expresses in the dreams as everyone experienced as a nightmare. Crazy things happen in ourselves when we sleep, inside the honiric period, we are psychiatric allucinating patiences. While when we wake up the story completely changes. Dreams are menthal recontructions of our emotions, coming from the uncontrolled unrational imagination that many times doesn’t definitively recognize what is true from what it is not. In dreams we have the chance to express hidden sides of our mind, sometimes those we don’t know, those we fear or we refuse but anyway existing.

We can really get something of how we are and we can learn a lot about the way we behave during our “ordinary” life in a sort of autoanalysis of our dreams. So much from dreams we can comprehend ourselves.