What Causes Dreams?

Did you ever wonder what causes dreams? Dreams are an interesting phenomenon, and the topic of much debate. Do dreams reveal hidden desires, or are they merely a conglomerate of random thoughts? What is the purpose of dreaming, and does it provide some type of psychological benefit to us? There are many questions to consider about dreams, but first we must understand the cause behind them.

Dreams are a series of images, emotions, sounds, or thoughts that occur during a specific portion of when you sleep. Your sleep is divided into two main blocks: rapid eye movement sleep (known as REM), and non rapid eye movement sleep (Non-REM). Dreams almost always only occur during REM sleep.


REM Sleep

REM sleep is only a small part of your sleep, usually taking up only about twenty percent of our overall sleep. Your sleep cycle is broken up into different stages—the first four stages are Non-REM and include your deep sleep stages, and the last stage is REM sleep.

During any given night, you will usually go through the sleep cycle at least three or four times, which means that you will have three or four periods of REM sleep. For example, if you sleep for about seven hours, you will have a little over an hour of REM sleep.

During REM sleep, your breathing is irregular and your heart rate is irregular as well. During Non-REM sleep, your breathing and heart rate is much more regular and much slower. Although scientists still aren’t exactly sure what causes dreams, it’s clear that REM sleep is very important to human beings


Theories on Why Dreams Occur

Even though there’s agreement about what causes dreams, there have been a lot of different theories about the topic. The physiological theory about why dreams occur, for example, is that dreams replace the functioning of transmitting messages that ceases because our brain is not active during sleep.


Psychological Theories About Dreams

Famous psychologist, Alfred Adler, believed that dreams were a problem solving device. The problems and questions that individuals were confronted with in their daily lives presented themselves again during sleep, and individuals continued to try to solve them

In fact, Sigmund Freud proposed that dreams were a combination of our daily activities, and suppressed wishes. In fact, Freud felt that dreams were the key to understanding our subconscious thoughts and desires.



More thoughts

Dreams come from memories in your mind (usually memories from the past three days). Your brain mixes up the memories and comes up with a dream.

Dreams are accumulation of events that have happened in life. It is the subconscious way of possible warning the dreamer of anxieties or as a way to relieve the anxieties. For some people, writing their thoughts out on paper makes them feel better about stress, issues, or events that have happened. This coping is related to the dreaming processes in that the subconscious of the person needs to "sort out" these things as well - thus causes dreams.