The last couple days I've been acting all hinky about the surgery mostly. Yesterday, I slept a lot of the day, blogged my heart out, then napped again and went to bed right after Desperate Housewives. Pan Am looked boring last night, because my head wasn't in it.
Then I was plagued with all kinds of crazy dreams which left me very unsettled this morning. One of the dreams I remember vividly was someone stuck me in either a nursing home or psyche ward on the beach over looking the water and sun and someone kept taking my special DVD movie (I don't know what the movie was) and I done a lot of crying because no one left a forwarding address or phone number, except my parents, and I called them trying to get in contact with my kids and they were very evasive about the information they were giving me. I was begging and pleading and I was calling other numbers that I remembered and no matter how hard I tried to type the number in correctly, I kept making mistakes, and never could finish the number. Was my head programmed to not dial certain peoples numbers? Was I just plain crazy? What the hell was wrong with me? How did I even get into that place, in my dream I just woke up there. When I woke up for REAL, my face and eyes were sore from crying but my cheeks were dry and my body was sore too. What, did I run a marathon while I was dreaming.... geez!!!??????!!!!!!!
I know dreams can be bewildering, terrifying, inspiring, but do they mean anything? Are dreams the nonsensical byproduct of a sleeping brain or a window into our unconscious mind, rich with revelations? Why would Mother Nature highly activate our brain, paralyze our body, sexually activate us and force us to watch these things we call dreams? Why? Why would Mother Nature do that? Our dreams combine verbal, visual and emotional stimuli into a sometimes broken, nonsensical but often entertaining story line. We can sometimes even solve problems in our sleep. Or can we? Hmmm, many experts disagree on exactly what the purpose of our dreams might be. Are they strictly random brain impulses, or are our brains actually working through issues from our daily life while we sleep -- as a sort of coping mechanism? Should we even bother to interpret our dreams? Many say yes, that we have a great deal to learn from our dreams.
So it got me thinking, what the hell are dreams? What do they really mean? and Why do we even have them? I have my personal theory's, like we are purging our minds of unwanted clutter, we are refiling our events in our mind (thinking like a computer it would be defragging) or they are some of our worst fears being sent out forth to guide us and to warn us?
I'm going to write about this right now and try to work out my anxiety about this dream and what it means. I don't dream every night like I used to with my old meds, but the rare dreams I do have leave such a profound effect on me.
Matthew Wilson of MIT says "Dreaming is a process, and not only is it useful, it might be essential for making sense of the world. Dreams have been responsible for two Nobel prizes, the invention of a couple of major drugs, and innumerable novels, films and works of visual art."
The scientist most associated with dreams is still Sigmund Freud, who saw them as brimming with symbols, mostly sexual. Such symbols took form as the sleeping brain tried to disguise forbidden urges welling up from its unconscious, though even Freud cautioned that this kind of thinking could be taken too far. Again, Sigmund Freud, you bastard, you highly intelligent mother fucking bastard!!!!
I just found out why I ache when I vividly dream. Patrick McNamara says that "when our eyes are closed, our head has drooped, we don't answer when we're called by name. That is when we are clearly asleep but the electrical activity of the brain says we're awake. And it wasn't just our brainwaves that seemed strange. We were sexually aroused. Our heart rates and breathing became irregular. Our eyes dart about beneath shut lids. It is these eye movements that gave the state its name: Rapid Eye Movement, or REM sleep."
But what was REM sleep for? The answer seemed to come from the sleepers themselves. During REM sleep, what the researchers at NOVA invariably found, when people woke up a subject, the subject would report, "Hey I'm dreaming, and I just had a vivid dream." So was REM sleep dream sleep? The idea seemed more than plausible when you considered REM's most dramatic characteristic says Patrick McNamara. Another feature of REM sleep is that our muscle tone just goes absolutely down to zero. We become functionally paralyzed. If we are sitting up in a chair watching TV, and the head nods and falls forward and we fall asleep, that's not REM sleep. If we fall into REM sleep, we would literally roll off the chair onto the floor, because our body becomes absolutely relaxed, almost paralyzed, in the sense that we can't make our muscles actually work. And it becomes absolutely calm and non-responsive. Nature, it appears, has devised a special state of paralysis to house our dreams, one in which they remained internal experiences. It was a conclusion that seemed impossible to deny, when researchers learned to switch the paralysis off. So this should tell us something crucial about the nature of the mind, because if we want to understand what makes us tick, we need to look at dreams. The above being said by Patrick McNamara!!!
"Dreams are the touchstones of our characters." - Henry David Thoreau
So I say what do we know about dreams thus far? Well, neurons play a role, we don't really dream until we are REALLY asleep, in REM mode and that we get paralyzed. So what exactly ARE dreams in easy terms. Let me describe them simply. Dreams can include any of the images, thoughts and emotions that are experienced during sleep. Dreams can be extraordinarily vivid or very vague; filled with joyful emotions or frightening imagery; focused and understandable or unclear and confusing. They are sexual in nature even if we don't have sex in them?? Which is still confusing to me, if I am sexually aroused while I dream and I am not having sex in my dream, what's the fuss all about? (Maybe for another time I'll elaborate or when I understand it more myself)
Some researchers suggest that dreams serve no real purpose, while others believe that dreaming is essential to mental, emotional and physical well-being. Ernest Hoffman, director of the Sleep Disorders Center at Newton Wellesley Hospital in Boston, Mass., suggests that "...a possible (though certainly not proven) function of a dream to be weaving new material into the memory system in a way that both reduces emotional arousal and is adaptive in helping us cope with further trauma or stressful events."
Now in MY terms why we dream, as I suggested above. Dreams are the result of our brains trying to interpret external stimuli during sleep. Our brains could be like computers using the metaphor to account for our dreams, serving to 'clean up' clutter from the mind, much like clean-up operations in a computer, refreshing the mind to prepare for the next day. We can look at dream function as a form of psychotherapy. In my theory, the dreamer is able to make connections between different thoughts and emotions in a safe environment. What do you think? That is probably a scary question to post here as many people have different theories on dreams and their purposes. These are just mine.
I suppose that instead of fighting my dreams or fearing them, I will bring my proverbial bowl of popcorn to bed with me and enjoy the show. If I learn something, great, if I don't, that's just fine too. At least Freddie Krueger isn't here. So I might as well enjoy them!
Anya
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