You may have wondered why your brain doesn’t simply rest at night, as your body does, but instead sets to work creating an artificial world that seems as real as waking life. Sometimes you cannot recall your dreams with any greater frequency than most people you know, but you’re intrigued by the ones you do remember and curious about what - if anything - they mean. There is no matter whether you remember or not your dreams - they could definitely affect your life. That is why dreams are more than random fragments spun from your waking life. Pay them proper respect and they will reward you with a greater understanding of yourself and your world as you see it. Our site team will help you to achieve this.

Often you awaken with no memory of dreaming at all, but sometimes, your experiences in that part of your life are so vivid that your mood for the day is colored by them. Your dreams of flying come only two or three times a year but they are exhilarating. Making more frequent appearances in your night life, though, are the classic anxiety dreams in which you show up to take an exam for a course you’ve never attended or you arrive at a party and belatedly realize you’re missing vital pieces of clothing. Then there are the out-of-control dreams, in which you’re driving a car that loses its brakes or its steering just as you start down a steep, winding hill, or the pursuit dreams, where you’re being chased by some dangerous person or creature. The common thread is that all of the dreams feel utterly real, from the visual details down to the emotions they trigger.

In discussing dreams with friends, you have found that the themes in your dreams seem to be quite common, as is your curiosity about them. The late physicist Richard Feynman has posed many of the questions about dreaming which one might have. Like Feynman, you may be intensely curious about why images in dreams looked so real and how they could feel so much like waking life. Your terror when you periodically dream of your children falling from a cliff or out a window is so physiologically real that you wake with your heart racing. Mulling over the mystery of what happens to our stream of consciousness when sleep descends, Feynman zeroed in on other fascinating questions: “What happens to your ideas? You’re running along very well, you’re thinking clearly and what happens? Do they suddenly stop, or do they go more and more slowly and stop, or exactly how do you turn off thought?”

The answer is that you don’t turn off thought. It just takes a different form. Feynman lamented the fact that he was unable to find answers to his questions about dreaming because there had been so little scientific investigation of the subject. But thanks to the dream research that has unfolded in the past two decades, many of those answers are now becoming available. Several surprising explanations about why dreams look and feel so real have appeared in the last 20 years.

It is impossible for scientists to agree on something as seemingly simple as the definition of dreaming. Some define it narrowly as the creation of hallucinatory narratives complete with characters and a discernable plotline that occurs primarily during that period of rest known as rapid eye movement (REM) sleep-when, as the name suggests, you see a sleeper’s eyes darting back and forth beneath closed lids. At the other end of the spectrum are researchers who classify any mental activity that occurs during any stage of sleep as dreaming, and some even argue that dreamlike mental processes during waking states, such as meditation, should also be included in the definition. The definition of dreaming that edges toward the broader end of the spectrum best reflects the scope of knowledge that’s emerged from dream research.

So a dream can be defined as a mental experience during sleep that can be described during waking consciousness. Some dreams are relatively mundane, while others are hallucinatory masterpieces. Of course, we’re likely to be able to provide a description only if we’re awakened in the midst of a dream or immediately after it ends. But even though we don’t recall the majority of our dreams, they’re still being produced each night. And research demonstrates that they can affect the quality of our waking hours whether we remember them or not.

The mind at night is surprisingly active, you learned, and not just when it is churning out a scenario in which we’re suddenly able to fly without an airplane. Using the same neural circuitry that permits us to navigate the world during the day, the brain on its night shift performs an impressive array of important cognitive tasks. For instance, when we’re just drifting off to sleep, we experience dreamy but plotless imagery that is associated with one of the vital functions the brain performs at night: rerunning experience to extract what’s important enough to be incorporated into long-term memory, thereby updating the internal model of the world that helps guide our daytime behavior. The mind concocts the vivid cinematic mental productions that we typically think of when the word dream comes to mind. But you should also learn that the related and equally important, high-level mental activity that goes on each night entirely outside conscious awareness. Whatever happens in your mind during sleep, it has an enormous impact on who you are and how you make your way in the world.

So do begin to pay attention, to listen, and to record your dreams. In the middle of an intense changes in your waking life, your dreams will become glittering jewels strung across your confusion, leading you to somewhat new. You should consider them a special, if mysterious, gift.

We strongly believe that exactly our site will be your best leader in the world of dreams.