The Science of Dreams

By Cole Haeska
Dreams have always been a wonder and a beauty to people, where our
imagination runs wild and whatever you want, or wish for, becomes reality; even if
for a few seconds. What do dreams mean? Do they have any real meaning or
purpose? What of symbolism? Many believe that things in their dream actually
mean something, but first, we need to look into what a dream is.
There is a lot of fable and fantasy behind dreams, but dreams are a very
unique and weird topic in psychology. Wind Goodfriend, Associate Professor of
Psychology at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake Iowa says, A dream is a
memory of a sensory perception experience that occurs in sleep. Meaning that
dreams are a play on your main senses during the later stages of sleep. When a
person sleeps, they enter five stages of sleep, and where most dreams occur is REM
sleep, rapid eye movement; also, dreams can take place in stages three and four of
the sleep cycle.
There is a wide spread belief that in any given night, a person could have
thousands upon thousands of dreams in split seconds all throughout the REM sleep
stage. The timeline of a dream correlates to the actual time one would be in REM
sleep. Says professor Goodfriend, so this only seems to prove that theory false. And
that is only one example upon many others about dream theories. Another wildly
popular dream theory is that the things you dream about all have symbols that
connect to everyone else, professor Goodfriend states. If a roller skating bear is in
my dream, and I relate it to everyone else, it could mean Im afraid of death We
believe, in psychology, that dreams are analyzable but not in a universally common
sense.
There is actually a large amount of resources out
there that let you type in a word or an object/person that
you dream about and it will interpret what it means to
your real life. And almost every website has their own
interpretation so there is no real way to see which one is
true and which one isnt. For example, I looked up
Batman and Spiderman and both said that I was missing
something important in my life and I needed to pull
together my inner strength to overcome my problem
Honestly I just thought I was being cool shooting webs
and beating up the Joker. Then I decided to do something
more serious and search up a Lake, because I live really
close to a lake. What I was told was lakes are a place of
serenity and peace, but also shows a lack of a dreamers
emotional output so I couldnt decide if I was a monk or scene kid.
Dreams are also proven to relate heavily on mental and physical health. If I
was to have recurring nightmares, or bad dreams, it could mean that I suffer from
heavy anxiety attacks or some traumatic experience that I never resolved or grew
out of, The contents of a dream may indicate certain levels of mental health. Says
Goodfriend. Sleep deprivation also limits one from dreaming, because the body must

catch up on its sleep rather than dreaming, which is also a reflection of mental
health.
Dreams, as much of a mystery they are, or how much we dont know about
them, they are a wonderful enigma that is a personal reflection of who we are and
dives deep into our psyche and hidden thoughts and memories inside of our brain.
It is nothing that we can fully understand, but a way to interpret who we are as a
person.