One Wednesday morning back in high school, Darlene, my roommate, woke up distressed. When I asked her what was wrong, she said, “I had a nightmare. I dreamt that my older sister was getting married, and it was a joyful event,” she said, adding quickly that her sister was in fact married and that she had attended her wedding. I was confused and asked how a happy wedding was a nightmare. She responded, irritated I may add, “You don’t understand anything, Jade. Dreaming of a wedding predicts the death of a loved one.” This is just one of the many interpretations or meanings of dreams that exist around the world. Despite the differences, one thing is for sure, people attach some sort of significance to dreams. Dreams are a series of thoughts, images, and sensations occurring in a person’s mind during sleep, according to Oxford Dictionary. Dreams, therefore, have won the merit of mystery as long as man has lived (throughout human history). Religious beliefs Pastor Augustin is known by his congregation to interpret dreams. He believes dreams are a form of communication from a divine power to people. They can be an alert for danger, a promise of fortune or a revelation of the future. “Dreams are not just dreams with no meaning. I personally have revelations and it is my most sacred way of communicating with the Holy Spirit,” he says. Some believers of different religions, like Pastor Augustin, are of the same view. Some add that dreams could also be a manifestation of the devil’s power. Which is why some dreams are referred to as ‘nightmares’, which is a very frightening or dreadful dream. It is, hence, believed that the devil can haunt one in a dream. Why do we dream? On the cause of dreams, Freud Sigmund, an Austrian neurologist and the founder of Psychoanalysis, suggests in his theory that dreams are influenced by events occurring in the last 24 hours. It is said that the unconscious part of the brain is responsible for one’s dreams. Besides, there are times we dream and we can’t seem to recall what the dream was the next day, yet other times we remember. Researchers refer to those we remember as ‘manifest content’ and those we forget as ‘latent content’. In an interview with Healthline, Dr Sujay Kasangra, a health expert, says that dreams occur when our brains are processing information, eliminating the unnecessary and importing the important short-term memories to long-term memories. Hence, the ability to recall dreams depends on the ability to memorise things in general. Also according to a study by Stanford University, we only dream of faces we have seen in person, pictures, or TV. All these affirm that dreams do not occur randomly. Freud, in his theory, also suggests that there are three types of dreams; intelligible dreams, which are clear and easily understood in the context of our lives; bewildering dreams, which are also clear but not relatable in the context of our lives; and disconnected dreams which are the confusing and meaningless dreams. There is also another type– ‘wet dreams’— which is when a male person dreams of engaging in sexual activities and ejaculates in real time as he sleeps. It was popularly known to happen to the male gender only, though Dr Alfred Kinsey, a sexuality researcher, found that nearly forty per cent of the women he interviewed experienced at least one wet dream. Also a study published in the Journal of Sex Research in 1986 found that 85 per cent of the women who had experienced wet dreams had done so around the age of 21. Popular misconceptions about dreams, for example, dreaming of your death, some believe means you will die soon; despite the fact that this actually scares people once they dream of their own mortality, there’s no scientific proof that shows that one actually dies shortly after they dream of their own death. In fact there’s not yet a definitive reason to why people dream, but in the meantime, we could avoid dwelling on negativity trying to interpret the mystery, our dreams.
