Saturday, March 9, 2013
Why are dreams so weird?
The topic of why we dream will be dealt with later, but I wanted to talk about why dreams are so strange. One thing that everyone I've spoken with agrees on is that there is never anything out of place in a dream. I've had dreams where I was in college but my classes were in my elementary school building. People fly all the time in their dreams and it never seems out of place. Why? Our brains developed two major functional parts - one for intuitive thinking and one for analytic thinking. The intuitive part is similar to our heart and lungs - it works all the time and takes very low energy to operate. We recognize familiar places and faces effortlessly because of this part of our brain. The analytic part of our brain has been shown to use up a great deal of energy; your head can really hurt from thinking too much. Like any organ that uses energy in spurts, it needs to rest. Because our bodies evolved to rest our large muscles' the analytic portion of our brain rests during that same period of time. With the analytic part of our brain resting, there is nothing to register nonsense, so anything goes in our dreams. When the analytic part of our brain kicks in, we wake up, realize we were dreaming, and begin the dream analysis.
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