Dreams

A couple weeks ago, I awoke suddenly in the midst of a daunting nightmare–a combination of my biggest fears. My body was physically responding as though everything in the dream had actually happened; my heart felt as though it was desperately trying escape from my chest, and I was on the brink of tears.

Despite traumatizing experiences like this, I love dreaming. Some people rarely remember having dreams. Others remember having them often-I am one of those people. And my dreams are weird. They’re a menagerie of plots, locations, and people. The person I passed by on the street the other day, my preschool teacher, and someone I don’t recall ever meeting all make guest appearances. They reach a level of complexity that I have a hard time comprehending when I am awake yet somehow understand perfectly when I am asleep.

I’ve always been fascinated by dreams. They aren’t fully understood in the scientific world, and there are many fascinating questions that remain unanswered. Here are some of mine:

Why do we remember some dreams but not others?

Although we don’t always remember our dreams, we actually have them at least four to six times every night! I often recall my most recent dreams, but there are a few dreams that I had more than ten years ago that I still vividly remember. I remember an old dream in which my neighbor’s house across the street turned out to be a gigantic industrial cake factory, and I had to fight a battle against killer robots in it. And I still recall a dream I had when I was five years old, one of the scariest dreams I’ve ever had. In it, an evil witch disguised herself as my mom, and I had to figure out how to determine which one was my real mom. Terrifying. There are other dreams that I vaguely recall pieces of information or blurred images from, but some are simply unforgettable for whatever reason. Perhaps what made them memorable was that they were nightmares?

Why can we have the same dream twice?

There are a few seemingly arbitrary dreams that I’ve had multiple times. I would not be able to recall the structure of any of the history flowcharts we learned sophomore year if you asked me to. So how can I remember a dream I had years before, and have the same, frame-by-frame identical one again? How and where does your brain store that information? If you’ve seen Inside Out–which I think does a fabulous job of visually representing how the mind organizes memories–I imagine the glowing memory marbles in the movie as dreams, stored on a shelf in your brain somewhere.

Are dreams related to déja vu?

Sometimes, I’ll experience a seemingly mundane moment and will be suddenly hit with the feeling that it had happened before, which is a puzzling and spooky feeling. I try to explain it by telling myself that what I saw or what happened felt familiar because I had experienced it in a dream.

Let me know what you think! Have you had any similar or interesting dream-related experiences or questions?