HOW DO WE DREAM?

BY SAFWAN ZULFAZLI BIN ABDUL KADIR

A dream is basically a successions of almost everything we experience when we are awake. This includes images, sensations, emotions and ideas that happen involuntarily in our mind during different types of sleeps. There are two types of sleep which short wave sleep (SWS) and rapid eye movement (REM). During the first 90 minutes of sleeping, we will be in the SWS part of the sleep. Scientist have proven that in this part of our sleep, we have a highervoltage delta waves that are being emitted from our brain. Usually during SWS stage 2 and SWS stage 3, one will not bulge after being pushed in a sleep. This means we are sleeping but we are not dreaming. This is somehow different during REM sleep. REM sleep is basically a sleep that is deeper than SWS and it has a lower voltage of delta waves than SWS. REM sleep is also a part of sleep when we move our eyes rapidly, hence the name of the part which is Rapid Eye Movement. Our eyes move as if we are seeing a movie in our sleep. Scientist have also proven that it is during our REM sleep that we dream. A normal person dreams in REM stage 2 and stage 3. Stage 4 of REM is usually a person with coma. That is why a person with coma will have vivid hallucinations and will have very long continuous dreams. Did you know that an average human that sleep eight hours a day will have normally 1825 dreams but only remember a few of them. Apart from that fun fact, it should be known what causes dreams to be eerie or what causes it to be a happy dream. Neurologist have found out that we dream what we experience. Lets say the day after tomorrow, you have a competition that will decide your future in a working field. You are very tensed up for that competition and you feel inferior towards your rivals. That night, you will probably dream about being a small person between so many giants and you are very scared. That will cause a bad dream. A dream will also be affected by drugs and smell. There are many types of drugs which each have different chemical composition. The chemical composition of a drug that you have ingested will cause a disturbance in the chemical structure of the brain that creates the dream. This will affect the dream that is usually associated with a person even though he has experienced a bitter situation or even a fine situation. This is also true for smell. What we smell during we sleep will also affect our dream. When we smell something good, we will have a pleasant dream and vice versa. Henry David Thoreau, a famous philanthropist has once said that Dreams are the touchstones of our characters. This is quite true as dreams actually somehow makeup for whom we are now. There are two main ideas that contribute to the origin of dreams. A psychotherapist named Sigmund Freud has made a theory and that theory said that dreams happen because the it is driven by wish fulfillment and dreams happen unconsciously and has no relation to our everyday life. This is however rejected by Carl Jung who is also psychotherapist who says that dream is related to ones unconscious desires and he describes dreams as messages.

As a conclusion, dreams are a highly debated topic among scientists, neurologists, psychotherapists, and many other people as it is still a grey matter to humans as humans could not fully understand dreams and where they come from. What is known is discussed here and information that is still debatable will not be presented in this slide of discussion as it is still not known of its righteousness. Thank you.