According to Wikipedia, ‘A dream is a succession of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that usually occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. Humans spend about two hours dreaming per night, and each dream lasts around 5 – 20 minutes, although the dreamer may perceive the dream as being much longer than this.’
The purpose of our dreams has long been a topic of fascination and aroused universal interest, with various theories attempting to explain what role they play in our lives.
Dreams have often time decided the destiny of not only individuals, but nations as well. On November 12th 1972 (some accounts have it as August 4th of the same year) former Ugandan President Idi Amin, had a dream. In that dream, ‘God’ had told him to expel Asians, and he gave them only 90 days to leave the country. His dream had quickly turned into a nightmare for the Asian population.
Among the perspectives seeking to decipher the role of dreams is the view that dreams represent our unconscious desires and wishes. Sigmund Freud, often referred to as the father of Psychoanalysis, suggested that our dreams serve as a window into our deepest, often repressed desires and emotions.
How many of us have dreamt about that seemingly elusive job promotion that we wish to be granted, seeing yourself having a firm handshake with your boss and being shown into a bigger, more spacious office, only to wake up with a few minutes to spare before dashing to work?
Or dreamt about that lady/gentleman that you have forever had a crush on but never had the guts to approach?
Another posit is that dreams help the brain to process our memories and information gathered during the course of the day. With the graduation week ended, I bet the number of fresh graduates with a dream loop of their name being read out loud at Makerere University is still in the of hundreds.
Our dreams are also a natural psychotherapy, where the mind processes and resolves challenges and emotions through in a secure and protected environment.
A relatively new concept, dream manipulation seems to be gradually gaining ground in the field of neuroscience. Lucid dreaming, a phenomenon in which a person becomes consciously aware that they are dreaming, even though they are still asleep, can be induced through experimental brain stimulation, using frequencies linked to heightened consciousness, gamma waves – think of it like tuning into a radio station, the right frequency can help induce lucid dreaming.
Lucid dreams typically happen during REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, a stage where the brain is active, and similar to being awake. It is for this reason that the dreamer accepts the dreams’ strange and unrelated events as normal, and only questions them when they wake.
Stephen Laberge, an American Psychophysiologist, in his groundbreaking book on the subject, exploring the World of Lucid Dreams, proclaims that learning to lucid dreams involves training oneself to recognize the absurd parts of dreams to help one realize that they are asleep.
In the early days of lucid dream research, scientists discovered that people in REM sleep could signal to researchers that they had become lucid in their dreams. This they could do by moving their eyes in a pre-agreed on sequence, for example, from left-to-right, left-to-right repeatedly.
This is necessary because, during REM sleep, the eyes can move freely, but the rest of the body is temporally paralyzed to prevent acting out during dreams.
Lucid dreaming has a number of potential benefits, including treating chronic nightmares, notably in individuals with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
For injured men and women undergoing physiotherapy and rehabilitation, the therapy can help hasten their recovery. And even for the disabled, a notable improvement in their quality of life has been noted – individuals who cannot walk can vividly experience running in lucid dreams.
By Alfred Galandi
