Spare Time to Dream !

You kidding me? I know what a dream is !

Dreams could be defined as stories our brains come up with while we sleep (or when math seems too boring), having vivid imagery and real life like situations. They may be about a past experience, your crush, your aspirations and basically anything else your mind can cook up.

Though I didn't know this :

But one thing that leaves me fascinated is that, how can our brains think of such close to real experiences or stories? I mean, sometimes I’m hugely impressed by my dreams. Surely if told to come up with a story while awake, we probably couldn’t do half as good a job as we could while asleep.

The best reason I found so far is the simplest. While we are asleep, our other limbs and body parts require almost no energy. So all this extra energy is guzzled up by our brain in making dreams. So yeah, that’s probably why you were in a live action film last night.

And after doing so much work, what does our mind do? It forgets. Truth is, we remember only 5% of all dreams we’ve ever had. Only the most vivid and hard hitting dreams make it to short term memory, even fewer to long term. And the harder you try to remember your dreams the faster you forget them. If you dreamt just before waking up, then chances are you’ll remember it.

Rapid eye movement in play during a dream....creepy.eh?

Sometimes when you have an important exam to give, you’ll dream both before and after giving it. If your exam went well then you may dream that you screwed it up. But when you wake up, the reassurance you get it is something isn’t it?

Any benefits?

Ok, so are dreams in any way useful? Depends. If you have a problem which you’re desperately trying to solve, then you may actually dream up its possible solutions. The most famous example is that of Kekule. Kekule came up with a cyclic structure for benzene after dreaming of a snake biting its own tail.

And lastly, even though you’d expect it, the best way to end this article would be with the most clichéd line ever -“keep dreaming”.

By Arjun Kulshreshtha (Guest Author)