3 Ways to Make Better Sense of Your Dreams
Bruce Christiansen / Unsplash
We often wake up from our bizarre and surreal dreams dismissive of the fact that the arbitrary sequence of scenes we witnessed in our sleep last night could ever add meaning to our waking lives. Dreams tend to leave us puzzled about whether they are completely random or actually trying to tell us something.
However, recent research in the fields of sleep and dreaming has uncovered some interesting insights about the stories that visit us at night and how they might serve specific and highly specialized functions to aid our well-being and day-to-day functioning.
If a dream you have had lately left you scratching your head in confusion, here are some fascinating theories about why we dream to give you more clarity.
1. Dreams Try to Predict the Future
“Episodic future thinking,” as the phrase suggests, refers to our brain’s capacity to imagine or simulate experiences that might occur in one’s future, which has been linked to enhanced decision-making, emotional regulation, intention formation, planning, prospective memory, and even spatial navigation.
A 2021 study applied the “episodic future simulation hypothesis” to dream research, which highlighted how our mind combines various fragments of past experiences into imagined simulations of future events. Given our brains’ advanced capacity to predict patterns and probabilities, dreams can give us important emotional and situational cues that could inform our responses if any version of them were to be realized in our waking life.
The researchers found that dreams were most commonly traced back to past memories or related to specific impending future events. The future-oriented dreams would draw from multiple different “waking sources” or events that were either currently happening in their lives or had happened in the past.
Such memory fragments and future simulations are combined into the novel scenarios that we see in our dreams.
You could think of these simulations as rehearsals for an upcoming show, where you’re the director as well as the lead performer. You are planning and organizing the event, preparing for anything that might go wrong, and using your past experiences to ensure that “the main show” is a success.
When viewed through this lens, dreams seem to be just another attempt by our brain to serve its primary purpose of making sure that we are safe and well-equipped to handle difficult situations.
The art of dreams: Computer scientist Narmeen Zain teams with dreams for art
Shrike with Fruits is a work in oil on canvas.
Muhammad Yusuf, Features Writer
“I think people, places, objects are only as much obedient to their selves as we expect them to be,” says artist Narmeen Zain. She was speaking on the sidelines of the latest exhibition she was taking part in, hosted by Dubai International Art Centre at The H Dubai. “Objects don’t exist in isolation,” she adds. “The links between them are hard for me to put into words, but I know that we overlap more than we are separate. However, there’s a volatility there that I sometimes forget. When I look in a mirror, for example, my face is broken into billions of others. But it is still my face. My work relies on this enmeshment.”
Many of Zain’s paintings begin in dreams, expressed in oils and acrylics. Though bound by language, art for her is something that exists outside its bounds because it can show thoughts that lie too deep for words. She has exhibited in places as far as Dubai and Karachi, Abu Dhabi and Mumbai. She has won awards ever since she was a student in Dubai and she has been Volunteer Art Teacher at Senses Residential and Day Care for Special Needs, Dubai. She went for higher studies to the UK (in the tech field) and is currently in Dubai, where she spoke to Gulf Today
Does your engineering side – you are a computer scientist – interfere with your work as an artist or does it help the aesthetics?
I find that the skills required for different fields can often be laterally applicable. Any kind of problem solving demands some measure of creativity, but programming is especially comparable to art in that it is also a form of creation. To answer your question, I don’t think being proficient in another discipline could ever really be harmful. It just gives me a different way to see the world. In this sense it affects my art, because it affects me. My work is the way it is because of who I am.
Man with Harmonica, an acrylic on canvas composition.
There seems to be Dali, Picasso and Van Gogh in your works. Will you agree?
As a child first learning to paint, coming across these artists was unavoidable. I will admit that I was struck by Dali’s concepts, by Picasso’s boldness and by the tenderness I saw in Van Gogh’s works. It seems inevitable now that parts of them have leaked into my own process. If you see them there, I am grateful. But it was not necessarily an intentional choice!
You use colour profoundly. Why are your artworks saturated with colour?
Colours are not just colours. They carry the weight of all their connotations and are just as essential an element as the subject. They evoke emotion. They continue the story. The colour is there because it has to be.
Has Freud – who famously interpreted dreams – influenced your work?
Very close! I relate a little more with the Jungian interpretations of dreams. The difference is that Freud would see a dream as a covering of a hidden meaning, whereas Jung would say dreams are what uncover the unconscious. The assumption was that the personality is striving towards fulfillment and through dreams, your unconscious mind shares some element that is essential to your growth. I’m not sure how wholly I subscribe to this, but another phrase that stuck with me was Yeats’ “in dreams begin responsibilities.” Perhaps he was right.
The science of dreams and nightmares: What is going on in our brains while we’re sleeping?
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