(Written at about 2am, no sleep yet...hahahaha! It would have been posted earlier but the internet connections aren't cooperating. Boo!)
I just read the article Dreams: Night School a while ago. It offered an interesting point on why we dream.
From the title of the article, dreaming is a form of "night school." We are able to rehearse difficult to life-threatening situations before possibly experiencing it in real life. This agrees with the fact that we don't only need physical preparation but mental preparation as well. It doesn't seem like much practice since we forget some of the other dreams.
This idea really shifted my perspective on nightmares. It makes so much sense since dreams seem and really feel real. Sometimes, they seem so real that I wake up just to get myself disappointed, hoping the dream was real.
"Anyone who's ever played too much Tetris knows you can start having Tetris dreams."I'm guilty of that! Hahaha! So why people dream about vampires, zombies, Tetris blocks and all these imaginary stuff? We practice! It's just that we get them with what is real. Hahahahaha!
Hooray to the uncensored vividness that makes little to no sense at all! Bwahahahaha!"Dreaming is a sensitive system that tries to pay much attention to the threatening cues in our environment," Revonsuo concludes. "Their function is to protect and prepare us."
"Yes," says Harvard's Barrett, "dreams are worrying about disasters. But they're also planning for nice things and they're fantasizing and they're problem solving."
She contends that the purpose of dreaming is "as broad as all waking thought. That's why I say dreams are really just thinking in a different biochemical state."
