We all dream.
Whether we are conscious or not, dreams creep into our subconscious while we sleep.
And sometimes, when we wake up, we find it difficult to discern if it was a dream or something real.
Matthew Walker, neuroscientist and author of the book
"Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams"
, ensures that people experience our most vivid or lucid dreams during the REM stage of sleep, so it makes perfect sense that sometimes we can wake up feeling confused about whether or not a dream has been real.
The father of psychoanalysis and the interpretation of dreams, Sigmund Freud, has already explored dreams as an enormous expression of the subconscious world, whose fundamental motivation for this activity is nothing more than the fulfillment of our repressed instincts and desires, that is, attempts of our own. subconscious to solve and satisfy everything that we have not consciously carried out.
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"Dreams are the first link in a series of psychic formations (...) their value is more theoretical than practical and they can help us to explain the genesis of phobias, neuroses and obsessive ideas (...) Each dream reveals itself as a formation full of meaning to which a precise place can be assigned in conscious activity ”.
And now, among the most recent theories and research, attempts are being made to clarify how dreams train our brain and prepare us for different situations that may occur to us awake and even in the future. This is what a recent study published in the scientific journal
ScientDaily
and published by neuroscientists from the
American Academy of Sleep Medicine
(AASM), where they have discovered how dreams are the result of a process that combines fragments of multiple life experiences and anticipates events futures. The results of the study have shown that up to 53.5% of dreams were traced back to the person's childhood memories, and that almost 50% of those memories were connected to many of their past experiences.
The meanings of dreaming about your childhood
For Erin Wamsley, lead author of the study and professor of neuroscience at Furman University in Greenville, dreams reflect a function of memory processing.
"Although it has long been known that dreams incorporate fragments of past experience, our results suggest that dreams also anticipate probable future events," he says.
Research has also detected that 25.7% of dreams were related to imminent or future events, and that 37.4% of those future dreams were closely related to the experiences we have as children. So if a person has had a bad childhood, can he in the future relive that bad experience in his dreams? Or, the human being may have the overwhelming desire to solve certain painful, embarrassing or threatening childhood events, and that today he would solve in a better way, without shame or pain, or that he thinks Why didn't I act of this or that shape?
Dreaming of summers when we were children, for example, and the first events we experienced can be reflected in our dreams in a different setting, but similar, and this is a way of recognizing that there is something in our present that can be familiar to then. Lauri Loewenberg, dream analyst, researcher, and member of the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD), explains that the subconscious borrows things from our past and incorporates them into our dreams. "Many times there is a lesson that we learned then, or that we still have something to learn more from it, and that we have to remember now to continue healing," he says.
In addition, and according to the clinical psychologist Javier Barreiro, director of Barreiro Psychology, dreams act on our emotional structure “Sleep helps us learn to manage emotions, even if the dream is not coherent in itself, that is why emotions such as sadness appear, anger, fear, frustration, etc… ”, he explains, so our emotions come into play throughout the dreaming process.
Neuropsychologist Erin Wasley adds that dreams are based on sources from our real life, but that they use fragments of our past life to construct novel scenarios, and that they can anticipate future events.
You just have to know how to decipher them well.
"Future-oriented dreams are driven by temporal proximity to our next experiences, but it is true that these dreams do not realistically represent the future either, but rather an activation and combination of relevant memory fragments, to be used for the future and that fulfill an adaptive function ”, he continues.
The childhood traumas, passions, and old friends that appear in your dreams
Having an unresolved trauma resulting from a complicated childhood eventually reappears in some way in your dreams. "If you suffered abuse or neglect during childhood, and you relive those experiences in dreams, your subconscious may be showing you that a part of you still lives in the past," argues Lauri Loewenberg.
Dreams can also offer the opportunity to test different responses to past events, so you can even simulate threatening events, to develop skills to prevent those threats, because, in the end, your first passions, and those childhood friends mark you. without intending it and, somehow, they continue to be present in your mind. "But, if you are dreaming of the same trauma over and over again, you may not have received the help you need to process and overcome childhood trauma or pain," adds Loewenberg.
This sleep expert also points out that dreaming about your childhood could also mean that you may be acting childish in some area of your life right now.
"In these cases, your subconscious may want you to make an adult decision, and along the same lines, dreaming of being a child could represent inexperience in certain situations," he points out.
Your inner child may want to go out and play
Apart from all the above, sometimes, dreaming about our childhood can indicate a longing to understand your inner child, and to know who you were in your childhood through what your dream means.
Maybe there is a part of you that still yearns to be a kid, have fun, and escape adult responsibilities, making it a desire to go back to those times when everything was easier and simpler.
Lauri Loewenberg says that if you are raising your own children, you might be more aware of the importance of remembering a child's perspective.
“Also, if you dream of your childhood home, it means that, somehow, we still live there even though we are already our own current adult self, and with this, we must bear in mind that the dream is not about the house itself, but rather who you were when you lived there or what your life was like there, so you may have to review in your real life some situation in which you need to grow and handle it as an adult ”, he explains.
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