Thursday, June 11, 2015

Dream On

It's funny it took me this long to get to this topic. Dreams. A couple days ago, I watched the movie Inception. Fantastic film. Christopher Nolan, thank you. Just thank you. You're amazing. The movie incorporated things so natural to us, you didn't even think about it. One such thing was the "kick" or the feeling of falling that helps you wake up. In the movie, *spoiler alert* if you get killed in a dream (i.e. shot through the head), then you wake up. I don't know about you, but for me, personally, it's not just when I am dead in a dream that I wake up. I usually wake up right as it hits the climax. Just as the action starts picking up and becoming terrifyingly real. My eyes shoot open, I grasp my pillows to make sure I'm on the bed and not the floor. I try to recall what happened last that made me wake up, but it comes to me in fragments like a book with words blurred by the rain. Now I can't stop asking myself, why do we forget?  Yet, somehow dreams remain one of the most intimate creations of the human mind. So with any question, I asked Google.

Scientific American says," Due to a lack of a hormone-norepinephrine- which helps enhance memory in humans in the cerebral cortex, a brain region that plays a key role in memory, thought, language and consciousness." But that is not a just enough explanation, so they go on to say that humans forget their dreams because it is in the "less consciously directed thinking" side of the cerebral cortex where the memory becomes foggy. 

Amy E. Brucker founder of Dream Tribe has a different theory however. She believes we forget our dreams for a whole host of reasons. The ones that stood out to me were "disinterest in dreams" apparently if you don't try to pay attention during your dreams you can't recall them. Another is "dreams are weird". This one elaborates that because dreams are so unique compared to our day-to-day lives we really have no ways of explaining it. To check other reasons why we forget our dreams, click on the link.

Here are the basics on how to better remember your dreams in a short video.                           Sweet dreams, everyone!



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