TED KOCAELİ COLLEGE / 8-B
Dreams
126
Naz Aleyna AYDIN
Before we fall asleep , our brain neurons are awake and active . However , when we start to fall asleep , our neurons slow down . After a few hours the neurons are awake again , but we aren ’ t . This is called REM sleep . This is how we dream . Our dreams are actually very short but they seem longer to us . We can see seven to nine dreams every night . Nevertheless , sometimes we only remember one , sometimes we remember none . Moreover , our dreams sometimes can be irrational and bizarre . The reason why our dreams are mostly unreasonable and strange is that the reasoning part of our brain is not as active as the emotional part of our brain while sleeping .
Apart from these , many neuroscientists also claim that REM sleep helps us to learn . Thus , they carried out an experiment . They prepared a maze and they found a group of people who wanted to take part in the experiment . The scientists wanted half of them to try to solve the maze while the other half were told to take a nap . During the nap , they would dream about the maze and other ways to solve it . They could see a lot of different possibilities to solve the maze . When they woke up , the people who slept completed the maze better than the other group . Scientists also did a similar experiment in lab using the rats which were actually inside the maze . The rats would try to find their way through the maze , creating patterns similar to a map in their heads . It took a map in the maze and continued finishing it with the ‘ map ’ it had created .
Besides this , in 1933 during the holocaust , all of the books about dreams and studies were burned in Nazi bonfires . A German woman Charlotte Beradt collected dreams illegally . She would ask her neighbours and other people about the dreams they had . The dreams were about corpses , murder , and the safe walls of their houses vanishing . Their dreams were linked to the trauma and the hard times that they were going through . She realized that dreams weren ’ t irrelevant .
We can understand that our dreams can reflect our daily life and what we experience . Sometimes we don ’ t understand our dreams but they always have meanings even if they aren ’ t rational .