Tanmoy Deb

Master painter Salvador Dali most famous painting Persistence of Memory which showed melted clocks.

What did you dream last night? Failed in math exam, parents shouting at you? You wake up in heavy perspiration! Such scary dreams often appear during student life. As we move on in life, the type of dream changes but once in a while, we do get scary dreams. Dreams are a series of moving images, patterns, familiar or unfamiliar faces, emotions, our hidden fears, etc. The spell may last from a few seconds to even half an hour.

While we sleep, our subconscious mind continues to work on our problems, on which our conscious mind had failed. Dreams help to process complex information easily, provided the conscious mind has absorbed sufficient relevant data. Sigmund Freud, the father of Psychoanalysis, suggested that dreams that are partially drawn from stimuli and experiences in the waking world are a roadmap to the unconscious mind. Simply stated, dreams reflect unconsciously repressed conflicts and wishes.

J. Allen Hobson and Robert McCarley say that dreams are the brain’s attempt to make sense of random patterns of firing neurons(neurons are used by the brain to send or receive command or stimuli) while one is asleep(because the brain never sleeps!). So, in simple terms – these are byproducts of the brain during sleep. Barret says dreams can often lead to creative breakthroughs when they help us solve a problem that requires vivid visualisation. Dreams can help us grapple with the problems that might defy conventional wisdom.Dr Jeffrey Ellenbogen, a neurologist at Harvard Medical School and director of the Sleep Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital, also says that if an incubation period — a time in which a person leaves an idea for a while — includes sleep, people are 33% more likely to infer connections among distantly related ideas…read more on NOPR