Will the dream at night come true?

No, almost everyone has had dreams. Dream is a complex physiological phenomenon during sleep. Some people compare this mental activity to a drama performed on the brain stage. But the plot of this kind of drama is incoherent and sometimes chaotic. Dreamers dream that their relatives and friends are dead, and they don't feel sad; I dreamed that I was standing naked in public, but I felt no shame.

The ancients said that there were many stories described in China's ancient books. In the Tang Dynasty, Shen Jiji's "A Story in the Pillow" said that a scholar named Lu met a Taoist in a hotel. The Taoist priest gave him a pillow and he fell asleep on it. At this point, the shopkeeper had just steamed a pot of yellow rice. The scholar dreamed that he was a big official, married and had children, and enjoyed all the splendor. When I woke up, the yellow rice was not ripe. Another novel in the Tang Dynasty, The Biography of Conan's Taishou, has the same effect. The author Li Gongzuo wrote a story about a man named Chun Yuba, who dreamed that he had become a prefect of the southern branch of the Great Huai 'an Kingdom, which was very powerful at the moment. Waking up is a big dream. The so-called rhubarb fruit is just an ant nest under the old locust tree.

These two stories are only Yu Shi's works, not a scientific study of dreams, leaving only two idioms for future generations: "Daydream" and "Conan Dream". In A Dream of Red Mansions, which is known as an encyclopedia, Cao Xueqin describes Jia Baoyu's psychological and physical activities while dreaming in a dreamland. Unfortunately, due to the genre of his works, he did not study the mechanism of dreaming. There are countless famous sentences about dreams in ancient poems, such as "I don't know the guest in my dream", "If I am worried tonight, I should dream" and "Saint Zhuangzi daydreaming was bewitched by butterflies", but none of them tell us what dreams mean.

Of course. The ancients in China also had their own achievements in the study of dreams. Through observation and summary, they came to the conclusion that "thinking during the day and dreaming at night", "Southerners don't dream of camels and northerners don't dream of elephants". Although there is some scientific truth in these words, the mystery of dreams has not been uncovered because of the lack of intuitive observation and experimental analysis.

The Revelation of Dreams For thousands of years, from emperors and generals to ordinary people, many people believed that the dreamer was unlucky. Some fortune tellers who explain dreams and predict what will happen in the future are even more professional dreamers. Superstition cannot correctly explain the meaning of dreams, and this irresponsible behavior should be abandoned. However, we don't deny that sometimes dreams can inspire people. When dreams help people solve difficult problems, they show the power they usually don't have.

Once upon a time, there was a man named Hao who wanted to invent a sewing machine. It is said that one day he dreamed that he was caught by a group of savages with spears in their hands and holes in their tips. After waking up, he suddenly realized that the needle nose of the sewing machine should be placed at one end of the needle, not in the middle. Coincidentally, 1865, when Kekule studied the structural formula of benzene, he racked his brains and couldn't figure it out. After he fell asleep, he dreamed that an salamander was connected end to end. When he opened his eyes, he realized that benzene was originally a ring structure!

This inspiration from dreams seems to be a gift from God. If these legends are true, biochemistry and physiology alone cannot fully explain the creativity of dreams. Why do dreams make people have such strong insight? Perhaps it is because it weaves the dream experience and imagination together in a unique and creative way!

When you fall asleep at night for about an hour and a half, your brain will be awakened by brain current, and the midbrain, pons and medulla oblongata will start to emit high-voltage pulses like barrage, and the released chemicals will shoot into the forebrain like waves. At this time, you began to dream. You may have to go through this process four times before dawn.

Scientists point out that dreams are a collection of mental images (called "images" in psychology) during rapid eye movement. The physiological characteristics of rapid eye movement are rapid eye movement, low amplitude and fast frequency of brain waves, irregular breathing and heartbeat, decreased tension of neck and quadriceps femoris and paralysis. If you wake up the sleepers at this time, they will often say, "I am dreaming."

At 23 weeks, the rapid eye movement period appeared; All birds and mammals (except anteaters) have REM periods. Because these creatures come from a common ancestor, modern science reveals that the rapid eye movement period is a legacy accepted by human beings in the process of evolution, and the mental activity of dreams can be traced back to 654.38+35 million years ago.

Gender, age and dreaming Although everyone dreams, dreams have obvious gender markers. Dr. Kramer, director of the Cincinnati Sleep Disorders Treatment Center in the United States, said: "Compared with the dreams of white American men, we find that white women and Indian women have more in common."

In the past, women often dreamed of gentle and comfortable scenes, talked a lot and were full of feelings, portrayed themselves as victims of aggression, and rarely had erotic dreams. Men's dreams belong to the outdoor type, and the world is wider. Today, the content of men's and women's dreams is getting closer and closer, and American women begin to find themselves appearing in dreams as aggressors.

Dr. Fox's research shows that age can also affect your dreams. He woke up children aged 3-4 from a deep sleep and asked them what they remembered. Children don't tell their dreams in a narrative way. Dreams are still like slides. They usually dream about rabbits, frogs, birds and so on, and seldom dream about themselves. Children aged 5-6 begin to dream that they appear in dream stories, but they are often not the protagonists. Children aged 8-9 have similar dreams as adults.

Overcoming nightmares Most parents know that children are particularly prone to nightmares when they are 3 to 5 years old. Some adults are particularly sensitive to their own feelings, especially easily excited, and the same is true. A remarkable feature of nightmares is that they dream that they are in danger. Except parents, they often dream that their babies are unlucky.

Psychologists suggest using a technique called "reason" to overcome nightmares. The so-called sanity is to realize that you are dreaming when you are dreaming. Less than one in ten people are born with this ability. Even these people, on average, only once a month, and their dreams are "awake". However, Raberg of Stanford University believes that mental health can be obtained through study and training. He dressed the volunteers with a special instrument that looked like glasses. When the subject falls into REM sleep, the sensor on the instrument will immediately make the red light flash. This red light can appear in a dream, telling the subject that he is dreaming.

Children over the age of 5 can learn the awake sleep method and successfully get rid of the entanglement of nightmares. A 7-year-old child said, "I dreamed that I was swimming in a reservoir and a big shark chased me." I was very scared when it opened its mouth and bit me. " Raberg told her to ride on the shark's back the next time she dreamed of it. The child obeyed the rules and never had nightmares again.

During REM, most dreamers don't move their limbs. However, when Mahavoort and Schenk studied 75 subjects, they found that their limbs were not paralyzed when they dreamed. Most of them are elderly men, usually gentle, calm and friendly, and their marriages are harmonious and happy. But these people unconsciously show violence in their dreams. 75-year-old Abel dreamed that he was hunting with his grandfather. The deer he hit was strangled before it died. At this time, he is hugging his wife lying beside him. Some people dream that they took the ball to the restricted area and flew. The pain woke him up and kicked him against the wall!

Some people think that dreams are just the opposite of reality. For example, dreaming of death doesn't mean bad luck. But when analyzing the dreams of patients with heart disease, Dr. Smith found that patients with severe heart disease dreamed of death and cemetery scenes much more frequently than others. He believes that if the patient doesn't know the seriousness of his illness, worry won't cover up his dream. It seems that dreams can sometimes be used as early warning signals of diseases.

The new theory of dream interpretation says that whether dreams can correctly reflect our health status is always a shortcut for us to understand the subconscious. Dr Delaney said: "Dream is a visual language that uses metaphor. It's like a poem. If you can understand metaphors, you will understand the meaning of dreams. " One of her patients had this dream: "It was dark at night and a man was chasing me with a knife. I turned to face him and let him go where there was light. He suddenly turned into a pool of water in the light. I scooped water with my hand, but the first bite was French brandy. "

Freud believed that dreams are not random activities of the brain, but a powerful subconscious desire. If this desire is forbidden, it is suppressed in the mind and often disguised in dreams. If Freud were asked to explain the dream of the female patient mentioned above, he would probably use Oedipus (father) emotion. A woman wants to have sex with her father, but her desire is morally unacceptable, so it becomes its opposite in a twisted dream: the opposite of a woman's secret desire prevails, and the man she faces replaces the penis with a knife.

What is a knife? What is "French brandy"? It means different things to different dreamers. Delaney asked the lady to think about what this image and feeling represent in real life. The patient finally realized that she ran away from her dream because of fear. She is worried that all men will become alcoholics like her father. Delaney said with emotion, "Dreams can tell us things that we dare not face directly when we wake up."

Acetylcholine is the substance that makes dreams. There are two kinds of neurons that control sleep in the brain stem. Some scientists believe that a neuron uses acetylcholine for information exchange, and the switch of this neuron is turned on during rapid eye movement sleep; Another neuron uses two other chemicals to send signals. These two chemicals are norepinephrine and serotonin. During the rapid eye movement period, this neuron is in the "off" state. Only when they are turned off can acetylcholine neurons release acetylcholine and send electrical signals to the cerebral cortex.

The cerebral cortex is a very advanced center of thinking and visual activity. When it receives these signals, it will interpret them with the help of information previously stored in memory, and then weave them into stories. So the dream came into being.

An animal experiment made by scientists helps to show that acetylcholine is very important as a dreaming material. If the analogue of acetylcholine is injected into the brain stem of a cat, the cat will go into REM sleep.

Using this hypothesis, physiologists can also explain why we can only "see" strange pictures when dreaming, but we can't smell incense, stink, sour, sweet, bitter and spicy. Visual neurons are strongly emitted during REM, but not olfactory neurons and taste neurons. Because the signals received by the cerebral cortex come from the brain stem rather than the outside world, these chaotic signals produce strange plots. During REM sleep, the neurons that control the movement emit very quickly, and the frequency and quantity of emission are similar to those when we do movements during the day. Therefore, there are often scenes of chasing, fighting and falling from a height in dreams.

Why can't you remember your dreams? If you don't remember it specially, the content of the dream will disappear within 15 minutes after waking up. This is because dreams are stored in short-term memory, and the chemicals that can "print" information in long-term memory are norepinephrine and serotonin, which just turn off when dreaming.

Scientific research on dreams can not only relieve the distress of people with sleep disorders, but also help to solve the mystery of memory and let human beings know themselves better. No matter what scientists find in the study of dreams in the future, people always like to wish each other good dreams tonight.