For my independent study topic I researched dreams. There are many different
approaches philosophers have taken to explain dreams and what they mean. I will
go through a couple of them. Many of you may be asking yourself “why do I
dream?”, there are several answers to that question. The first in the
physiological set. We dream in order to exercise our brains. When you’re
awake, messages are constantly speeding among all your billions of brain cells
to keep you moving and thinking and digesting an so on. So the idea is that when
you’re asleep, dreams exercise the “pathways” between brains cells. A
couple of ideas that might help this make sense are; the first couple of years
of your life are the most intense for learning which is also when you have the
greatest amount of REM sleep–which means your dreaming a lot. Another thing is
your brain waves during REM sleep look about the same as your brain waves while
your awake. During other parts of sleep, the brain waves look very different (a
lot slower) There is also a psychological set of ideas about why we dream. Since
psychology has to do with your thoughts and emotions it has been said dreams are
actually about immediate concerns in our lives. In the bible and within a lot of
cultures dreams are thought to be prophetic, which means they can predict the
future. Sigmund Freud a famous philosopher gave us a lot of ideas on how our
minds work and was very interested in interpreting dreams. He thought dreams
contained symbols hidden deep within our minds and memories.