What do dreams indicate from a scientific point of view (11 photos). How does science explain dreams? Why do people dream from a scientific point of view?
Dream interpretation is an ancient activity. But with all kinds of obscurantism becoming a thing of the past, they trust him less and less. However, it is fundamentally wrong not to attach any importance to dreams, considering them a meaningless creation of our resting brain. In fact, dreams can say a lot about the state of mind and mood of the person who sees them. This will, of course, not be a prediction of future events, but a kind of psychotherapy that will help you cope with difficulties in real life and prevent possible mistakes in your personal and professional life.
Dreams about death 
With death everything is simple. Seen in a dream, it naturally does not mean death. But, most likely, if you die in a dream, then you want change. The subconscious tells you that the old you is no longer relevant and a new one is needed. You strive for these changes, consciously or not. So, if you die in a dream, consider it a signal to start a new life.
Dreams with answers
The famous story of how Mendeleev came up with the periodic table in a dream may suggest the mystical origin of dreams. This is wrong. It's just that when we sleep, our brain continues to solve problems set the day before. And sometimes the answer really comes in a dream. But you always have to ask a question first.
Dreams about animals 
Researchers most often interpret dreams about animals as dreams about habits. Habits can be harmful and cause illness, or they can be vital, such as brushing your teeth or looking both ways before crossing the road. If the animals in your dreams are domestic and behave non-aggressively, then most of your habits do not harm you.
Dreams about appearance 
If you choose clothes in a dream, then this should be interpreted to some extent literally. Clothing is how you present yourself. If you are wearing a tracksuit, it means you are relaxed or serene. A business suit indicates that it’s time to take a break from work and go on vacation.
Logic of dream plots 
The more logical and ordinary your dreams are, the more clearly and consistently you think. Boring, unmemorable stories without vivid emotions are the dreams of a healthy person. And vivid and fantastic dreams indicate that you are confused and cannot collect your thoughts.
Dreams about illness 
Researchers believe that our subconscious is trying to tell us about illnesses not only through direct stories about ailments in dreams. Of course, it is worth paying attention to them, since the brain could already record changes in the cells of the body when you do not yet feel pain. However, the most traditional story about health is a dream about a car in which you are moving. The analogy is simple - in reality, the body moves with the help of a car. And our mind moves in space with the help of our body. That is why the subconscious speaks to us in a dream with such a metaphor. The manner of driving and the state of the car in a dream is an analogy with control over one’s health.
Dreams about the future 
Dreams are not prophecies. In the 21st century, it’s time to stop believing in stories about how someone sees the future in a dream, and go to dream interpreters. You can interpret dreams only by analyzing the present and the past. However, you yourself may have noticed that the dream you had the day before resembles what happened later. This is just the work of our subconscious, which is more insightful than consciousness. It can analyze and draw conclusions based on data. For example, if you dreamed that you came down with the flu, and a couple of days later you actually came down with it, it’s just the brain that noticed the activity of the virus earlier.
Dreams about yourself 
All the heroes of your dreams are you. Even if you dream about your mother, your girlfriend, or a work colleague you barely know, they always behave the way you would behave or would like to behave. You should never think that if you dreamed of a pretty girl from the next door and in a dream confessed her love, then this has at least some relation to her. No, any personalities are facets of your personality.
Dreams about relationships 
As already mentioned, do not interpret dreams involving other people in terms of relationships with them. Any relationship that develops in dreams is a relationship between many facets of your personality. Moreover, people of the same sex as you are the literal embodiment of your visible character traits. And people of the opposite sex are your hidden inner self. Listen to the latter more carefully.
Dreams about the past 
Dreams about events that have already happened to you indicate your current mood. If you return to the distant past, you have internal anxiety, and if even in a dream you are in the present, then you are satisfied with almost everything in the current state of affairs.
Sometimes sleep is simply a continuation of our daytime worries and thoughts. But it may have nothing to do with our lives: a war in the distant past or in the future, unknown places, mysterious creatures, completely unreal events. Some dreams surprise us - and this is a sure sign that their plot hides some other meaning. How do our dreams arise?
(Not) live broadcast
Our dreams convey messages from the unconscious and help us enter into dialogue with it. They symbolically reflect our forbidden desires, allowing us to experience what we cannot achieve or do in reality (as Freud believed), or maintain mental balance (as Jung believed). What are dreams made of? 40% - from the impressions of the day, and the rest - from scenes associated with our fears, anxieties, worries, says neurophysiologist and somnologist Michel Jouvet. There are dream plots that are common to all humanity. But the same plot has its own unique meaning for each of us.
What do we dream about most often? Men dream about other men, sex with strangers, cars, tools and weapons. The action takes place in an unfamiliar place or open space. But women are less likely to leave the premises; they often dream about food, clothes, work. In addition, women usually pay more attention to their dreams than men and remember them better.
Dreams work for us, even if their images are frightening. They speak of our anxiety, dissatisfaction, and indicate unsolved problems. But if we calmly think about what we saw in the dream, the fear will gradually decrease. “Frightening dreams, shocking us, force us to think,” explains Jungian psychoanalyst Vsevolod Kalinenko. “We see nightmares if our “I” ignores what the unconscious is trying to communicate.” Our consciousness strives to “forget” everything that is incompatible with our beliefs, but in some circumstances we can no longer do without this “forgotten” thing.
Paradoxical dream
We dream in a special phase of sleep, which was discovered by the French neurophysiologist Michel Jouvet in 1959. Such a dream was called paradoxical. “While studying conditioned reflexes in cats, we unexpectedly recorded an amazing phenomenon,” says Michel Jouvet. – The sleeping animal exhibited rapid eye movements and intense brain activity, almost like during wakefulness, but the muscles were completely relaxed. This discovery changed all our ideas about dreams. The state we have discovered is neither classical sleep nor wakefulness. We called it “paradoxical sleep” because it paradoxically combines complete muscle relaxation and intense brain activity.”
On the verge of sleep and reality
Some of us are convinced that we are not dreaming. “An illness, accident or injury can cause neurological changes that lead to the disappearance of dreams,” explains Michel Jouvet. “Dreams may also disappear if the phases of paradoxical sleep become too short and frequent.” But there are many more who simply do not remember their dreams. This is possible in two cases: either the person woke up a few minutes after the end of the dream, and during this time it disappeared from memory, or the images that emerged from the unconscious were subject to strict censorship by the “I”.
For those who do not remember their dreams and regret it, there is a method of “free waking dreams”, developed by psychotherapist Georges Romey*. A patient immersed in an intermediate state of consciousness (waking dream) describes to the therapist the images that come to his mind without looking for logic. The script is slowly taking shape. According to Georges Romey, “past traumas or difficulties have fixed neurons in certain positions. In a state of relaxation, nerve impulses flow better, identifying and releasing blockages and thus promoting awareness of images, memories and emotions.” And not only does waking dreaming change what is recorded in neurons, but studying it reinforces these changes. By combining Freudian dream interpretation (deciphering fantasies and personal repressions) with Jungian analysis (dealing with the collective unconscious) and using the typology of symbols developed by Georges Romay, the therapist helps the patient understand the dream.
Notice, remember, think about it
So, we had a dream that surprised or alarmed us. What should I do to figure it out? To begin with, show interest and curiosity, since our forgetfulness is precisely a consequence of insufficient attention to the world of dreams. And vice versa, if we begin to be interested in our inner world, if the dream touched us or seemed important, our memory improves.
“We can almost forget a dream, but if we remember the most insignificant fragment of it, or even the feeling of the dream, its aftertaste, this is sometimes enough to, with the help of fantasies and memories, penetrate the slightly open door into the unconscious,” says psychoanalyst Andrei Rossokhin. Often we immediately try to explain our dream to ourselves... but this is not worth doing: thinking is a function of consciousness, and dreaming is the result of the activity of the unconscious. “We can be sincerely confident that we understand the dream, but this is nothing more than an illusion: in reality, we only hear the voice of our own logic,” believes Andrei Rossokhin. “Therefore, take your time, let the dream “breathe”, allow different thoughts and sensations to come that will arise in connection with what you saw.”
Words and thoughts may at first glance seem completely unrelated to the dream. The obvious meaning of a dream is only a screen behind which the deeper “messages” of the unconscious are hidden. It is necessary to notice details, especially unusual ones - often the main idea of the dream is encrypted in them. By changing the appearance and shape of ordinary objects, creating strange situations, the unconscious gives us a hint: we need to look here.
* Georges Romay, somnologist and writer, author of “Dictionnaire de la symbolique des reves” (“Dictionnaire de la symbolique des reves”, Albin Michel, 2005), books “Stairway to Heaven” and “Un escalier vers le ciel” , “Une reve eveille libre”, Devry, 2009, 2010).
So, what is sleep from a scientific point of view, what are dreams and what is their meaning?
What is sleep and is it necessary?
Scientists of antiquity did not know the causes of sleep and often put forward erroneous, literally fantastic theories about what sleep and dreams are. More than a century ago, for example, some scientists considered sleep to be a poisoning of the body; allegedly, poisons accumulate in the human body during wakefulness, causing poisoning of the brain, as a result of which sleep occurs, and dreams are just hallucinations of a poisoned brain.
Another version said that the onset of sleep is explained by a decrease in blood circulation in the brain. For two thousand years, people were satisfied with the wisdom of Aristotle, who argued that sleep is nothing more than halfway to death. The situation changed dramatically when the human brain began to be considered the seat of the mind and soul. Thanks to Darwin's theory and Freud's work, the veil of divinity was torn from man, and a large-scale study of the functioning of the mechanism (the word, how inanimate!) of the human body and brain began. It was a time of incredible faith in science.
In the minds of scientists, the body was seen as a complex automaton; all that remained was to understand exactly what gears and cogs made up this automaton - and the secret of life and mind would be revealed. And nothing wonderful! But the subsequent development of science and technology: X-rays, EEG, MRI and other devices that help “look” into the brain, revealed a lot of new things to humanity. And most importantly, they created more questions than they found answers: why is sleep needed, what is sleep and dreams in reality? For a long time it was believed that sleep is just a rest for the overloaded brain machine, which protects against premature wear and tear. Also, during sleep, overworked muscles and bones get rest.
However, this simple theory did not prove to be fully consistent. Back in the 20th century, in its middle, it was found that in a sleeping person, brain metabolism is only 10-15% lower than during a shallow sleep. And muscles that are tired during the day can have a great rest just by being at rest. It turns out that the human body has absolutely no need to spend a third of its life hungry and defenseless.
You don't need sleep to relax! For only 10% sleep efficiency, natural selection would not risk the entire individual, or what, the entire human species. After all, during sleep we are not able to react to danger adequately, to quickly orient ourselves, while the insidious enemy always carries out his dirty deeds under the cover of darkness... In this case, why did natural selection not take care of the problem of the defenselessness of those sleeping, why is it still affecting the body to this day? the burden of compulsory rest hangs, why do you need sleep, what is sleep? It turns out that sleep is not just rest, it is a special state of the brain, reflected in specific behavior.
What is sleep from a scientific point of view?
What are sleep phases and what happens to the body?
A person devotes almost a third of his entire life to sleep. Sleep is a cyclical phenomenon, usually 7-8 hours a day, during which 4-5 cycles replace each other. Each cycle includes two phases of sleep: the phase of slow and rapid sleep. The moment a person falls asleep, slow-wave sleep begins, which includes 4 stages.
Stage one represents drowsiness: a person’s consciousness begins to “float”, various uncontrollable images appear. This is a shallow sleep, lasting up to 5 minutes, of course, if the unfortunate person does not suffer from insomnia. During the second stage, a person is completely immersed in the arms of Morpheus. If the dozing person is not disturbed by anything, then the doze will go into the second phase of sleep, lasting about 20 minutes. The third stage of slow sleep is characterized by immersion in deep sleep. The time of the deepest and soundest sleep is the fourth stage; during this period it is quite difficult to wake a person.
During the stages of slow-wave sleep in the human body, the temperature drops, metabolism decreases, heart rate and breathing slow down, muscles relax, and the eyeballs under closed eyelids make smooth, slow movements. At this time, the production of growth hormone increases and body tissues are regenerated. And suddenly, after 20-30 minutes of deep sleep, the brain again returns to the second phase of shallow sleep. It’s as if the brain is trying to wake up, and therefore begins to reverse. But instead of waking up, he moves not to the first, but to the fifth phase of sleep - rapid sleep, called REM sleep.
The slow-wave sleep phase is replaced by the fast sleep phase after about 1.5 hours. During this period, the work of all its internal organs in the human body is activated, but at the same time muscle tone drops significantly and the body becomes completely immobilized. During REM sleep, processes completely opposite to slow sleep occur in the body: the temperature rises, the heart rate and breathing increase, and the eyeballs begin to move sharply and quickly.
When a sleeping person is completely immobilized, his brain is extremely active. It is now that a person sees most of his dreams. REM sleep lasts about 10-20 minutes. Then everything repeats again. After the end of the REM phase, the second, third, and then fourth phases of sleep follow again in strict order. The duration of REM sleep in the last cycles, towards the end of the night, increases, and slow sleep decreases.
So why do you need sleep, and what are dreams?
Sleep for a person is, to some extent, more important than food. A person can live about 2 months without food, but very little without sleep. Scientists did not conduct experiments that would find out the viability of a person without sleep. But to understand this, it is enough to recall the executions carried out in ancient China, sleep deprivation being the most severe of them. People who were forcibly deprived of sleep did not survive longer than 10 days. One of the experiments conducted by modern scientists showed that already on the fifth day a person’s hearing and vision deteriorate, coordination of movements is impaired, hallucinations may begin, attention is scattered, the individual becomes no longer capable of purposeful activity.
The majority of people during this time lost weight, despite the abundance of food. On the 8th day, the experiment was stopped due to the requirements of the “experimental subjects” - people could no longer do it. Experiments were conducted in which a person was deprived of sleep to find out the meaning of each sleep phase. At a certain stage, the person was woken up, then he fell asleep again. The results were recorded using special instruments. As experiments have shown, if a person is deprived of REM sleep, he becomes aggressive, absent-minded, memory decreases, fears and hallucinations arise. Thus, we came to the conclusion that REM sleep is necessary to restore the functions of the body’s nervous system, and it is its restoration that occurs during REM sleep.
While slow-wave sleep is in progress, the human brain processes all the information received during the day. This is precisely what explains the intense work of the brain; it is necessary for organizing and classifying information received by the brain during wakefulness. In this case, new information is compared with the past, long stored in memory, finding its own place in the system of ideas that a person already has about the world around him. It requires comprehension, processing or refinement of existing ideas.
Of course, this requires active creative brain activity, which is believed to occur during deep sleep. In a processed, ordered form, with a complex of organic relationships with the experience of the past, new information is recorded and further stored in the long-term memory of the brain. That is why artificially depriving a person of this phase of sleep leads to various memory disorders and can cause mental illness.
What are dreams and why do we have dreams?
We can say that it is in a dream that the brain decides what information needs to be retained (that is, remembered) and what can be “thrown away”, looks for connections between different information, weighing the value of the experience gained. The brain moves a mass of “cards” with data through a huge “card index”, establishing a relationship between them, and assigning each one to its own “catalog”. It is this creative, incredible work of the brain that explains our dreams.
Strange, bizarre visions are a direct reflection of the process of searching for relationships, “cross-references” between various information stored in memory. When the relationship between the new “data card” and the open “catalog” is absent, the dream becomes strange, incomprehensible, bizarre. When a relationship is found, memory is updated, enriched with new facts. In addition, the nerve endings that are involved in the memorization process are “trained” during fast sleep, especially when the brain is able to calculate and remember a new structure, the internal logic of the material proposed for study.
This could be considered a complete answer to the question “what are dreams and sleep”, if not for one small “but” - the so-called prophetic dreams. Many scientists, insisting that a dream is just a “processing” of what was seen and heard, ignore the existence of dreams, the events in which are in no way consistent with what a person saw or heard in life. And even an explanation that the person simply “forgot about it” looks weak. But what about, for example, the incredible stories of discovering treasures in places where a person had never been before, or even heard of them, but clearly saw both the place and the process in a dream. Or even worse - a terrible dream told by a husband to his wife, waking up in the middle of the night: he saw how he would go to take out the trash before work and a homeless man would kill him - in the morning this happened, the man was killed near a garbage container, and the killer was found according to the description given deceased to his wife the night before.
And there are a lot of such stories - each of us has had a prophetic dream at least once. So, what does sleep mean in this case, what are dreams, and why do dreams occur? There is a theory that does not reject the official version of what dreams are and why dreams are dreamed, but tries to complement it and fully reveal what a dream means. By studying the electrical activity of the human brain, scientists discovered weak vibrations - alpha waves. Having measured them, they discovered the alpha rhythm of the brain and found out that alpha waves are characteristic only of humans, and no one else. Soon they discovered the existence of weak oscillations of magnetic fields around the human head, coinciding in frequency with the alpha rhythm.
But the most amazing thing is that the characteristics of these waves and electromagnetic oscillations are incredibly close to the terrestrial characteristics of the same order, the natural resonances of the so-called “Earth-ionosphere” system. Answering the question, what are dreams, what does sleep mean, we can assume that the sensitivity of the brain to earthly electrical influences is capable of providing communication with a certain principle that permeates everything around us.
That the brain is also a receiver that provides an invisible and unconscious connection with the planet, with the cosmos... In many laboratories on Earth, scientists are trying to find a solution to the most ancient riddle of the illusory world, to answer what happens to us in a dream, what sleep means, what dreams are ? Today, the most powerful, previously unimaginable research tools are being used - positron emission tomography, neurochemistry of various groups of cells... The future will show how effective this arsenal will be.
Interesting facts about sleep and dreams
The amount of sleep required for good rest is about 7-8 hours a day, while in childhood about 10 hours of sleep are required, in old age - about 6. There are cases in history when people spent significantly less time sleeping. For example, as witnesses said, Napoleon slept no longer than 4 hours a day, Peter I, Goethe, Schiller, Bekhterev - 5 hours, and Edison - generally 2-3 hours a day. Scientists believe that a person can sleep without realizing it and without remembering it.
It is well known that the answer to some very important question for a person, which has been tormenting him all day or several, can come in a dream.
Mendeleev dreamed of a table of chemical elements arranged in order of increasing atomic weight.
The chemist August Kekule saw the formula for benzene in a dream.
The violinist and composer Tartini composed the final part of the sonata “Devil's Trills” in a dream, the best of his works.
La Fontaine composed the fable “Two Doves” in a dream.
In a dream, Pushkin saw two lines from the poem “Licinia” that he then wrote.
Derzhavin dreamed about the last stanza of the ode “God”.
Beethoven composed the piece in a dream.
Voltaire immediately dreamed of an entire poem, which became the first version of the Henriad.
Not all people see vivid, “colorful” dreams. About 12% of sighted people are able to see only black and white dreams.
Dreams can be not only colored, but also with a smell.
People who are blind from birth do not see pictures in their dreams, but in their dreams there are smells, sounds, and sensations.
The most intense and realistic dreams are seen by people who quit smoking.
People tend to forget their dreams very quickly. Literally 5-10 minutes after waking up, we don’t remember even the fourth part we saw in the dream.
Seeing in dreams many seemingly completely unfamiliar people, in fact, according to science, we saw them all in real life, but did not remember their faces, while the brain imprinted them.
40 minutes, 21 hours and 18 days - this is exactly what constitutes the record for the longest lack of sleep.
Sorcerers and ghosts, instantaneous movements in space and the transmigration of souls, abductions by aliens and encounters with the Loch Ness monster... How I want to believe that in our everyday life there is a place for the inexplicable!
The less studied a particular phenomenon is, the more myths and fables there are around it. For many hundreds of years, sleep has remained the object of absolutely fantastic speculation. Recently I came across information that up to 80% of the Russian population believes that prophetic dreams are true... Being a somnologist, I cannot ignore this topic full of misconceptions. And, of course, I intend to argue with those who believe in the mysticism of prophetic dreams.
What are dreams?
First, let's figure out what dreams are. Dreams are called “shards of the day.” It is believed that this is a kind of by-product of brain activity, formed at night during the processing of information received during the day. Separate fragments of this information flow add up and mix with each other, giving birth to our dreams. From this point of view, the origin of dreams was very successfully characterized by I.M. Sechenov, who described them as “unprecedented combinations of experienced impressions.”
The content of dreams is determined not only by recent, but also by earlier memories. For example, it happens that a sleeper suddenly sees in a dream a person whom he has not met for several years. Why is this possible? The fact is that during sleep the subcortical layer is disinhibited and chaotic excitation of neurons belonging to different parts of the brain is observed. For this reason, long-standing memories can be “embedded” in dreams, including even those that a person seemed to have long forgotten.
Thus, there is no mysticism in the origin of dreams. Are there prophetic dreams that can predict the future? Most likely, this is fiction. Moreover, we can say with confidence: it is everyday reality that “predicts” our dreams, and not vice versa.
Why do dreams sometimes come true
Sometimes even the most inveterate skeptics suddenly begin to believe in miracles: there comes a time in their lives when, for some unknown reason, some dream comes true. How can this be explained?
Coincidence of circumstances
The simplest answer to the question of why prophetic dreams occur is a common coincidence. Every night a person sees several dozen separate dreams; a year their number reaches several thousand, so sooner or later one of them may, completely by chance, be repeated in reality.
Singer Irina Otieva, confident that prophetic dreams really exist, once said that at the age of 10 she saw herself in a dream, already an adult, singing in a huge concert hall. She realized that this dream was prophetic when, many years later, she performed in the Rossiya concert hall - in the same one from her dream.
However, after I started questioning her, we found out two things. Firstly, she dreamed of a singing career from early childhood, and secondly, even before her dream, she had already been to “Russia” with her parents. Impressions from the concert, dreams of creativity and fame - this is how, apparently, this “prophetic” dream turned out.
Even those dreams whose plot does not relate to everyday life can be attributed to coincidence. The reason for this is the information flows that bombard people every day. Television, radio, Internet... The information load from the outside is simply colossal, sometimes we don’t even record everything we see and hear, but information, regardless of our will, enters the brain, and in the process of processing it, the most unusual dreams arise. Some people are interested in: what to do to have a prophetic dream? According to this logic, the answer to the question is simple: live an ordinary life, look around, listen and remember.
I once talked with a woman who claimed that a few days before the fire in the Ostankino Tower, she had a dream that the tower had already burned down. Was this a prophetic dream? On the eve of her dream, this lady could well have walked past the TV tower on her way to work, then watched some story about a fire on TV, and then quite naturally saw in her dream a “cocktail” of the tower and the fire.
Subconscious analysis of information
Are you familiar with the concept of insight? You are facing some problem, you don’t know how 
solve it, and at one moment the solution suddenly comes as if by itself. This is the result of the analytical abilities of our brain. We may not focus on thinking, but the brain still automatically “thinks for us” and sometimes provides the results of its activities in such an unexpected and pleasant way.
Analysis and search for solutions are processes that occur in our heads constantly, and going to sleep does not stop them. This is why the intuitive, predictive guesses of the brain are sometimes reflected in our dreams. Unconscious analysis of information is another answer to the question of why prophetic dreams occur.
One man told a story about how a “prophetic dream” helped him find a missing value. During a business trip, his watch disappeared at a hotel. He left his room in the morning to go to the pool, and when he returned a couple of hours later, they were not on the nightstand near the bed, although he clearly remembered that he had taken them off and put them there before leaving.
The man contacted the hotel security and was assured that no one had entered the room in his absence. Suspecting a universal conspiracy, he searched the entire room and did not find anything missing. Tired of searching, he lay down on the bed and accidentally dozed off. He didn’t think about how to have a prophetic dream - he just fell asleep. In a dream, he saw himself looking into a bag with swimming trunks and a towel, which he took with him, and saw a watch there. Having woken up and done the same thing in reality, he actually found his “treasure”.
At the time of the story, this gentleman believed that he was faced with a double mystery: firstly, he did not understand how the watch could get into the package, and secondly, he allegedly saw a prophetic dream. However, having reconstructed the chain of events that happened on that mysterious morning, it was necessary to debunk his belief in miracles.
It turns out that before leaving for the pool, the dreamer had a fleeting intention of stopping by the fitness bar after swimming, so he took his wallet with him. Or rather, I thought I took it, but in fact, out of absent-mindedness, I grabbed the watch from the nightstand. He never went into the bar - he was tired of swimming and forgot. But during sleep, his brain “remembered” this, analyzed the information and provided him with a ready-made solution, telling him where the lost item was located. Did this person have a prophetic dream? In a sense, yes. But there was nothing mystical about it. Everything can be explained from a scientific point of view...
In the situation described above, the prophetic dream seems to be directed to the past, but still I would like to predict the future. Analysis and forecast are, in a certain sense, predicting the future based on past experience. We plan our lives, we expect that something will happen in the future, and in connection with this we somehow prepare for it. The uniqueness of the human brain lies in the fact that it has abstract thinking, it can think and predict the future.
But for some reason we make such predictions absolute in our dreams. Therein lies the problem. Any forecast of future events is probabilistic. An event may or may not happen with varying probability. For example, if you dreamed that you would go to work tomorrow (like all previous weeks, months and years) – will this be a prophetic dream? 99% of people will say no. But why not? You dreamed of the future!
Here's another example. You dreamed that you were leaving the house and an icicle would fall on your head. You went out and she actually fell! Most people will say that this is a prophetic dream. But in fact, this was an event that could have happened, although with an extremely low probability. The brain predicted it, since the person had looked at the weather forecast the day before, which spoke of a thaw, icicles and ice.
If you dream of some potential troubles in the future, then it is quite possible to analyze the situation and take some action to avoid it. For example, a month ago you crossed the road in the wrong place in front of speeding cars. And suddenly you dreamed that you were hit by a car. Think about it. Maybe it’s worth walking the extra 100 meters and using the pedestrian crossing?
But you shouldn’t bring your behavior to the point of absurdity in connection with such “prophetic dreams”. Imagine the following situation. You didn't come to work today. And tomorrow you write an explanatory note to your boss: “Dear Chief! I’m not sure if prophetic dreams exist, but since I dreamed that I was hit by a car, I decided not to leave the house all day.” At best, you will be recommended to see a psychiatrist, and at worst, you will simply be fired.
Here you can recall the saying of one Englishman: “If you dreamed that horse number 6 will win the race tomorrow, then bet money on it, but do not mortgage your house.”
Deja vu
Please note: very often people understand that some of their dreams turned out to be prophetic only at the moment when it comes true. Before that, they may not even remember about it! Probably, in such cases, prophetic dreams are imitated by such a well-known phenomenon as deja vu.
Sometimes a person experiences a spontaneous failure in the propagation of signals along the information channels of the brain. New information enters the departments responsible for memories. This makes you perceive the current situation as something that has already happened in the past.
Deja vu is a very specific sensation that is accompanied by a feeling of “exit from reality.” For this reason, during deja vu, a person may think that he saw the event that just happened in a dream. Hence the photographic coincidence of reality and some “prophetic” dreams.
Lie
“Everyone lies,” said the main character of the famous television series (“Doctor House”). And this is true - a person, without noticing it, tells lies or half-truths at least 20 times a day.
Do prophetic dreams exist? Many are easily convinced that yes. Moreover, this topic is very mysterious. It gives the dreamer significance and arouses interest in his person. This is used by people seeking to attract attention. Pay attention to those who allegedly see prophetic dreams. As a rule, these are teenagers, older people and women with problems in their personal lives - a typical list of people deprived of attention. Thus, one should perceive stories about prophetic dreams with a healthy distrust.
Manipulation
The idea of the existence of prophetic dreams is strongly supported by various interpreters, predictors and “magicians in the seventh generation.” This is a very good tool for influencing people with unstable psyches. Workers in the occult sciences, as a rule, are very good psychologists who can convince an impressionable person of anything. And just prophetic dreams are a very fertile topic, ensuring strong and long-term dependence of people caught in their trap.
Several times I had to consult people with severe insomnia and depression, which developed against the background of a constant expectation of some kind of trouble from supposedly prophetic dreams. Usually it goes like this.
A man comes to a dream interpreter and tells his dream. No matter what he says, he will be told that everything is terrible, the chakras are closed, the biofield is damaged, his loved one will leave him, there will be no money and diseases will strike... Of course, this is followed by an offer to fix everything, but you need to come regularly and tell your prophetic dreams; Honestly, this will help! And healing rituals will depend on this.
Naturally, all this is not done for free. After some time, the person is told that the problem is even deeper, black magic is already involved, enemies are poking his Voodoo doll with needles and, in general, a very strong evil eye... Even more manipulations and money are needed. The unfortunate person develops severe chronic stress and develops a persistent reflex of anticipation of trouble. All this leads to depression and severe insomnia, which has to be treated by psychiatrists and somnologists.
Prophetic dreams are true. Usually they dream from Thursday to Friday, and on Christmastide you can even tell fortunes about dreams. Special spells and rituals will help you see a dream that will definitely come true in reality. If on any day you have a dream and you want it to come true, under no circumstances tell it to anyone for three days. If you have a bad dream, hold yourself by the crown of your head, light a candle and look at its flame, knock on the window three times...
Dear ladies and gentlemen! Don't turn your deep-seated belief in miracles into consciously cultivated madness. Today there is no reason to believe that prophetic dreams really exist. Of course, it would be fun to see your future spouse long before you meet, or to know what will be listed on the stock exchange next year. But, alas, this is impossible.
Psychologists say that the tendency to believe in various kinds of predictions indicates that a person does not like to take responsibility. Do not look for clues and predictions in the chaotic images of night dreams. Manage your life yourself!
It would not be bad if we knew exactly what makes prophetic dreams possible. However, we have a problem, which is expressed not at all in the fact that we do not know how to explain it, but in the fact that we do not know how exactly to explain it in terms of hundreds of theories and assumptions, many of which deserve some attention, if only because come from pundits.
It's funny, but the problem really lies in the difficult choice of one theory. It may be that looking for one explanation is fundamentally wrong, since there can be two, or even three, four, and even much more at the same time. In my purely personal opinion, that’s how it is.
Why do I think this? The fact is that a dream is not a string that weighs a wash barrel, and its structure, functioning and origin are thousands of times more complex. Moreover, a prophetic dream, like an ordinary dream, in most cases, is not just one thing or brain function. What we see at night is the result of the activity of many completely different systems of the central nervous system, each of which has its place due to various factors.
If we project such a situation onto a prophetic dream, then here is an exaggerated description of the three main systems involved in it and the conditions necessary for them:
- we first find ourselves in a dream (1), then other factors make the plots spin before us (2), and third factors make these plots line up in the image of unconscious calculations (3), which produce the product in the form of a prophetic dream. And this is only the most general and truly exaggerated description. In fact, there is an interaction between a huge number of components.
Suffice it to say that the prophetic nature of a dream is determined by a number of factors and properties of the brain. These are the ones we will deal with at their core.
Where does knowledge come from in prophetic dreams?
Sometimes in a dream, almost any person sees such plausible prophetic things that explaining them from a logical point of view seems impossible at first glance. Well, how can the brain or what is responsible for dreams (if it is not the brain) know something that you yourself do not know?
For the sake of objectivity, let us immediately note the least probable explanations for this phenomenon. Moreover, they almost immediately come to the mind of the average person, because since childhood we have become accustomed to explaining all incomprehensibility from precisely this position. So we can only hope that all this is happening due to certain information fields, bioenergetic structures, telepathic communication of consciousness, or in general, knowledge simply comes from... space. All these things are difficult to analyze, and starting from them, it is impossible, illogical and absolutely useless to talk about anything. Still, we live in a different era, and there is a more plausible explanation for everything.
We can safely say that everything that a person sees, hears, touches and generally somehow perceives throughout his life is stored in his memory, even if it was something extremely insignificant and did not even fall into the field of vision of consciousness. This theory is confirmed by various practices of highly altered states of consciousness, in which such little things can emerge to the level of awareness even after many decades. This means that if there is Something in a person’s head that can analyze incoming information, albeit without the participation of ourselves, this Something has a much greater - tens and perhaps hundreds of times - information resource than we do. What remains unnoticeable to the mind, for this Something will be part of an overall complete picture that can be analyzed and from which it can be predicted.
This Something is our subconscious. And his strength is truly amazing. It is thanks to him that we live. Our mind is essentially too limited and our speed of thinking is incredibly slow. What can our conscious intelligence do in a second? Nothing. What can the subconscious do during this same time? Without any words or reflection, it makes the right decision in a tenth of a second, which can save our lives in a critical situation.
The existence of intrinsic computing power, whatever its name, is beyond doubt. She is the one who can figure out things that seem impossible. Moreover, considering that she has all the information resources for this. As a result, it turns out that even just by the appearance of a stranger, the subconscious can figure out who he is, where he is from, what he thought, what he was going to do, etc. And what it can learn on the basis of long-term observations is generally beyond the bounds of our imagination.
There are ways of purposefully contacting this incredible resource, which I have been intensively studying and studying through the phenomenon of “out-of-body” travel - additional evidence of this theory. I would even say that a prophetic dream is not the best and most manageable method of contacting this most powerful resource.
The fact that the subconscious plays a key role in the formation of prophetic dreams and more is also confirmed by many scientists from various fields of science.
The concept of “prophetic dream” is, of course, such an everyday one. One can truly say that dreams, the contents of which come true, as the official position says, are explained by intense subconscious work. It is probably simply impossible to explain the phenomenon of prophetic dreams in any other way. However, in the end it is necessary to say that still no one knows exactly what this incomprehensible subconscious is.
Why does information come in a dream?
Let's say the brain really can know more than our mind itself. However, why doesn’t he show this while he’s awake or at some other time, but mainly in his sleep or drowsy state? Someone explains this by saying that in a dream, our spirits or some kind of astral, ethereal, mental and similar bodies fly away somewhere, even to other dimensions and distant planets, and there we receive new knowledge and useful information. Honestly, I don’t even want to discuss such absurdity, because, for example, our soul already disappears somewhere if some small section of the brain of someone who is conscious is turned off and he immediately turns into an idiot. In general, this is an irrational view, and starting from it, it is impossible to obtain at least some explanations.
It seems to many that the right and left lobes of the human brain function in the same way. However, scientists found out many years ago that the activity of one hemisphere or another leads to completely different consequences. This is very clearly visible if, during craniotomy, which is carried out while maintaining the person’s consciousness, one or the other hemisphere is switched off. We found out that the left hemisphere is logic, iron-clad and uncompromising, based exclusively on reliable and known facts. It is this hemisphere that characterizes our existence in the world, since its role in wakefulness is much greater than that of the right.
And the right, in turn, is responsible for intuition, art, creation, design - in general, for all the creative abilities that there can be. A person with the right hemisphere turned off is in no way 100% capable of such things. In everyday life, for most people, the right hemisphere of the brain is not very active. But among artists, inventors, writers, musicians it is easy to find a person for whom it works much better than the left one.
When we sleep, the role of the logical hemisphere, that is, the left, is extremely small, which at least proves that we cannot even be aware of ourselves. Or rather, it is possible, but very difficult. But in sleep, the creative right hemisphere is fully revealed. It is this that helps us build the most bizarre images in the world of our phantom sensations, which sometimes have nothing to do with logic and common sense.
This is where another feature of this creative hemisphere emerges - intuition. It turns out that it is in a dream that our intuition is most acute and obvious. If in the waking state the right hemisphere works more actively in women and creative individuals, who as a result have what is called a sixth sense, then in their sleep it manifests itself even more and, in addition, becomes accessible to every person. It is this theory that logically explains why extraordinary knowledge can appear during sleep.
An interesting version was put forward by two Australian psychologists: Allan Snyder and John Mitchell. They believe that the problem lies in the human rational mind, which may not allow any options for solving problems a priori, as if filtering out the most incredible ones. However, in a dream, such “censorship” can simply be turned off and it is the rejected option that often closes the logical chain. However, in the section on determining a true prophetic dream, I approached this issue just the opposite. The fact is that the explanations of these psychologists relate only to those complex options that are more related to some scientific developments and the like. In everyday human life, things happen that are much more explainable and expected, so the particular paradox of the decision can be almost completely eliminated. In general, they did not put forward anything new, and all this fits into the theory of increased work of the right hemisphere and shutdown of the left - “censorship” in this case.
When is a prophetic dream possible?
Most people think that a prophetic dream is like an element of a random number generator; a number may or may not appear. This is what leads to the most absurd theories. In fact, not a single idea will ever appear in a dream just like that.
Well, no one has ever dreamed of something completely unexpected. If you trace the recorded stories involving prophetic dreams, then these dreams almost always relate to what worries the person most. Moreover, even ordinary dreams begin to adapt to such real experiences. All brilliant insights in a dream, including those of Mendeleev, occurred precisely under the influence of intense thinking.
Understanding this factor makes it easier to purposefully create prophetic dreams, because it turns out that the thought of a specific goal or question is the main factor in its appearance. However, these techniques are based on this, having a high application rate. Even purely folk methods of obtaining prophetic dreams have the same nature, although there deliberate concentration on the question is obviously simply replaced by rituals, spells, etc.
Therefore, it is easy to explain why a person dreams of the death of a sick loved one when he constantly thinks about him and his health. It is not difficult to understand why a person sees in a dream the location of a missing item that is very necessary. It is obvious and understandable why brilliant discoveries in the field studied by scientists are often made in a dream.
The only option when it may seem that a prophetic dream about real events arose by chance occurs when something connected with you or your loved ones begins to intensively, but at the same time implicitly, develop into something completely unusual and serious. And one fine moment it pops up before your eyes in a prophetic dream. With this maneuver, the subconscious mind warns of possible events, even if you did not think or worry about them at all.
Everyone sees prophetic dreams
During night sleep, a person is not in a static physiological state, but quite the opposite. Normal sleep is cyclical, like all living things. Each cycle lasts an hour and a half, almost 80 minutes of which are in the so-called slow-wave sleep (SWS) stage, when our body grows, recovers and gains strength. 10–15 minutes are in the opposite stage - rapid eye movement sleep (REM). At this time, a person dreams, and his body experiences a real vegetative storm: pressure, temperature, heart rate, breathing and much more jump. A distinctive feature is body twitching and rapid eye movements. After such a cycle, a person wakes up every time, although he almost never remembers it, because he quickly falls asleep again. It turns out that over 4–7 such night cycles, the dream period will be at least one hour, during which you can experience a total of fifty dream scenes and much more.
Let's say some people claim that they have a prophetic dream once a year, but they remember no more than three dreams per night, although they sleep for a long time. It is not difficult to calculate that for them one dream out of a thousand that they remember is prophetic. But in reality, I dream much more. If this same person remembered all the dreams he saw, then he would see prophetic dreams every ten days, because it is during this period that a person experiences a thousand dreams.
All this only says that prophetic dreams occur much more often than we think. But it’s our own fault that, when we wake up, we simply don’t remember them. It would be quite possible to assume that if a person always remembered all his dreams, then he would come across prophetic dreams at least once a month without any training and procedures that are described in this book.
What can you learn from a prophetic dream?
What can a person learn from a prophetic dream? In fact, almost anything you want. Since the nature of a prophetic dream is associated with the activity of a powerful subconscious, there can be no thematic restrictions on information in prophetic dreams. Prophetic dreams help to obtain any information regardless of the time of the events that occurred. A dream will help you learn something from the past, what is happening now or what will happen in the future. Naturally, this applies only to events and their nuances.
Events can also be extremely varied. They can concern the person and those who come into contact with him. They may also concern nature and other very global concepts, including even the political sphere. More specifically, you may dream of a unique weather forecast, a prediction of a specific natural disaster, or even the winner of an election race and a government reshuffle. As for nature, there are much more prophetic dreams about it than about everything else. Another thing is that often the people who talk about them interpret the facts incorrectly and biasedly. In politics, everything is even more complicated, because experienced political strategists know well that any seer can be successfully used in the election race, which is why it is difficult to trust them.
It is no coincidence that the most truthful and accurate evidence of prophetic dreams concerns scientists. It is in this area that the constant attack of the brain in a certain direction is most practiced. From time to time, the brain gives up precisely in a dream, giving its owner exactly what he was looking for. That is, a prophetic dream can bring people answers to the most difficult tasks and questions. Science and famous scientists prove this.
It is especially important to note that a prophetic dream can very accurately characterize the health of a person and his loved ones. An additional factor here is that the subconscious mind can be aware of those internal ailments that have not even manifested themselves yet, so dreams about health should always be of interest to any person. They seem to warn us, because it is simply impossible to do it any other way.
In a dream, a person may simply discover a lost thing or even a person. He may simply dream of a place to look. Healers who know how to control them often try to use this feature of prophetic dreams.
A prophetic dream does not necessarily have to be in the nature of a prophecy or an answer to a question. In the end, he may simply recommend something in a given situation, even if you haven’t given it much thought.
In general, a dream can give a person an answer to any question, any riddle that can torment the human mind. History confirms this, we and those around us. However, prophetic dreams are not a magic wand, and their possibilities are not unlimited. If something lies beyond perception, beyond the available data, then the information received will only correspond to the theory of probability and nothing more.
