If dreams are meaningless then what would we have ?

Question

If we did not have dreams ( in the literal sense) what would we have? Do you feel dreams have played a role in our development?

Answer 1

I am not sure how told you that dreams arn't meaningful????

Dreams are our brain and subconsciousness way to evaluate and sometimes even work out a problem in our awake life.

Also, dreams can reflect real fears and fears that we don't even know we have.

If you have nightmares and they are all different senerios yet the same worry, then your brain needs to help you resolve things.

If you want to understand your dreams. Write them down when you wake up. You can find books that give definations to things in dreams. I don't totally believe in that all, but it might clarily your dreams.

Dreams also help us digest our problem issues that we can't do in our wakeful hours.

You can also suggest that you dream about or not dream about by suggesting it outloud to yourself just before falling asleep,

Answer 2

I don't know if you mean dreams like when you're asleep...or dreams like goals in life. If you mean goals.....something to work towards and look forward to (whether it ever happens or not) ....then I think when you don't have them...you kind of stop "living".  Then you're on the computer day and night! lol

Edit...There was a saying..."Anticipation is the height of glory." I don't know if I got it right. I can't find it under quotes.  I think you know what I mean though.

Answer 3

Carl Jung expressed that he believed that dreams could have two purposes: helping us to continue thinking about things in an abstract, primal sort of way; and helping us to communicate with our bodies. One of the founding fathers of psychology has therefore said that dreams are anything but meaningless. They typically do not, however, have significant meaning in our normal lives in the way that lots of people think, with regard to dream interpretation.

Dreams are also an expression of creativity. There can't be much in the way of creative expression without occasionally having dreams about how something would look. Additionally, some of my own ideas and inventions were first thought up as dreams.

Plus, according to most dream manuals, my recurring nightmares are an indicator that I'm imminently going to die (and I've been having them now for almost 20 years as the result of PTSD, rather than simply having a dream).

The dream that I have in this case is definitely a representative dream, as there are monsters and mountains (neither of which were involved in what caused my traumatic event). However, the dreams started not quite a week after my traumatic event, and so it's highly likely that this was the earliest expression of my mental illness.

But in and of themselves, dreams are an indicator of one's mental state, and are a good general indicator of the way that things are likely to go in the upstairs department. I leave dream interpretation to the experts, in general: psychologists.

Answer 4

dreams allow our sub consious to think, rather than our consious. our SC can give us insight to what is happening in our everyday life, we just need to interpret them. if you have a nightmare when your boss is screaming at you, you may be worried about being fired. there are other less simple things in dreams too, but you get my point. if we didnt have dreams, we wouldnt be able to get through everyday life as smoothly. dreams do play a part in our development. our dreams allow us to realize ourselves. our wants, our desires, our needs, our feelings toward a certain object or person. without those, all of those would probably come out during our daily lives. dreams also can give ideas, they can give you a thought, and you may be able to make it work, outside of your dream.

i hope i answered the question well enough.

have a wonderful day!!!

-Angel-

Answer 5

Of course I think they do. Really, everythings starts with a dream, then inspiration, then a plan, and then that is when we decide to execute the plan or not.

If your talking about subconcious dreams... I never have those =[

Oh, and if we didn't have dreams... I don't think we would be anywhere, I mean literally... Nothing would be fun, amazing, etc...

Answer 6

Sleep is largely designed to recharge/repair the body which is damaged in the daily hustle and bustle.  It has been strongly suggested that dreams are associated with the reinforcement of memory (quite often they will contain events from recent history but also significant events from the past) Dreams may not contribute to the reinforcement effect but could just be an epiphenomenon.  Experiments in sleep deprivation highlight a marked decline in memory and concentration as well as very vivid and prolonged dreaming bouts once the deprivation has ended which tend to support the theory.

Answer 7

Dreams and dreaming are a hobby of mine and find this area to be facinating, personally.

Its kind of hard to answer this without explaining the whole dreaming process. But here goes:

If we did not dream then what we would simply have is a period of "sleep" that would more resemble coma than dreaming. If you were able to recall anything from sleep without dreams, all you'd see is darkness.

While dreams themselves are not linked to restoration and processing certain neurotransmitters, the process of dreaming is. You cannot live without sleep and the dream process is a part of sleep.

When we dream we actually routinely go through 5 different stages with varying degrees of brain activity. While we dream throughout the night and have dozens of dreams in a single night, because of the state of mind in each stage of the sleep cycle, we generally only can recall dreams during REM.

I don't mean to patronize you if you already know these things, my point is that without the biological process behind sleep, humans would have evolved slightly differently in that the benefits of sleep would be gained through some other process.

I think dreams plays a role in developement. But only a minor one compared to early childhood, home life and school. Yet we spend about a third of our lives dreaming and sometimes the things we dream about can impact our lives. So to totally just disregard them as nothing but time wasted, I feel is incorrect. I think dreams can be a powerful tool if one exploits them properly.

Answer 8

I think dreams are very meaningfull and have more impact on us then science states.  I think they go far beyond just our normal everyday lives and our normal dimensions.  I have thought for years we visit other dimensions and that there are many copies of us with a so called connected soul.  Science talks about dark matter and other things that they can not explain and maybe we can connect to it with our own minds since our minds do possess energy.  Perhaps some of our most profound advancements in our human history come from such dreams from our connected souls in other dimensions.

We need sleep to live and perhaps we need dreams to live and evolve.  Combined processes, weather by God or mother nature to advance our species.  We are basically creatures of our enviroment and perhaps dreams can help us expand our minds and become more evolved.  If you think about it's hard to think of concepts that are beyond our own sensual perception and in poofs of genius some have come up with world changing ideas.  Be them good or bad they have changed our world.  If we can not conceive an idea then we have no way to place our thought processes upon it and maybe this is where the unconscious comes in to play. For an example. Say we dream of dark faceless man who is watching you and conspiring against you.  You awake and think no more about it or forget. Then at work that day you see your boss and a colleague discussing something and even though you never ease drop you take a listen and you hear the colleague talking bad or even untrue things about you.  You never noticed with your conscious mind that the colleague was out to get you but your unconscious mind did and it told you in a dream the only way it could.  And I know many of us have went through the same thing in various ways.  So I think dreams are very important to us physically and mentally to advance as a species.