Psychology Essay on Dreaming and Sleeping

Recurring dreams and nightmares may seem like a bad thing, however, if understood correctly can be one of our biggest problem solvers yet. Nobody likes to experience a bad dream and most of the time we wake up,

calm down and just wish to forget about them. We neglect to question as to why we had to go through such a terrible dream when, ironically, is the opposite of what we want to do and exactly what we should do.

Sometimes dreams can just be a correlation of things we’ve gone through that day, things we’ve seen and our confined thoughts but most times they’re much more than that and can actually become quite useful. The first step is remembering the dream and everything you can about it, especially if it is a bad one. Just about everything in a dream is symbolic in some way, big or small, but we tend to notice certain things over others. These things that stand out are our mind’s way of trying to communicate with us about our more important problems. This is also sort of a pressure release therapy for the psyche or a way to vent and cope for your mind. If you continue to ignore the dream it might cause your mind to throw current events, people or things in the dream to show you that you still need to solve the problem. Ignorance results in the recurring of the dream or nightmare.

For instance, sometimes we can’t accept aspects of ourselves that we need to grow out of or confront so our minds will turn them into monsters, demons, shadows or things of this nature and usually send them after us. Now if you always wake up and try to forget this dream and keep living your life, don’t be surprised if you keep experiencing this dream. The only way to stop it is if you think about yourself and your life to find what you need to change. Dreams can also predict things that your sub-conscience is thinking of doing but you just don’t know yet; like if you were to turn around in that dream while being chased and confront the thing chasing you, this would foretell of your overcoming that problem.

Normal things we experience in everyday life result in deep inner thoughts held within our brain until we go to sleep, if those thoughts result from a problem that day you’re most likely going to dream about it, subliminally or clearly. It’s your mind’s way of letting you know “you need to change this”, “this isn’t good”, “watch out for this” or “hey, wake up and realize this”. If we learn to examine and analyze our own dreams we can not only stop those nasty nightmares from coming back but understand ourselves better and solve our own problems easier!