Dream Theory

I've been having a lot of weird dreams lately.  I should point out that dreaming in itself isn't unusual for me, due to my Nystagmus, my conscious mind never really switches off entirely.  I've suffered with insomnia for most of my life, and I rarely sleep out of conscious effort it is usually when I reach a point of exhaustion that I actually fall asleep.

Dream interpretation is something that has fascinated people for centuries, so much to the point where many theories exist as to what they mean.  Some people insist they mean nothing at all, some posit they are premonitions, others posit that they are simply the leftover thoughts of the day circulating in your mind.

The theory I subscribe to most is based on the concept of three brains.  The theory states that humans have three distinct levels of brain function.  The first is the conscious mind which is what you are using right now and use to think and express yourself.  The second is the subconscious, this is the part of the brain where our thoughts linger when we are aware of them but not focusing on them, this deals with the things we are keeping in our short term memory or the working memory we use day to day.  The third is the unconscious mind which controls everything that we cannot consciously control, e.g. your heartbeat.

The unconscious mind runs through millions of permutations without us knowing.  It constantly processes everything and runs through the possible outcomes of our actions.  Occasionally the unconscious mind will meet something it can't compute on its own so it bleeds information into the subconscious mind where it is then presented as random thoughts to our conscious mind.  The conscious mind then throws back information and more experience and perceptions that can help compute things further.  To take an example you sit and watch TV with your conscious mind paying attention to the TV show.  Your subconscious might be thinking of something else or holding onto things you need to do later.  Your unconscious mind is processing everything else about your surroundings.  Everything in your periphery that you're not paying attention to.  Something small moves or a sound happens you don't notice at first and the unconscious mind makes an assessment based on what it thinks happened, sometimes it can't draw a conclusion at which point it prompts the subconscious, "what was that?" and the thought jumps into the conscious, you turn your head you see what it was and that either prompts some other response or the unconscious mind is satisfied and it is dismissed.

That's the theory as to what happens when you are awake.  As for when you are asleep, the conscious mind shuts down, and the subconscious then takes over.  This is where our day dreams and our fantasies and our imagination get their chance to shine, with greater control over our thoughts the subconscious gets to explore things with more processing power.  The communication between the unconscious and the subconscious however doesn't stop.  The unconscious still dwells on all manner of other things it wants to process.

The dream theory I subscribe to posits that the same interactions happen as when we are awake, the unconscious mind receives all of the information that the conscious would normally generate but from the subconscious instead.  This leads it to provide further prompts and lets us explore things in an unusual level of surrealism.  The theory goes further that mental conditions such as Schizophrenia occur when we lose the ability to separate the parts of the mind into their distinct functions.  In other words the unconscious mind gains a much greater level of influence when awake than it normally should, as a result the dark and disturbing thoughts that are normally locked away from us bleed through.  The theory posits that when we are asleep, because the conscious mind has shut itself off to recover, the subconscious has less defence against the unconscious and the divide between the two weakens.  This is why a dream can turn into a nightmare so easily.  Why what we dream of can reflect what we were obsessing over whilst awake, and why dreams can often take the form of things that we have actively been trying to repress in our minds, as repression is relegation of thought to the unconscious mind.

As for those that posit that dreams can predict the future, I don't discredit that view entirely.  When you play a game of chess, you think about the pieces you are playing with, and you develop a strategy.  You respond to the changing state of the board and you develop models in your mind of how you think the game will play out.  With the three brain theory I believe that part of the function of the unconscious is to contemplate the possible outcomes of scenarios we contemplate.  I also believe that if there is something that is concerning us or is of great interest to us then our unconscious mind will likely dwell on it quite a bit, and those possible outcomes will be fleshed out in greater detail.  It's not a great leap of imagination to consider the possibility if the dream theory I subscribe to is accurate, that whilst asleep the unconscious mind may present those possible outcomes to us.  In other words the unconscious mind has made a prediction and it is sharing it with the subconscious, and any dream that predicts the future we refer to as a premonition.  So I think it's entirely possible that premonitions are real and serve a purpose - I don't think it's because of any psychic ability or for some spiritual reason, I think it's just an openness to the act of contemplating the future with more than just your conscious mind.