One of the brain's most astonishing capacities is its ability to create its own images called dreams without any visual input from the outside world. Whether you are sleeping or awake, your brain is constantly at work, communicating messages to you in the form of dreams. Dreams are a communication of body, mind and spirit in a symbolic communicative environmental state of being (Central 103).
We dream in order to sort out memories, either adding them to the memory store or throwing away unwanted information. It has also been suggested that dreams are an attempt by the brain to make sense of stray thoughts. Essentially, dreams are our method of relaxing and letting our minds drift away into a different world. Your brain, mind and spirit, while at rest "review" and analyze in its own way long term, short term and spirit memory. It kicks around emotions, thoughts, ideas, actions and interactions of the short term memory. All this data as well as your subconscious of what people do and say, are all processed as a dream (Central 104). I find this in my own experiences with dreams to be very true. I often find myself waking up from a dream noticing that the context of my dream has a lot to do with what is going on in my life at that time. If I am distressed and under a lot of pressure I have more intense dreams than in other times when I am in a relaxed state of mind. Sometimes I dream about the last thing that was on my mind right before I fall asleep.
In order to dream you must enter the REM sleep phase. REM is a time when your heart rate rises , your breathing becomes rapid and irregular, and every half minute or so your eyes dart around in a momentary burst of activity behind closed lids (Myers p.192). I find that I can slip into REM fairly fast once and while, usually when I have been deprived of a lot of sleep. Once I was in class and hadn't gotten very much sleep the night before. I decided to rest my head on the desk and the next thing I know I am playing baseball in a dream.
