Dream On

Another blog post with a song as the name (if you don’t know Dream On by Aerosmith click here and watch it it’s absolutely imperative) and another blog post centered around an existential question.

“What do dreams mean? Do they affect our future?”

No, contrary to public opinion I am not going insane. There is a reason I have posed myself this question. This post marks the second week of This Week I Learnt, you can see the first post here.

We are studying Romeo and Juliet, if you’ve read the play, you might know about the very odd conversation involving Mercutio and Romeo and the topic of dreams. If you haven’t that’s all cool. Here’s sort of how it goes.

Mercutio: Dreams don’t mean anything, they don’t have any correlation to your destiny .

Romeo: Yes they do. I know they do.

Mercutio: No they don’t. You’re wrong.

Romeo: Dude. Yes they do

Mercutio: I think I might going an little bit insane.

Romeo: Fair enough. Let’s go to this party.

Obviously it was much more complex and poetic than the conversation I have laid out above. You can watch a video of this scene below:

So you might be wondering who I side with. Do I believe that dreams have an relation to destiny or the future? No absolutely not. Definitive no. And here’s why:

It is somewhat proven that dreams are actually underlying neurological processes, it is hard to prove and widely disputed but it is possible that our brains are triggering emotions and memories while we sleep. But most of these are supposedly done at random. So essentially the theory is that when you sleep get a bunch of memories, feelings, sensations etc. that rise up randomly.

Now you may be sitting there and going yeah but I’ve had this one dream and the meaning was so deep and intricate it can’t just be random. Well then you might be suffering from the “Barnum Effect”. It’s not fatal don’t worry. In 1948, a professor by the name of Bertram Forer conducted a study where he had 39 students undergo a fake personality test. The answers they were given were what is now known as “Barnum Statements”. Or blanket statements. Such as: you thrive in leadership positions, you lack in emotional stability, etc. basically just the stuff horoscopes are made of. When we dream sometimes we apply one of these Barnum Statements to the dream to give it meaning.

Humans love to look for the deeper meaning in things when sometimes that just simply isn’t the case. It’s possible that dreams are just neurological processes our brain undergoes while we sleep and that they are totally random.

What do you think? Thank you for reading! “ This Week I learnt” comes out with another post next week.

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