Samiul Bashar Samin
In some ways, our brains function differently during sleep as opposed to when we are awake.The areas are responsible for logical reasoning, planning and maintaining focus on the most obvious solutions to problems. Among other things, the prefrontal cortex prevents ‘mind-wandering’. But, for solutions to difficult problems, based on remote associations, mind wandering or ‘thinking outside the box’ might be just what is required to make non-obvious connections.
It has to do with the way the brain works; it doesn’t passively receive information about the external world but, rather, actively interprets that information and looks for patterns in it. If everything were random, there would be no patterns, and prediction would be impossible. You can predict only by discerning a pattern in your experience (or knowledge, which is a sub-set of your experience). Are there regularities or sequences in events? Do some events generally occur with others? If there are associative patterns in events, they can be used to help predict what will happen next.
Some patterns are deterministic and logical. For example, day follows night. Day and night are, therefore, associated as a sequence in the human mind, and we can predict that day will occur after night. Another example: traffic is worst at commuter times, and heavy traffic is associated with commuting. This isn’t an association determined by natural law but, without human intervention to stagger commuter times or alter traffic flows, you can still predict the bad traffic around 8am.
The ability to identify patterns is a hallmark of the human mind. Our visual system has an almost infinite capacity for pattern recognition. But why would our awake brains specialise in identifying logical, deterministic patterns while our brains in REM sleep are better at detecting probabilistic ones? And why do the REM dream images – which portray these probabilistic patterns – remain unconscious?
While we can’t say that dreams come true, we can say that they predict. I don’t believe that I will ever walk along a suburban street, see a house smothered in sand, and feel afraid. But I do think that my dreams identify probabilistic patterns in my experiences that, in the past, were used to predict experiences at ‘landmark’ places. And if you think about it, dreams can also predict how I will act in certain situations because I unconsciously anticipate their consequences. For example, you now know that if someone I love is thinking of buying a house a person has died in, I will want to say: ‘Don’t buy that house.’ If you knew what the associations I make in dreams mean, you would be able predict things about me. But if you don’t share my experiences, I don’t think you can interpret my dreams
. The ‘hidden’ code helps us act intuitively and rapidly to navigate them. Does it help to try to decipher a hidden dream code? Yes, particularly if a hidden code is making you fearful in situations that are not actually dangerous. Like me being afraid when alone in a house. You might think you know yourself, but you will have more insight still if you understand yourself through your dreams.