Dreams: But What Do They Mean?

By Sophie Hecht from the Space Foam^TM team

Imagine this: You are sprinting through a mountain range trying to escape a dragon whose face looks like your boss. Suddenly, your flip flops fall off into lava and you tumble down the side of the cliff. Before the behemoth grabs you, you hear a loud ringing and your eyes shoot open. You look around. You’re in your bedroom; your alarm shrieking next to your ear. It was just another dream.

Dreams can make us happy, sad, scared, or downright confused. At times, they can be perfectly rational, while others can make no sense at all. Ever wonder what dreams are, why we dream, or if our dreams mean something? Many scientists have studied dreams in depth, but still don’t know all of the details. Here is what they do know:

Everybody dreams, including blind people.
People dream every night, around four to six times in fact (even if they don’t remember the dream).
Around 95% of dreams are forgotten by the time a person gets out of bed.
Most dreams occur during the REM (rapid eye movement) cycle, where the person is in their deepest sleep.

It is understood that dreams process emotions, incorporate memories, and help solve problems in our daily lives. If you go to bed with a dilemma on your mind, you might wake up with a solution, or at least feeling better about the situation.

Different experts have different opinions on why we dream. Some believe that dreams are nonsensical activities of the sleeping brain and they have no purpose or meaning. Others think that dreams are necessary for mental, emotional, and physical health. In a study to test the effect of dreams on people, researchers woke up the participants right before they entered the REM cycle to not allow them the dream. Afterwards, the participants exhibited anxiety, increased tension, weight gain, and difficulty concentrating. Some believe that this is because of sleep deprivation while others think it is a direct result from lack of dreaming.

Dreams speak in a symbolic language. If you dream about a particular subject, it is likely to be something much deeper. A suggested exercise to practice is to write down everything you remember about your dream directly after you wake up. A week later, go back and read your dream and try to see what in the past few days correlates to the story your dream told. This will help you understand the way you think and feel.

As you can tell, dreams are very important in maintaining a person's well being and state of mind. Not getting a good night’s rest and waking up in the middle of the night can disrupt your REM cycle and rattle your dreams. At Space Foam^TM, we believe that quality is better than quantity. Sleeping with the perfect pillow so you don’t wake to flip it at 2:00AM can make all of the difference. We find that our innovative, cooling, comfortable Space Foam^TM pillow is the best way to fall into a deep, dreamy sleep.