Skip to main content

Understanding Dreams!

Do you remember what you dreamt last night? Even if you can’t and are under the impression that your sleep was dreamless, you would have actually dreamt more than 2 hours or 25% of the time that you slept.
Dreams are successions of images, ideas, emotions and sensations occurring involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. Good or bad, dreams always take us to some interesting places.  They can range from normal and ordinary to the surreal and bizarre. Dreams can at times spring a creative thought or give a sense of inspiration. Dream imagery is usually absurd and unrealistic and they are generally outside the control of the dreamer. They can vary from frightening, exciting, magical, and melancholic to adventurous.
Dreaming is as old as human history; it finds mention in ancient Mesopotamian, Chinese, Assyrian, Greek and Indian texts. Credit for the first serious attempt to study and understand dreams, called Oneirology, go to the European scientist-philosopher Sigmund Freud, who described it as “the royal road to the unconscious” mind when we lose our consciousness during sleep.
Men and women probably dream just as much but women tend to remember dreams better, especially during pregnancy. Several factors influence dreams of which smell is particularly important. People exposed to smell of rotten eggs while sleeping, report bad dreams when woken up. On the other hand, smell of roses during sleep produce pleasant dreams.
Sound also affect the quality of dreams. The sound of falling water often results in dreams of swimming or seas, and can often trigger bed wetting, as often happens when it rains at night. A child sleeps well when soothing “lories”are sung to him.
Bad dreams are not uncommon, and often take the form of falling or being chased. They generate a lot of anxiety and may wake you up with panic and sweating. They are common when the body or the mind is in pain, when the external stimuli such as smell and sound are unpleasant, during indigestion and when the blood sugar drops during sleep as in some diabetics on insulin. It is also associated with use of certain medications like propranolol or barbiturates. Dreams of choking and strangulation are common when suffering from blocked nose, chest infection, or during passive smoking.
Good sleep, of which dream is an essential part, helps our brain to regulate mood, solve problems, reduce stress and feel refreshed. Dreamless sleep, as happens with certain sleeping drugs or under the effect of alcohol, lacks these benefits.
Your dreams could tell you much about the state of your health. If you are getting pleasant dreams, you are probably physically well, getting adeqaute sleep and are in a stable state of mind. If you are getting recurrent bad dreams, there is something that is desperately trying to draw your attention. Listen to it!
As published in HT City( Hindustan Times) dated 11 September, 2011.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Food Fads in Liver Disorders

In an attempt at trying to do well to those they love, spouses and parents often enforce diets on patients of liver diseases that often turn out to be detrimental. The commonest food fad is pale insipid boiled cabbage being doled out to nauseous patients suffering from hepatitis that makes them puke even more.  The liver, in a way, is a buzzing manufacturing unit that requires lots of energy to keep its multiple functions going. And it derives all this from the food we eat. During disease, such as during an attack of jaundice, when many of the liver cells get killed, the liver attemptsdamage control by trying to regenerate quickly. For its cells to multiply however, it requires a generous supply of energy that comes from carbohydrates, and protein, the building block for its cells and tissues. Boiled green vegetables unfortunately have neither of these. Hence the situation often progresses to that of a starved liver unable to recuperate due to cut-off food suppl...

The Doctor’s Dress

The familiar white coat worn by physicians as their distinctive dress for over 100 years, has started generating  murmurs  of controversy. It is not uncommon to find the blood pressure to be higher when measured by a white-coat-wearing-doctor in the hospital or clinic than the readings obtained at home by relatives.  This is due to the anxiety that the white coat and the hospital setting evokes in patients, and has been termed “White Coat Hypertension”. Mature clinicians often routinely subtract a few points from these measurements when entering records in case charts or calculating the dose of anti-hypertensive medications to be prescribed. The white coat scares children too.  Kids often express their dislike for this dress by crying and screaming and by denying access to their bellies or chest for examination by paediatricians in this attire. Many pediatricians across the world have folded up their white coats and taken to informal colourful dressing to...

Uberification of Health Care

The imaginative concept of matching transportation demands of people with cab facilities using a smartphone platform that Uber is credited to having created is now beginning to be applied to health care as well. At the outset, let me share with you what I understand of Uber. It is an on-line transportation company that develops, markets and operates the Uber mobile app, which allows consumers with smartphones to connect with Uber drivers through a software platform for taxi service. Uber itself does not own any assets such as cars, or hire the drivers. Uber was founded by Tavis Kalanick and Garrett Camp as recently as 2009 in San Francisco, but the impact and success of this “start up” has reverberated across the world, being now valued at US $ 62.5 billion. Fresh successful ideas in one domain often tickle the minds of entrepreneurs in other fields. Healthcare experts are now trying to explore if they can bring about a revolution in their sector as well. The proposition se...