Dreams Reveal Insightful Mind and Humor

 I’ve been having weird dreams lately. Not just odd or nonsensical, but the type of dreams that make you wonder what is wrong with your mind. The types of dreams that make you wonder if you’re becoming mentally unstable. A few weeks ago I dreamt that I was a turtle. This was just a precursor to many bizarre dreams to come. I had these sub-conscious reveries about all my friends dying, being replaced by another person, everything being made of cheese, me being a toilet with multiple personality disorder, etc.
  One of my latest dreams was about me killing a random person. WHAT THE HECK BRAIN!? (Note: no need to worry, I would NEVER kill someone. Ever.) Dreammoods.com suggests that the murder dream represents my letting go of an old habit or way of thinking. Or that I may have deep-rooted and repressed anger towards someone. It also says that my cheese dream may mean that something in my life is cheesy or lame. I honestly doubt this site is actually based off of scientific research.
  The people of ancient times (I mean, like people from 500 BC, not my parents) believed that dreams were what happened when the soul of a person left the body and decided to run around for a little while its body was asleep. Another ancient theory was that certain dreams could prophesy about coming things. I think it’s safe to conclude that these ideas are… invalid. I decided to do a little more research into what dreams really are and how they affect us.      
  Wikipedia says that a dream is a succession of thoughts, including images, sensations, and emotions, that occur involuntarily during certain stages of sleep. Okay, but what drives and causes our dreams? Freud believed that dreams were shaped by our unconscious desires and wishes and that most of the time, dreams are about these wishes being fulfilled.
  Wait, I want all my friends to die and for everything to be made out of cheese? Ummm… well maybe that second one (tell me that you’ve never fantasized about this), but I’m pretty sure that having all my friends die would be fairly tragic.
  I still don’t know HOW dreams happen though. WE NEED TO GO DEEPER. A few Google searches later, I learn that dreams are very strongly associated with rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM sleep. During REM sleep, the brain stops producing certain chemicals and certain parts of the brain act as if the body were awake. Some people say that dreams are the unimportant result of this increased activity.
  Others say that dreams are the product of dissociated (detached from reality) imagination. The brain uses sensory memories in order to simulate a hallucinogenic memory of these dissociated thoughts. In case you don’t speak scientist (it’s okay, I don’t either), that last sentence is basically a fancy description of a dream.
  Do my dreams mean that I am going insane? Google suggests that I might have post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I’m pretty sure that nothing too traumatic happened to me (if you don’t count the two dogs, two rabbits, and a lizard that all died tragically when I was but a child) that would cause a disorder like this.
  Another thing the internet told me was that dreams associated with blood and gore are associated with bipolar disorder. I’m pretty sure that I don’t have massive mood swings (among other things).
  Another psychological condition is dream anxiety disorder; where the person with this problem has too-frequent nightmares. This one doesn’t apply (I might have had this as a kid actually, as I used to have these recurring nightmares about being lost in a corn-maze at night with a pack of wolves chasing me).
I personally think everything being made of cheese would be pretty amazing. Anyhow, I think it’s safe to assume that I’m not mentally unstable (Yay!), but merely have a very… interesting… dissociated imagination.