Myths, religion, history, secular society, new age mysticism, and hundreds of other participants all have a stake in the game. Some have beliefs that dreams actually mean something, other see this as merely chemical interchanges in the brain. But all of them don’t really understand the why questions…even now.

I guess that it might be easy to get sidetracked into the broader (and possibly more fruitful) areas of cognition, consciousness and sentience that trying to find out why we dream.

This strikes me as an area which had a lot of questions to have answered, but I suspect that the current hoopla about the Higgs Boson will be answered sooner…

Dreams of Meaning: Where Religion and Neuroscience can’t compete
http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/tabid/68/id/11003/Default.aspx

We sleep. We dream. We do not know why.

Faith traditions have interpreted sleep and dreams as meaningful for millennia without the need for scientific grounding, though. Dreams are visits from angels, attacks by devils, and revelation from the divine. Some dreams predict the future while others seem like spiritual exhaust from the day. Dreams drove the Buddha toward enlightenment and saved Egypt from seven years of famine. They propelled Sigmund Freud to stardom through his writings on sublimated wish fulfillment and the royal road to the unconscious.

But the last century has shown a shift in focus from decoding dream content to mapping neuroanatomy and the past two decades have produced much of the technology needed to begin preliminary exploration. When we sleep, proteins knit cells together, growth hormones release, and our bodies paralyze to give our brains room to roam without physically acting out dreams. When it comes right down to it—we spend one third of our lives doing something the medical community currently understands only in scraps and pieces. Sleep research—and the cognitive sciences that engage in it—are young but promising. Each new breakthrough drives this kind of question to the fore: If we can map the neurological processes correlated with dreaming, do dreams lose their religious meaning along the way?

Be Sociable, Share!

•