Dreams Provide Nighttime Escape Falling Most Common on College Dream List

Author: Abigail Mitchell

We have all had them-those utterly bizarre, other-worldly nighttime musings we call dreams. I bet at one time or another every college student has suffered the humiliation of leaving the house completely naked only to wake up at the peak of embarrassment and breathe a sigh of relief that he or she is alone and fully clothed.

Researchers did a study of the most common dreams experienced by college students. The top results were as follows: falling, being attacked or pursued, trying repeatedly to do something and failing, school, teachers, studying and a sexual experience.

Associate Professor of Psychology Marcia Collaer was amused to find that it was more common for students to dream of school-related material than of sexual encounters. "It's probably because our dreams tend to be negative," she concedes.

Most of our dreams appear incoherent and nonsensical. Erin Bell '06 reported that she had a dream in which she found herself wandering around an art museum in Boston (where she has never been) when an old woman began to pursue her. She ran for her life. Then another woman stepped onto the scene to rescue the terrified Erin and take her back to her house. When they arrived at the safe haven, Bell met the Olsen twins. She then heard the voice of her dead grandmother come through the body of her rescuer who happened to be holding a wooden bat. "It was bizarre," she said.

The ancients saw dreams as prophetic visions of the future. Sent by the Gods themselves, dreams could provide guidance and help or else warn of impending events.

Much later Freud came on the scene and proposed the idea that dreams have deep personal significance. They were the unconscious creeping out from underneath the floorboards of our imagination. Our primitive desires, fears and motives would come to light in short freeze-frame narratives.

Currently, researchers consider dreams as mere manifestations of our brain's aroused state during sleep. They contend that, in dreams, our brains operate just as they do during waking hours except for the lack of external stimuli, a state in which our memories come to the surface to play a prominent role. Dreams, which are subjective by nature, may have deep personal meaning for the individual but may not be cryptic messages sent from our unconscious.

For Elliott Turley '06, "Dreams represent our social anxieties. Most of my dreams center around a social situation gone awry. Maybe I'm insecure."

Dreams can help us in life on a practical level, but they can also enrich the quality of our life experience. Dreams can be used as a problem-solving tool in which our mind can play out various scenarios in order to find the best one.

People have been shown to practice their skills during dreams, such as a gymnast going over her floor routine, rehearsing every back handspring as if she were at afternoon practice.

Dreams can be a fun diversion, a time for indulgent exploration. We can be the Ulysses of our own odyssey. We can live many lives, take any number of risks and laugh in the face of a life-or-death decision. Dreams are the wellspring of our creativity. They flow directly from that creative source which usually lies latent, masked by the cloak of our rationality. Just take a look at Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," a creative masterpiece that was based on a dream. Those fears, anxieties and even lurid fantasies, whether unconscious or conscious, get transmitted into the medium of a movie when we dream.

The most fascinating aspect of dreams is their outlandish fantastic quality, their inability to be rendered in words.

As Joseph Conrad said, "No relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams .... No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence - that which makes its truth, its meaning - its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream - alone."