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What Are the Causes of Human Dreams?

Dreams have always been a mystery. Many people think the cause of dreams is a psychological imbalance or a suppressed desire wanting to escape their inner minds. Others believe dreams are caused by a series of chemical reactions within the brain. Whatever the cause, dreams will continue to hold a sense of mystery and intrigue for scholars and spiritualists.

  1. Emotional Causes

    • The famous Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud stated dreams were caused by a person's repressed desires, usually sexual in nature, that are begging to be expressed. Freud further stated the more repressed a person's desires are, the more intense the dreams are. He stated that in order for people to stop having such intense dreams, they must undergo therapy to determine the source of these repressed desires. Although many advances in discovering the causes of dreams have been made since Freud's time, his theories are still used to an extent today.

    Physical Causes

    • It was later discovered that dreams are actually a production of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which is a stage of the typical sleep cycle characterized by random eye movements. The person is not aware of his physical surroundings in the waking world, but the brain creates a pseudo environment in which the person is made to think he is in a type of reality that in fact does not exist. Scientists believe the brain creates this dream state in order to regenerate the body and repair any damage during the sleep cycle.

    Genetic Causes

    • Some scientists have also discovered that genetics can predetermine if a person will dream during sleep and to what extent her dreams will be realistic. This, in essence, means your DNA has mapped out your brain to say whether you will have dreams, what kind of dreams you will have, and how intense they can be.

    Spiritual Causes

    • There are some people who also link dreaming to spiritual crisis or awakening. Some say dreams are a way of getting in touch with a person's higher power. Dreams can be interpreted as a way for the higher power to tell people what they need to do with their lives.

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