What Causes Really Strange Dreams?

Sleeping and dreaming are inescapable aspects of the human experience. Dreams have captivated the human imagination since time immemorial. Even today, much remains to be scientifically understood about dreaming. Dreams can be a deeply pleasant or even insightful experience, but they also can be bewildering and terrifying. A number of internal and external factors work together to produce unusually strange dreams.

The Science of Dreaming

• The science of dreaming has evolved a great deal and remains an active field of study among neurologists, psychologists and others. Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung conceived of dreams as the manifestation of unconscious impulses that our conscious mind could not handle. They considered dreams to be mostly the product of psychosexual urges and neuroses. Later advances in technology allowed psychologists to study brain images of dreaming people and explore the parts of the brain that are the most active while dreaming. Science also has discovered the role of the sleep cycle in dreams; some phases of sleep are dreamless while others involve active dream activity.

The Subconscious Mind

• Very strange dreams are products of the goings-on in the subconscious mind. During sleep, the conscious mind is shut off, and the subconscious mind processes the emotions, events and impulses of a person's life. It's well-established and widely experienced that preoccupations or recent events can work their way into dreams. Therefore, an unusual dream could be produced by the confluence of disparate experiences in real life or strong emotional states interacting with memory.

Mental Illness and Psychological Trauma

• Mental illness can produce vivid, unpleasant and bizarre dreams. This is especially true of people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder who may relive iterations of a traumatic event in dream form. Survivors of war often endure unusual dreams in which their post-traumatic stress manifests repeatedly.

External Stimuli

• Although the conscious mind is inactive during dreaming, external stimuli can still influence the content of dreams, giving them a strange twist. For example, auditory stimuli in the room, such as a television set left on, can become part of the dream and produce bizarre, twisted reveries about exercise equipment and diet pills. One study even showed that olfactory stimuli -- scents and smells -- can color the emotional flavor of a dream and give it a strange twist.