How we store our dreams

For thousands of years, people have written and reported being awake in dreams. Many people report having very real dreams. Experiences of flying, feeling the wind, touching the ground and eventually falling and jolting out of your bed. The experience to many is as real as the real world.

Lucid dreaming has captured the eyes more recently to neurologists and scientists because they believe that lucid dreaming could be an open window in studying consciousness. With the help of EEG, Brainwave mapping, Electrical brainwave stimulation and current research in Parapsychology. There is more evidence than before.

There are five stages of sleep.

Stage 1 - This stage is where you are in light sleep, where you can easily be woken up. Its where your muscles movements slow down and your eyes relax.
Stage 2 - Your eye movements stop and your brainwave slows down. Bursts of brainwaves (sleep spindles) spike.
Stages 3 & 4 - Low Delta brainwaves are reached, you are in deep sleep. it is in this stage that dreaming is usually studied and researched because of the fluctuations in other brainwaves, such as Gamma and Beta being present, most likely due to being more conscious in the dream, this is where REM (Rapid Eye Movement) is present.
Stage 5 - Delta brainwaves remain exclusive to this stage, not many traces of other brainwave states other than Delta are present, muscles and eye moments are still.

REM (Rapid Eye Movement) is an interesting subject to study. This stage of sleep is where dreams usually take place. During REM, tells the pons, which is located at the base of the brain, to send signals down to the spine to turn off neurons, which allows paralysis to the rest of the body, which stops you from acting out your dreams & disturbing your sleep, and most likely saving you from imagery. You could imagine if this didn’t happen, how dangerous or even a mess would your bed or bedroom be from waking. During deep sleep and dreaming, your eyes may move and you may also even talk. I know this has happened to me many times, I have witnessed me talking out my dreams and explaining what is going on, using a great app like a sleep-talk recorder, which will only record what you say in your sleep. Playing it back It would remind me of my dream experiences because I would be reminding myself of what I said. During the REM phase, this is where the connections to brain cells are weakened, not like they were when you are awake. This was found by two studies published in Science outline. They outlined two theories. Information processing: which allows for memory consolidation and Restorative: which maintains repairs and flushes out toxins.

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Are dreams stored in the brain? Using EEG mapping, studies have shown that the pre-frontal cortex of the brain is where brain activity occurs. This part of the brain is where memory, recall and high activity is stored. This is interesting to know, because I have often got to remember my dreams by tapping my forehead, closing my eyes and remembering the last dream I had, this usually wakes up the rest.
An American research team at UC Berkely found that the part of the brain called the right inferior lingual gyrus, associated with the visual cortex is where dreams are either generated or transmitted, which is the middle part of the prefrontal cortex and the middle brain which is connected to the pineal gland, a gland where consciousness is known to originate.

Dreams are a beautiful way for us to deal, face and process our emotions from our physical lives. It helps us deal with anxiety and traumas. Without dreams, we would not have a break from this world, to reflect, meditation is also very similar because it allows us to gain information and clarity.