Dream

I'm not the usual active dreamer, what with being an insomniac, dreams often are short and vivid, rarely remembered, thankfully.

But occasionally i get that vivid and elaborately structured dream that is just too difficult to forget. So what is a dream?

Dream might have its etymology from the Proto- German word "DRAUMAZ" possibly meaning "DECEPTION".

My favourite book, Guyton's book of Physiology, says that dreaming is an active process. Strange, seeing how we always thought sleep was a passive state.

Sleep s REM (rapid eye movement) and NREM (non rem). Dreaming is a process (lets just say process for now) that occurs during the REM phase. Now a few characters of rem sleep are, 1. There s active movements of the eyeball while the muscle tone and movements are suppressed. 2. The brain activity s erratic. 3. The breathing and heart rates are erratic. So does this signify rem sleep and by implication dream, is an active process?
Nathaniel Kleitman and Eugene Aserinsky say that rem sleep has 2 parts. 1. Tonic 2. Phasic.

In my dream, i was scuba diving, in the depths where light is unwelcome. With me, i have a torch. Suddenly the torch goes out and i am left in pitch black. No idea which way is up which is down. I keep swimming and swimming. Until my oxygen runs out. Then i suffer a slow, agonizing, drawnout, painful death by suffocation. This is where i jolt to wakefulness sweating, with the blanket twisted around me and the bed in disarray.

Rem phase lasts around 90 to 120 mins every night. There are about 5 to 6 rounds. So the average would be 18 to 20 mins per cycle. Then why, correct me if i am wrong, do we feel that dreams last longer?
A simple physics shall answer that. Thank you Einstein. Theory of relativity. Also the brain activity is so fast that hours in a dream state last but few seconds in reality (i did not steal this concept from Inception folks).
Sanskrit scriptures describe 4 states of consciousness.
1. Jagrat- wakeful state.
2. Svapna- dream state.
3. Sushupti- dreamless higher state.
4. Turiya- spiritual consciousness.
Now if the sauna state s compared to rem and sushupti to nrem, voila, we have a conformance.

Sankaracharya says, 'Experience of deep sleep is a glimpse of self's real nature where there exists no "I" .'
Then there is the theory, forgot by whom, which correlates long term memory with active dreaming. Several neurotransmitters being implicated.

So, what is dream? It certainly is no passive meaningless process. From the way i interpret my dream, I'd say, it is like a colescing of all.
Having recently experienced a traumatic separation, perhaps, my dream draws inspiration from that. The torch being the person i lost and the subsequent loss and my depression. The emotional trauma has manifested as a dream. I fervently hope i am not seeing the future. So having said this i have substantiated the scientific explanation of long term memory and the spiritual explanation of self realisation.