Sleep Disorders Health Center
Freaky Dreams: What Do They Mean?
Consider this freaky dream. You're at a black-tie gala in a fancy hotel banquet room with lots of other people. You're all having a good time eating dinner, dancing, and talking. When it's time to go, you look for your purse, but it's gone. As you anxiously search for it, a fast-moving river appears out of nowhere, bisecting the room. Your purse is floating on the river, but you can't reach it. It is moving too swiftly. When you awaken, you're filled with a sense of panic.
Now if you plugged the dream into an online dream analyzer, such as you might find at Freakydreams.com, you'd learn that a purse is a symbol for wealth and resources, a hotel represents transition, and a river connotes emotion. Since you have been living through a kitchen remodeling -- with its attendant financial stresses and upheavals -- this dream echoes and amplifies what's going on in your waking life.
What Are Dreams?
Human beings dream, and so do, scientists believe, most mammals and some birds. On the most basic level, a dream is the experience you have of envisioned images, sounds, or other sensations while you sleep. They are an internal mental process. But dreams are actually much more than that.
Sigmund Freud's theory was that your dreams are an expression of what you're repressing during the time you are awake. And Carl Jung believed that dreams provide messages about "lost" or "neglected" parts of our selves that need to be reintegrated. Many dreams simply come from a preoccupation with the day's activities. But some offer rich, symbolic expressions -- an interface between the conscious and the unconscious that can fill in the gaps of our self-knowledge and provide information and insight.
In his book The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence, and Imagination, Robert Moss writes, "Dreams are open vistas of possibility that take us beyond our everyday self-limiting beliefs and behaviors. Before we dismiss our dream lover, our dream home or our dream job as unattainable -- 'only a dream' -- we want to examine carefully whether there are clues in the dream that could help us to manifest that juicy vision."
Why Do We Dream?
Everyone dreams every night -- even if we don't remember our dreams.
Tom Scammell, MD, associate professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, says no one knows why we dream. "There is a strong movement in the research community to research how sleep improves memory and learning," Scammell says. "One speculative possibility is that dreaming allows you the opportunity to practice things you may or may not ever have to do, like running away or fighting off a predator."
Three or four times a night, you have a period of sleep that lasts approximately 90 minutes called REM -- rapid eye movement -- sleep. It is during REM sleep that your brain is more active. And according to Scammell, it's then that conditions are right for "story-like" dreams that are rich in action, complexity, and emotion.
"You are most likely to recall dreams if you wake at the end of a REM episode," says Scammell. "Americans, who are chronically sleep-deprived, probably miss out on some REM sleep. This builds up pressure for REM sleep. So when you're catching up on your sleep, you may have more REM sleep with more intense dreams."
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Important Safety Information
- KAPIDEX may not be right for everyone. You should not take KAPIDEX if you are allergic to KAPIDEX or any of its ingredients. Severe allergic reactions have been reported.
- Symptom relief does not rule out other serious stomach conditions.
- The most common side effects of KAPIDEX were diarrhea (4.8%), stomach pain (4.0%), nausea (2.9%), common cold (1.9%), vomiting (1.6%), and gas (1.6%). KAPIDEX and certain other medicines can affect each other. Before taking KAPIDEX, tell your doctor if you are taking ampicillin, atazanavir, digoxin, iron, ketoconazole, or tacrolimus. If you are taking KAPIDEX with warfarin, you may need to be monitored because serious risks could occur.
Uses of KAPIDEX
- Persistent heartburn two or more days a week, despite treatment and diet changes, could be acid reflux disease (ARD). Prescription KAPIDEX capsules are used in adults to treat heartburn related to ARD, to heal acid-related damage to the lining of the esophagus (called erosive esophagitis or EE), and to stop EE from coming back. Individual results may vary. Most damage (erosions) heals in 4–8 weeks.
Talk to your doctor or healthcare professional. Please see full Prescribing Information for KAPIDEX.
You are encouraged to report negative side effects of prescription drugs to the FDA. Visit www.fda.gov/medwatch or call 1-800-FDA-1088.
KAPIDEX™ is a trademark of Takeda Pharmaceuticals North America, Inc., and is used under license by Takeda Pharmaceuticals America, Inc.
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