Thread: Define 'Dream'

In my culture(Islam), dreams are believed to be for precognition, and, even more bizarre, sleep is when the soul rises to the heavens. I see it as:
REM is very important for stress and stuff, and dreams are the way to let that steam out. And they are great for LDing!
This is what I likely thing, but I am not sure. I'll always go with the scientific explanation

A state in which the brain creates and then perceives visual, auditory, taste, olfactory, and kinetic sensations.
Somehow a lucid mind can manipulate, trigger, and stop sensations at will (should he or she actively attempt to do so).

As for their purpose, I have no clue. I'll leave that one to the scientists.

Purpose? Whatever you want it to be or whatever you can find behind them. I often extract valuable information from my drings by metaphorically interpretating them if that makes sense to any of you (I'm sure it does to a lot, it's DV after all).

Dreams are adventures my brain creates while I'm asleep, sometimes influenced by things I've seen/heard/thought while awake, sometimes as random as they can be.

As for the purpose, I don't believe there's any. I do believe that some dreams can be interpreted for personal knowledge (for example, if you dream about drowning a lot, maybe you're going through a bad phase in your life where you feel like you can't breathe?), but my dreams are so random and crazy that I tend to see them as nothing more than stories where I play a character.

A bunch of glorified hallucinations that keep the mind active when the body isn't.

Originally Posted by splodeymissile

A bunch of glorified hallucinations that keep the mind active when the body isn't.

Lmao that's another way to look at it.

Well, I think there's truth into what everyone here has to say. That's the cool thing about dreams, there's no scientific explanation. Don't get me wrong though, I do love science.

In very general terms, a dream is a mental imagery that makes you feel like you are somewhere else than in physical reality.
This includes daydreams as well, which I consider to be almost the same thing as REM dreams, but obviously less immersive.

The definition of a typical dream, though, is the time during sleep when your brain creates sensory input from past experiences and expectations.
You think of a person, and you assume that the person is standing on the ground, which brings up further associations like houses and trees, and so on.

I think dream is realm. The pupils of the eyes are the gateway to inside, where the inner-space is vast and interconnected with others. So when we close our eyes, we go inside. When we open our eyes, we are outside.

Dreams are infinite potential manifested. I personally believe them to be just as real as waking life (not to say they are one and the same, or even similar).