WHY WE DREAM.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXIX, Issue 5266, 23 April 1928, Page 3

WHY WE DREAM.

A DOCTOR’S EXPLANATION.

BRAIN ONLY PARTLY ASLEEP. “If anyone doubts that dreams are. only remembered if the dreamer wakens either completely er almost completely, let him try to remember in the morning any dream which he may have had when he was dozing off to alee® the night before. The author in his own experience has never been able to do this, unless he wakened up to a greater or less extent after having the dream,” says Dr. Wiliam Elder, consulting physician to Leith Hospital, in a volume of studies in psychology. “Dreams being simply the, thoughts, ideas, and imaginations of a person whose whole communal co.insci'ousness is not awake, there can. be nothing mysterious about them. We believe with Sir Clifford Allbut that sound sleep is dreamless, and that it is only when a person is partly awake that dreams take, pace. We know that every moment of the day in our wakeful state, thoughts, ideas, memories, pictures, imaginations follow one another, in varying sequences and vividness through our consciousness. Now if that be, so is there anything surprising in the fact that the same thing occurs when the brain is only partly asleep, when the person who has been a'sleep is gradually waking up and becoming more and more conscious ? is there any* mystery if some of the thoughts, ideas, imaginations are divorced from reality, when it is known that they are only partly consciously corrected and also may be deprived! of some of thqir necessary associations because some of the associated neurones have not been stimulated? That is what constitutes the drqam. If the person were fully awake it would not be a dream, but his ordinary thoughts, ideas, etc. It is therefore easy to explain why we dream. It Would be practically impossible, to find an explanation if there were no such thing as dreaming. Absence of dreams could only result from a person awaking instantly.’’''