What are Dreams?

What are Dreams?

Everyone spends about 1/3 of their lives in sleep.  Most people associated dreams with sleep, but dream scientists include day-dreams, hallucination, and other waking-but-subjective experiences within the scientific definition of dreams.


Nearly everyone dreams every night, but not everyone remembers their dreams.  It appears that dream recall responds to attitude, intention, and mindfulness practice.

Dreams are highly bizarre

Dreams are highly bizarre in many different ways

Dreams that happen during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep are characterized by their highly bizarre content. Fantastic beings, strange stories, and impossible logic are all normal for REM dreams.

Dreams also involve entities understood to be at least psychically real within shamanic or polyphasic culture.  These entities may be ancestors, spirits, elementals, angels, ETs, or NHIs.

Dreams involve strange states of consciousness like sleep paralysis and out of body experience.  The distinction between sleep and waking gets blurred when you start to look at the variety of sleep and dream phenomenon.

Dreams are often forgotten

Most people have 3-4 REM dreams a night and will likely tell you about a dream when you wake them up at any time in their sleep cycle

It's difficult to remember your dreams if no one has taught you how to remember them or even why they're important.  Most people have 3-4 REM dreams a night, but only remember 3-4 dreams a week.


Dream recall is, in part, a function of attitudes toward dreaming. Monophasic cultures like Western materialism do not respect the reality of dreams. If you don't care, you won't remember.


You can improve your dream recall in simple says: care about your dreams, set the intention to remember them, and then record them when you wake up.

Responds to attitude, intention, and mindfulness

It makes sense because your dreams are you

Dreams appear to respond to intention.  You can set an intention to remember your dreams, to have specific experiences, or to become more aware in your dreams.  


You can use your intention to shift unwanted, recurrent, or nightmarish dreams.


Dream recall seems to be a function of:

  • Attitude: if you honor your dreams, you will remember them
  • Habit: if you have the habit of recording your dreams, you will remember them
  • Mindfulness practice: if you practice mindfulness and set the intention to remember your dreams, you will remember them

Want to learn more?

Make sense of dreams by learning and practicing.  D-SETI e-courses include:

  • Practices to help you remember, record, and interpret your dreams
  • Lectures that present research-based inquiries
  • Bibliographies to help you continue your learning journey
  • Question and Answer to deepen your learning journey

Take the free e-course Dreaming 101.

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