Can our dreams tell us anything valuable about our lives? What do scientists say about the topic of dreaming? Have you ever had a “de’ja’vu” dream?
Everything in the natural world has a purpose, and every function of living biology has an evolutionary purpose. Studies by anthropologists have concluded that the phenomenon of dreaming while we sleep may be a result of a prehistoric survival mechanism. Anthropology relies on artifacts and inferences, so identifying artifacts that are relevant to evolutionary psychology can be extremely difficult.
Modern psychologists have conducted some groundbreaking repeat studies on dreaming. Everyone’s neurobiology is slightly different, so for example, some people can remember their dreams while others have no dreams, and some people have even learned to control a lucid dreaming state. Many subjects of these studies throughout time report “de’ja’vu” experiences: where one remembers a given event already happening before, sometimes in great detail. In fact, what you likely experienced is seeing your de’ja’vu scene in a dream before, but you may not have necessarily remembered the given dream after you woke up. How is one to remember to connect relevant events in dreams to real-life events, especially if we have forgotten something not already regularly at the front of our minds? How can one possibly see the future in their own dreams like this?!?
The artifacts from which anthropologists most often draw from in relation to the evolution of dreaming as a survival mechanism are psychology studies on the topic today, which are not new. Many people have experienced this phenomenon including myself, as introduced below. Like with any other person, every psychologist and anthropologist has different brain chemistry from one another, so some may experience the same thing and take the topic more seriously than someone who does not and, at the moment, cannot. If millions of people around the world are experiencing de’ja’vu in their real-life events, what possible other purpose can this function of biology have?
Minus the appearance of mysticism with which the modern world generalizes topics like dreaming, putting this phenomenon in the context of a prehistoric survival mechanism makes a lot more sense. If humans are capable of foreseeing events in their dreams randomly or even using controlled methods, could such a capability be useful for foreseeing danger in specific? Prehistoric humans used to read into the symbolism of astonishing, everyday phenomenon we take for granted like gravity without the relevant knowledge we all have today such as physics. Under this “ancient shamanistic” context, how would the members of a tribe put together the symbolism if one of them tells others about a dream where hundreds of unfamiliar, angry-looking tribesmen suddenly show up to their village under a solar eclipse? Other artifacts like those related to the pantheons of the world show that more is simply going on than we think.
I have had many de’ja’vu dreams. Most vividly, I’ve seen the distinct architecture at the Fisherman’s Wharf Inn-n-Out in San Francisco before going there. But what else can symbols in dreams say to one, about the current state of the world? The "snakes" and the "owls" are keeping themselves very busy waiting to be swooped blind by the world’s latest imperialistic powers growing in might. Right now, a "rabid basset hound" is helping a "crouching tiger" take over the world, from the scenes of my hometown. I am confident in what I saw because I suddenly woke up from a dream about successfully, specifically improving world relations with North Korea on the night after, unaware of what the night before’s dream could have possibly meant until that moment. The exact symbols are mindblowing. The dreams occurred when Donald Trump gave his “rocket man” speech. Zelenskyy should not be running between all of the cliques of “bears,” “dragons,” and “eagles” at my middle school, amongst messy international relations as a result of global superpower competition.
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