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Geek to Live: Incorporate text files onto your desktop - Desktop - Lifehacker

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Dreams: Night School | Psychology Today

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If dreams evolved to simulate the threats in our environment, then being exposed to more dangers in real life should activate the nightmare function, overstuffing our dreams with threats. This is precisely what happens. Even a single exposure to a life-threatening situation can plunge a person into an inferno of post-traumatic nightmares, dreams in which the threatening event—the attack, the rape, the war—is repeated over and over in every possible variation.
Dream researchers have known for centuries that dreaming helps problem solving, for example—but they still do not know why.
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- Some researchers argue that dreams are designed specifically to help us come up with creative solutions. But if that's the case, it's infuriatingly inconsistent—and complicated by the fact that we rarely remember our dreams.
- couples who dream about their relationship are more likely to resolve their conflicts than couples who don't.
- The implication seems obvious: Sleep provides practice.
- Stickgold holds that dreaming is much more complex than rehearsal. He points, for example, to the ability of sleep to allow us to integrate and consolidate knowledge.
- During sleep, our brains are making sense of the world, discovering new associations among existing memories, looking for patterns, formulating rules. "That's how we create meaning," says Stickgold. "Our brain puts things together."
- She contends that the purpose of dreaming is "as broad as all waking thought. That's why I say dreams are really just thinking in a different biochemical state."

Dreams: Night School | Psychology Today

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Revonsuo believes that by providing rehearsal, dreaming helps us recognize dangers more quickly and respond more efficiently. We don't need to be aware of this rehearsal, just as you don't have to recall exactly where you practiced your tennis serve in order to reap the rewards.
The dreaming brain, explains Revonsuo, scans emotional memories. When it detects a memory trace with a strong negative emotion, it constructs a nightmare around that theme. The more traumatic the event, the more intense the nightmare. The brain's system for detecting threats is sensitive and flexible: Anything the brain tags with a strong negative charge gets thrown into the threat bin and dredged up at night.

Dreams: Night School | Psychology Today

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As Harvard sleep researcher Allan Hobson puts it, dreams are "the noise the brain makes while it's doing its homework."
A dream researcher at the University of Turku, in Finland, Revonsuo believes that dreams are a sort of nighttime theater in which our brains screen realistic scenarios. This virtual reality simulates emergency situations and provides an arena for safe training. As Revonsuo puts it, "The primary function of negative dreams is rehearsal for similar real events, so that threat recognition and avoidance happens faster and more automatically in comparable real situations."

Dreams and Nightmares; Changing Unwanted Dreams, Parts I and

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nightmares dreaming

The next step is learning methods to inhibit intrusive negative imagery and promote positive imagery.
the next step is learning
to change dream scenarios into more positive and productive dramas.
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- Practice during the day is also necessary
  to learn the skills involved in re-scripting dreams.