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Dreams are significant because they reveal how the unconscious mind functions. In order to control your emotions it will help to understand how wild and crazy the unconscious mind is. The unconscious mind acts on impulses not rational thought. The experience of emotion is driven by the unconscious. When something happens you don’t think “I’m going to feel happy about that” you simply are happy for unconscious reasons. The unconscious mind works on impulses and learned responses. Since the “happy” response is learned it can be changed in part, however, because how your mind directs your emotions how to feel. It is important to understand, however, that emotions need to be lead on to how they should feel because they are illogical and function unconsciously, similar to how dreams function.

We need the escape of dreams from the logical, rational world in which we operate. There is a desire within humans to break everything down and tear everything apart. Why? Because breaking things is fun. No one wants to see everything continue as usual, why? Because things continuing as usual represents nothing out of the ordinary. Things that are out of the ordinary are going to be more emotional, and more stimulating. That’s why humans intentionally engineer their dreams, to have something fun to escape into. Take this dream “We’re in a hotel. We all have rooms, but we’re in Steve’s room. There are multiple beds that may be stacked. We are trying to make music. A boy starts playing guitar and it’s fantastic. Steve holds up my cell phone, it’s recording, he hands it to me. Steve asks me to play it back. There is a lot of music. One song my clarinet is so sharp. Steve says ‘if you can’t hear that…’ condescending. Steve leaves the room. We are competing for his attention, girls and boys. I am on a bed that is high. I know I’m the favorite and they’re asking me about it and I decide to leave. I slide off the bed, then reach up under the rail and grab a black candle (handmade) and a cigarette and something else.” It should be obvious that that is a fun event.

If you take all dreams and think about them, you will realize that they are fun, even nightmares are fun because they are emotional. It is fun for a person to have a deeply emotional experience because it is stimulating, people will do anything for stimulation even if that stimulation is a negative emotion. All dreams represent some sort of significant or large emotional event. The event doesn’t have to be real it just has to provoke a large emotional reaction in the person. As long as this emotional reaction doesn’t incur damage, then all emotional reactions are good. It is the saying, what doesn’t hurt you only makes you stronger, only it’s more like, what doesn’t hurt you only makes you stronger. So if it’s emotion, and it doesn’t hurt you, then it makes you stronger and you even like it.

People enjoy all their dreams while they are sleeping, because during sleep they are solely emotional beings. As solely an emotional being you aren’t engaging the logical part of your brain. So even if you dream about something like the death of your parent, you are still going to enjoy the dream because it is emotional and you’re not thinking about the consequences of that. That is why you dream, because dreaming is fun, even if it isn’t fun to think about when you wake up. If you were awake and thinking clearly you’d realize that you don’t want your parent to die, but during the dream you are solely and emotional being and just interested the thrill of the death of a loved one.

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Source:  OpenStax, A cognitive perspective on emotion. OpenStax CNX. Jul 11, 2016 Download for free at http://legacy.cnx.org/content/col10733/1.26
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