Mind Rambling: Dreams, Language, and the Human Brain

Dreams. Many people think of dreams differently. Some people think dreams are messages from the gods. Some people think dreams predict the future. Some people think that dreams come from your imagination. Others think it’s a mix of what happened during the day or week. I think that the brain naturally gives you nightmares to prepare you for any bad things that happen in your life. I also think that dreams are made up of snippets of memory, both recent and old. Some that you can’t even remember normally. Its also made up of your conscience and sub-conscience, as well as opinions. Opinions that you had 5 years ago. Opinions that you recently have. And it is made of all the thoughts, images, small and insignificant memories found in the back of your head. And all these things make a dream. But a dream must be something you can sense. You must be able to reach down and feel the laces of your shoes, to be able to taste a cheeseburger, to be able to swim in a swimming pool in a castle on the moon. Which means that your brain takes the images of the dreams and makes you actually think within your dream, think the collection of thoughts that it puts together. You can run, and feel the nerves and muscles in your leg, when in reality you’re laying still. In a dream, you can eat a sandwich, feeling the bread on your teeth, the taste on your taste buds, without eating a sandwich in actuality. Its like a alternate dimension. And all those thoughts, memories, images, opinions- they aren’t chosen randomly. They are chosen to form something certain. Back in the caveman days, cavemen most likely dreamed of things compiled to indicate possibilities of what would happen if they did something, like jump off a cliff, to warn them against it. Not a nightmare. A nightmare would be to prepare them to fall off a cliff, a dream would be to plant the rule of thumb into your head and conscience. But over time, we have developed our world as it is today. Our minds have become less animal. We create language. We create entertainment.  And our natural, rule-of-thumb-granting dreams became more formed around the oddities, and unnatural, un-normal  world that we think of as normal is all included. As we grow to older and older ages before dying, and as we think more complex thoughts and opinions, the dreams become more and more as we think of them today. We used to, a looong time ago, think only in images, pictures, videos in your mind. Like animals. The difference between the big complex brain we have and that of a small animals is amazing. And most likely, the only reason our brains got so complex and human, is because we developed language. At first, it had a few words meaning different situations. Then it got more specific. More, and more, and more specific. And the more specific and complex our language got, the more specific and complex we could think. Thinking  without language is mere image. Mere natural instinct. If a moose had a language so specific as to have different words form a sentence, each word meaning something different, and being able to make so many different sentences, then it would have a brain nearly as good as ours. Here’s a sort of ratio of language to brainpower.  A few noises, meaning different situations: ape-like mind-power.  A few different sentences: dolphin-level brainpower. A small network of words and sentences: A bit more than dolphin, and emotions more understood and expressed. Making new words: about two times dolphin level brainpower. Thousands of words meaning different things: Before the medieval ages. Being able to speak language, write it, and sing: Medieval. Language has millions, maybe billions of words, songs are more than chanting, social world more developed, possibilities easily stated: Modern brainpower.