The term dream designates the act of rest of a living organism and is opposed to what is called the waking state or being awake. The dream it is characterized by being a state in which there is very little physiological activity (blood pressure, respiration and heartbeat) and very low response to external stimuli.
Dreaming is something involuntary for the human being and generally in the dream there is a reworking of situations experienced while we were awake and that were carefully stored in memory and contrary to what we would suppose that they would already be forgotten, some of these will reappear in our dreams as a result of this process.
When we fall asleep we enter a kind of virtual reality that is made up of images, sounds, thoughts, and sensations. Meanwhile, we can not always remember what we dream, sometimes it may be that we remember very vividly a situation that presented itself to us in a dream or perhaps we go to the other extreme and we do not remember anything or just an image or a feeling that we were left with. .
Although the human being has always lived this possibility of dreaming, it will not be until the last century when more progress is made on this subject and important discoveries and advances in this regard, as was achieved by the American psychologist William Charles Dement, who discovered that in a sleeping stage, the sleeper experiences rapid eye movements (REM) accompanied by an increase in blood pressure, respiration and heartbeat, something that was only thought possible in the waking state.
Psychology has also played a fundamental role when it comes to talking about sleep. For instance Sigmund Freud and the stream that he founded, psychoanalysis have distinguished between two types of dream content, the manifest and the latent. In the first the story is as the sleeper repeats that he lives it, while the second for psychoanalysis is what that dream really wants to mean, obviously it would be the opposite of the one experienced by the sleeper and it is here where the psychoanalyst enters the scene to truly interpret it.
In short, and beyond these Freudian questions of interpretation or those that gave a prophetic value to sleep in ancient times, sleep turns out to be a necessary and recommended state for both health and good performance, whether in the study or in the job.
