Dreams is a very interesting topic to talk about; wherever you take it. Today, we are going to talk about a subject that is not as interesting as the expressions, but as strange as they are, a phenomenon that every human being has experienced at least once.
In your dreams; There are moments when you get chased, try to beat someone or scream until you’re out of breath, but you can’t run because your legs are like pasta, you can’t punch because your arms are like jelly, and you can’t open your mouth to the fullest and scream the air you fill your lungs, here’s why they happen?
First, let’s talk about the explanations about the reasons for the problems of ‘not being able to punch’ and ‘running’ in dreams, which are related to our muscles;
- The first description describes the physical cause of the incident:
- We can’t punch while dreaming because our bodies are temporarily paralyzed during REM sleep so we don’t hurt ourselves.
- The second explanation is a little more psychological:
- We can’t punch in a dream because our subconscious is holding us back. Since most of the threats we encounter in our dreams are reflections of real life problems, we do not have enough confidence to take them down. In other words, we cannot overcome the physical threats that we cannot overcome in real life, either in dreams.
A person’s physical condition also affects how they move in real life and therefore how they punch. When a person is going to punch, a request is sent from the brain and the arm is moved with sensory feedback from the nerves of the arm muscles. But without a physical stimulus (like in a dream), the brain cannot measure how hard the punch is to be thrown.
When we punch, our brain calculates the weight of our arm, the muscle strength we have, and the softness of the opponent the punch will touch. Without this physical data, that is, when we are partially paralyzed in REM sleep, our brain can only guess at our punch.
The Thalamus, the part of the brain that regulates sensory output, restricts the transmission of the motor signals needed to complete the fist movement, as well as the perception of joint movement data. That’s why we feel like our arms are jelly when we’re dreaming.
There is a similar situation in the reason why we cannot run fast in a dream.
Just like throwing a punch, our brain sends a prompt to our leg muscles when running in real life, and the leg muscles provide sensory feedback. Likewise, the brain calculates how far your legs will go by calculating the strength of your leg muscles and the hardness of the ground your feet touch.
However, because we are partially paralyzed in the dream state, that is, in REM sleep, our brain, which cannot imagine physical data, similar to not being able to punch, makes a guess and therefore cannot obtain stable results. Therefore, our legs feel like long boiled pasta.
We will consider not being able to shout in a dream separately; because this action is controlled by a different part of the brain. But again, there are two kinds of explanations:
- Physical description:
- During REM sleep, the areas of our brain that control speech have very low activity. For this reason, we cannot shout or form proper sentences even if we want to.
- Psychological explanation:
- Due to the fact that the situations we live in suppress us, and therefore we cannot express ourselves correctly, our subconscious also causes us to not be able to speak properly in our dreams, to discharge our nerves by shouting, and to be unable to express ourselves.
We mentioned that we are in REM sleep while dreaming. In this state, our brain is still active, of course, but some areas of the brain are much less active than others. Two of these underworked areas are called the Broca and Wernicke areas.
These two brain regions control our speaking and reading abilities. Therefore, while we are dreaming, we cannot form a sentence properly, we cannot shout at the obstacle in front of us, and we cannot select letters while reading a document.
We have briefly given the psychological causes of these situations above, of course we did not give them in vain:
We have given physical explanations for the causes of these conditions, but these are not insurmountable problems. The solution lies in the psychological reason for not being able to do these movements.
On Quora, a forum where the answers to such questions are discussed among people, one person describes the situation of ‘not being able to punch in a dream’:
“One day, I had to punch the threat in front of me in my dream, but I couldn’t shake my hand against my opponent and this situation made me insecure. Then I signed up for a boxing class and really learned how to throw a punch. After a while I was faced with a similar threat in my dream and this time I had confidence as I knew how to punch and had a solid hook.”
On Reddit, another platform where people discuss the answers to such questions, a person describes how he overcame the ‘can’t shout in a dream’ situation:
“At a certain time when I was subjected to a series of nightmares, all my enemies and obstacles were falling on me in my dreams. I just couldn’t scream and call for help. In real life, I was not a person who had the ability to express myself very much.
Now these dreams really started to tire me and I started to get psychological support. My doctor suggested that I solve them by talking to my obstacles that are causing me problems. Indeed, I did, I began to express myself. I was feeling much better. I was now able to scream and ask for help in a similar nightmare I had a long time ago.”
In fact, the incident that this friend experienced shifts to ‘lucid dreaming’, that is, ‘lucid dreaming’.
The state we call ‘lucid dreaming’, which is referred to as ‘lucid dreaming’ in English, in its most basic form, refers to the fact that people have more awareness of the dreams they see in their sleep than normal.
Normally, they are not conscious during REM sleep, but during a lucid dream, people become conscious. Therefore, they gain the ability to control what happens in your dream. According to the data, about 55% of people have experienced lucid dreaming at least once in their lives.
As a result; The people who told the events had a higher awareness in their dreams because they found a way to overcome the obstacles they were stuck in their dreams.
Someone was able to become conscious in a dream and perform this action because he learned to swing his fist, and someone was able to develop his communication skills and be able to talk to people he was afraid of speaking to be conscious and perform this action in his dream.
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