What are dreams?

Sometimes I wonder what dreams are. And this question has started troubling me a lot in the recent past; the reason being too much of sound sleep. But I too have carried out a, sort of, research on this. Although it may sound strange but yes, I’ve started experimenting with my dreams.

The findings are a hotchpotch; some quite obvious, some drastically surprising. I’ve come to know that my dreams are colourful (not always figuratively though, but technically). This is contradictory to what some of my friends, the very few with whom I’ve discussed the topic, have told me. According to them, their dreams are black and white. I’ve also noticed that I can feel things in my dreams. I can touch objects, smell odours, think, talk to people (the last one may seem obvious to almost everyone on this planet).

But, the big question that pops up in my mind every now and then is, can we learn something in our dreams? Learn something new, that is. Something that we haven’t known in our real life. This would make dreams look more like reality and less unlike it, at least in this respect. This recursively makes us ask what exactly dreams are. What is it that can make us feel the sensations as if it were real? Of course it is real, one may think. But that’s just what the word “dream” defies, just what it is an antonym of.

If ever I find out, in the course of my experimentation, that we could, or at least I can, learn new things in a dream, what should I infer from it? That dreams are real? Or they are just what they described in The Matrix as the other world; the red pill world? Are we living in two parallel universes? Or are dreams and reality two worlds of the same universe; the universe still unexplored? We just do not know.