We're amazingly gullible when we're asleep, especially considering how cognitively "awake" we are as humans. This higher consciousness is what's supposed to separate us from the animals, except it goes straight out the window the minute our brains decide it's time for yet another mad (and logistically impossible) storyline.
I dreamt recently I was hovering in the air above a horse that was talking animatedly to the sea. Not once did it occur to me, mid-dream, that the scenario was unlikely or weird - instead, I marveled at the horse's positive attitude.
In another, I suddenly had a six-year-old son who kept sneaking away to the men-only bathhouse. Did I remind myself - as actual, real life panic began to rise - that this was a fictional situation? That probably, at some point, I would have noticed I'd had a child? No, I was far too busy searching madly for a male stranger to go into the bathhouse and fetch it back again.
It's like our mind suddenly splits in two: one half a nutty story teller weaving the latest inane narrative, the other half a dumb, nodding child, wholly accepting of chatty cavalry and surprise sprogs.
Given this nocturnal naivety, it's no wonder our dreams affect our daily emotional lives - that you can wake up stressed, sad or anxious thanks to their content. For lack of a better term, they can give you an emotional hangover.
This was the premise of a new study by researchers at Maryland University, who wanted to know if our dream-life affects how we treat our partners in real life. Or, as the study
itself puts it: the extent to which dreams of close others would predict subsequent waking experiences with those partners.
