Why Do I Keep Dreaming About Justin Beiber?

I was standing in a crowd of people, and we were all looking up at a man standing on top of an enormous light house. I asked my friend, “Who is that?” and she responded, “Its Justin Beiber”.

I was walking around a shopping mall holding about a million shopping bags, and in the distance…I saw Justin Beiber.

I was sitting on a roller coaster getting ready to launch high sky into the air, and I was scared as ever. But then I turned my head to see the person sitting next to me, and there he was. Justin Beiber.

Honestly, I don’t think about Justin Beiber a lot. So why does he keep showing up in my dreams?

This article is going to answer not only my question, but also yours. Have you ever wondered why we dream about the things we do? Well, there are two popular explanations.

1) Freud’s Dream Theory

A famous psychologist who lived in Austria more than a hundred years ago developed one of the most well-known theories of dreams. He was named Sigmund Freud. Freud believed that there are two types of thoughts in our minds. The first was the conscious mind, it represents the thoughts we are aware of, can remember and can be dealt with. The second is the unconscious mind; thoughts, wishes and desires that we are unaware of and are repressed. Thoughts are usually pushed into the unconscious because we don’t want to remember or deal with them, even though we don’t know we’re doing it.

Freud believed that some of the unconscious leaked into dreams, and since our mind knows that these thoughts, that we have chosen to forget, may harm us, it constructs symbols that represent the unconscious thought, but still hides its true meaning.

This is why Freud considers there to be two layers to a dream:

The manifest content: what the dream seems to mean on the surface.

The latent content: the underlying, true meaning of the dream in which your unconscious thoughts are attempted to be covered up.

2) Activation Synthesis Theory

Hobson and McCarley formed a different theory in 1977. They were biologists, so they took a very different approach to the question of dreams from Freud. They stated that when sleeping, during a stage of sleep called REM (rapid eye movement) which happens around 5 times a night, dreaming occurs. This process is called random activation.

This is because during REM, neurons in the brain will activate and engage in activity randomly, and the brain tries to interpret this information into a story to make it make sense. This ‘sense’ is the dream.

In conclusion, there is no straight forward answer to ‘why we dream the things we do’, but instead there are many studies and theories that attempt to unravel the mystery of it. So for me, either it is a coincidence that I continue to dream about Justin Beiber, or I am secretly in love with him. Personally, I would find the latter unlikely, but who knows? It might be the work of my unconscious after all!

Sources:

http://media.philly.com/images/activebrain.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/Sigmund_Freud_LIFE.jpg

http://media.philly.com/images/groggy.jpg

http://media.philly.com/images/groggy.jpg

Edited by: Shruti Ram