Many students at AHS experience weird dreams and don’t think twice about them, but there is some psychology behind these bizarre visions. They are referred to as “vivid dreams” and over 50 percent of these visions feature the dreamer falling. These apparitions can be caused by a number of things, including sleep deprivation and stress. 

In psychology classes at AHS, students are taught dreams occur in REM sleep. REM stands for resting eye movement, and occurs multiple times throughout the night. Dreams that seem the clearest and most-memorable occur in the last REM sleep of the sleep cycle, which is close to morning.

Junior Alicia Pastrana recalls a peculiar dream where she was in “a video game where I had to save a group of kids. For each kid I saved I got 10 coins.” Pastrana needed to gain 100 coins, otherwise, the children wouldn’t make it out of the game. “These kids’ lives were really in danger because although they were only in a video game, they would be killed in real life too,” Pastrana said. She was driving a bus with some of the children she had saved and a girl on the bus was “snatched out of the bus by some force” and was dragged away from Pastrana. “I had to stop the bus and run after her because she was one of the more important people to save,” she said. Pastrana then took a sword and had to cut the “force” away, even though she wasn’t able to see anything. When Pastrana reached a certain checkpoint on the road, the “whole scene had changed, and in big letters above us it said “Level 10: The Big Boss” and then I woke up.” Pastrana was “high-key disappointed” she was unable to finish the dream.

Sophomore Hunter Weppler hasn’t had many “strange” dreams. “The weirdest dreams I’ve ever had are probably the ones when I dream about being in Florida at Disney.” Weppler said while having a good time at Disney World in his dreams, it would snap back to reality, where he would wake up “to being at my home and being disappointed.” Weppler would be riding the popular ride “Test Track” in Epcot, but when he was about to get onto the ride, “it goes back to reality and I’m just disappointed.” 

Junior Henry McCalla has “retained this dream since I was six.” McCalla was in a mess hall the size of a “warehouse” that was full of people at long tables that stretched from wall to wall. “In the far opposite corner from the door was a pickle man, not unlike the pickle people from “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2,” that were cooking hot dogs for the thousand people in there,” he said. In his dream, McCalla made friends with the “pickle man.” There was a sketchy elevator next to his grill, so naturally, McCalla and the man got on. “It took us to a big, spooky church sanctuary,” McCalla said. The next thing McCalla recalls is that they were both “on small, railed-off platforms on the wall and I’m a skeleton.” 

While vivid dreams may be slightly off-kilter, they spice up the mundane but necessary task of sleeping.