Contentment

Do you ever feel completely content with life? Do you ever just have one day where everything seems okay, everything seems to have fallen into place. Even if it’s just for one day.

Even if it’s 1a.m. and you’re lying in bed and looking around your room and just for the moment, everything seems right.

The problem with feeling content is that it never lasts too long. I see a lot of people saying they feel content and the next day it’ll be the opposite. It’s funny that you can feel so content one day and the next you may feel like you’re falling apart; I feel like we should live for that content feeling, we should remember how it felt and that it’s possible for everything to be okay.

I know that it would be hard (but not impossible) to constantly feel okay, to constantly feel at peace with your life - this is why contentment is such a great feeling. You know that you’re okay.

Perhaps you’ve started something new and you’re succeeding at it and it’s making you feel good; maybe you stuck to your schedule; maybe something generally amazing happened that put all your worries aside and you just feel happy. Anything can make you feel content, it’s just what breaks that feeling that I find to be the problem, so I prefer not to focus on it.

When you feel content, it’s almost like life has come to give you a hug and pat you on the back, as though you’ve achieved something; even if you haven’t. It’s that moment where you just wish everything could stay as it is because you wouldn’t mind feeling that for the rest of your life. 

Contentment is defined as ‘a state of happiness and satisfaction’ which, in truth, can be found in mostly anything, so why do we feel it so little? In my opinion, it’s because the more we get, the more we want. It is said that the richer you are, the less giving you are with money because you have more so you want more; of course I am not saying this is true for everyone. I feel like we should all realise that we could have nothing, or a lot less than we have now and just appreciate what we have. It would be hard for me to say ‘look, your life is good, appreciate that’ because I know I’d be a hypocrite to say such thing because, my life is good but sometimes I don’t appreciate that.

It’s only moments like this that make me realise I’m fine and I’m okay and one day I’ll be sat in my own kitchen eating breakfast at 11am on a Sunday morning and regardless of whether I’m alone, with a partner or a family, I’ll have made it. This is how I get through the hard times - I think of contentment and how one day I will be content with life and what I have and I will have made it. All the hard times, all the worries of ‘will I go to uni?’ or ‘will I make it through college?’ will one day be over. And, in all honesty, I think it’s what everyone should live for. Don’t live for your best friends or your pet dog, live for the day where you look back and feel happy that you stayed. Live for the feeling of contentment every day.

Dreaming

I love dream theories and when people look up the meaning behind their dreams and take things from it. I love the idea of writing your dream down as soon as you wake up and then being confused three days later. It’s something I aim to do next year.

But, the best thing about dreams? In my opinion, it’s that, even now, scientist don’t know why we dream. As I said, I love dream theories, I love reading about why people think we dream, however out of blue or well thought out they are. I thought I’d share some with you. (If you’re not into science I really hope these make sense and you enjoy these because it may get very science-y).

1) Wish Fulfilment.

This is a theory that claims that whatever we dream, happy, sad, scary or dull, is us granting ourselves wishes we have now or had in the past. I like this idea, the idea that we once wanted (or currently want) something that maybe we cannot get in reality so instead our brain functions whilst we sleep in a way that allows us to create a scenario in which we achieve that wish. We get what we wanted.

2) Dreaming is a random by-product of REM sleep.

In which dreaming serves no actual purpose. REM stands for rapid eye movement, it is characterised by quick, random movements of the eyes and paralysis of the muscles, therefore dreaming occurs as a by-product of this. It is not necessary, it serves no purpose and has no meaning in the long run.

3) The"reverse learning" theory.

This theory suggests that we dream to be rid of undesirable connections (or associations) that build up in our brain. As if our dreams are a garbage collection mechanism. It says we dream to forget, to eliminate information overload. If there is something we do not wish to remember, it goes in the ‘garbage collection’ into a dream and is forgotten. (Which seems odd to me, seeing as we remember our dreams a lot of the time).

4) Consolidating what we’ve learnt.

Contradicting the previous theory, this one says we dream to remember. It is based on many studies and explains that we retain information better when we dream about what we’ve learnt. If there is something about our day, or week, that we ‘need’ (or want, I assume) to remember, it becomes a dream and we remember it.

5) Painful emotions = symbolic associations.

To me, this suggests that our dreams help us to link certain emotions with a thing. So, your dreams deal with certain emotions, but emotions do not specifically cause dreams. It means that when we go through a certain emotion we are more likely to have a dream related to that emotion, or an opposite emotion.

I feel like that was as least science-y as I could make it.

Whilst personally, I cannot identify with many of these theories, I am not dismissing them. They all intrigue me and make sense in their own right and maybe they all have impacts on us. As someone who enjoys the science behind everyday things and also researching things, I find it fascinating that such an obvious thing as dreaming does not yet have a definitive reason or explanation.

If you research a little deeper, you can find so many websites with their own explanation, or a list of explanations as to why we dream, but why do we not have one that everyone knows? Mainly, of course, because science has not yet developed the technology to discover such thing but as science improves and new things appear every week, what happens when we do know? Won’t it be scary to know what is causing these dreams that are so abstract and often weird? Will it be exciting, perhaps we could create our own dreams, further than lucid dreaming¹, beyond anything before? I feel it could be somewhere between the two but I feel like it won’t be too long before we truly know the science between dreaming.

¹A dream in which you are aware you are dreaming, you can learn to lucid dream and therefore chose your dreams, I believe.