为什么说不要把梦轻易告诉别人？（双语）

为什么不能把你的梦告诉别人

Why You Shouldn\\\\\'t Tell People about Your Dreams

译者：WinterZhang

原文作者：Jim Davies 

I had a friend who tried hard to remember more of her dreams. She’d write them down and then tell people about them. She stopped, though, because it started interfering with her social life. She\\\\\'d start talking about her dreams and people would leave the room.

我有一个朋友，她总是尽力尝试记住自己做的梦。她把梦境写下来并且告诉别人。但她后来改掉了这个习惯，因为这开始影响她的社会生活，每当她聊起梦时，人们就会选择离开。

There are two major theories about why we dream. The first is the activation- synthesis theory, which holds that dreams are interpretations by our forebrains of essentially random activity from the spinal cord and cerebellum during sleep, especially REM sleep.

关于梦境产生原因的理论有两个：第一个是激活合成理论，这个理论主张梦是睡眠中，尤其是在异相睡眠中前脑对随机活动的感知和理解，这些活动的根源来源于脊髓和小脑。

Part of the explanation for why dreams can be so weird is that they are interpreted from chaotic information. The evolutionarily older parts of our brains are also the seat of our basic emotions. According to this theory, the emotion comes first and dreams are made to make sense of the emotion. Evidence of this comes from scene-changes that happen: when we have anxiety dreams, for example, they often switch from one anxious situation to a different one—so rather than us feeling anxious because of the content of our dreams, it could be that our feeling is causing an anxious narrative in the dream!

至于梦境为何如此离奇，一部分是因为它们的诠释信息是杂乱的。我们大脑中不断进化的旧零件也是我们基本情感的酝酿基础。根据这个理论，首先产生情感，梦想赋予它们意义。这一理论的证据来自于情景变化：当我们做焦虑的梦时，比如，情景往往会从一个焦虑的情形转换为另一个情形——因此，不是因为梦境的内容让我们感到焦虑，而是我们的感觉在梦境中创造了一个焦虑的故事。

The other major theory of dreaming is “threat simulation theory,” which holds that the evolutionary function of dreaming is for us to practice how to behave in threatening situations. There\\\\\'s a lot of evidence for this theory too.

关于做梦的另一个主要理论是“模拟威胁理论”，这个理论主张，做梦的进化功能让我们练习如何应对威胁的情境。关于这个理论的证据也有很多。

First, most dream emotion is negative. Also, people tend to dream of ancestral threats: falling, being chased, natural disasters, and so on. These frightening elements are overrepresented in dreams—that is, we see them in dreams much more than our experience in our day-to-day world would predict. Lots of people dream of being chased by animals, but how often does this actually happen to people? The overrepresentation of animals chasing us in dreams, especially for children, suggests that we have some innate fear of them. In contrast, we don’t dream of modern threats, such as heart attacks, as much as you’d expect if dreams were based on the problems we actually face in today’s world.

首先，大多数梦境中的的情感都是消极的。同样，人们倾向于梦到祖先延续下来的那些威胁：坠落、被追赶、自然灾害等等。这些令人恐惧的元素在梦境中占有很大的比例——也即是说，我们在梦境中经历这些场景的频率远远多于我们每天在现实世界中能够预见的。许多人梦到自己被动物追赶，但是这种情形有多少几率会真正发生呢？在梦境中被动物追赶，尤其是小孩被追赶，这个高频率的情景表明了我们对这些场景有着天生的恐惧。相反的，我们不会梦见现代社会中的威胁，比如心脏病。同样，你也不会期待梦境的基础是我们在当今世界中遇到的问题。

These two theories of dreaming are often presented as competing, but as far as I can tell they are compatible—that is, even if dreams are interpretations of chaotic input from the spinal cord, there is still a theory needed to describe how chaotic input is elaborated into narratives that we experience as dreams, and it\\\\\'s quite possible that the mind takes advantage of this opportunity to practice dealing with dangerous things.

尽管这两个理论往往以互相矛盾的形式呈现，但目前我认为它们是可以同时存在的——即使梦境是对传输给脊髓神经的混乱信息的理解，我们依然需要理论来对混乱信息变为故事的过程进行解释，这些故事也就是我们所谓的梦境。而且我们的心智很有可能利用这一过程的优势，练习如何处理危险的事情。

Why do we feel the urge to talk about our dreams? A suggested ramification of threat simulation theory relates to the idea that “two heads are better than one:” discussion of dreams might be adaptive if they help us mentally prepare for threats. We like to talk about dreams to help us prepare for how to act in dangerous situations in the future.

为什么我们要这么急切去讨论我们的梦？“两个脑袋比一个好”，这种观点可以称作是模拟威胁理论的一个衍生理论。如果梦境能够在精神上帮助我们应对威胁，那么对于梦的探讨或许能够增强我们的适应能力。在未来，我们将会通过讨论梦境来帮助自己应对危险的情境。

Which leads us to why we find our own dreams so interesting. There are three reasons based on known psychological effects, though all of them are speculative in terms of my application of them to dreams.

这让我们知道为什么我们发现自己的梦也如此有趣。基于已知的心理影响，梦境如此有趣的主要原因有三个：

The first is negativity bias, which makes us pay attention to dangerous things.

首先是负面偏见，这让我们关注危险的东西。

The second reason has to do with the emotional primacy of dreaming—because so many dreams are so emotional, they feel important in a way that people hearing about them, not feeling that emotion, might find hard to relate to. Once I dreamed of a terrifying staircase. When I told my girlfriend about it, she laughed at me for being scared of such a harmless thing. In the dream it was scary, but clearly my audience couldn’t appreciate that.

第二个原因：梦境遵循情感至上原则——因为许多梦都很情绪化，它们很重要，但是如果你难以跟梦境关联，就感觉不到这种情感。我曾经梦到过一个恐怖的楼梯，当我跟女朋友谈起这个梦时，她嘲笑我竟然会被这种无害的东西吓到。在梦境中它非常吓人，但我的听众明显没有领会到这种感觉。

We tend to think of dreams as being really weird, but in truth about 80 percent of dreams depict ordinary situations.We’re just more likely to remember and talk about the strange ones. Information we don\\\\\'t understand can often rouse our curiosity, particularly in the presence of strong emotion. Just like someone having a psychotic experience, the emotional pull of dreams make even the strangest incongruities seem meaningful, and worthy of discussion and interpretation.

我们倾向于把梦看做是很奇怪的东西，但事实上大约80%的梦都描述了正常的情景。只是我们更倾向于记住或者谈论那些奇怪的梦。那些我们不理解的信息往往能激发好奇心，尤其是在强烈情感流露下。就像那些得过精神病的人一样，在情感推力的作用下，就连最离奇最不现实的梦境都似乎有了意义，并且值得我们去探讨和解释。

These reasons are why most of your dreams are going to seem pretty boring to most people. But if you’re going to talk about some of your dreams, pick the ones in which you deal with a problem in some new way.

这就是为什么你的大部分梦境对别人来说都很无聊。但如果你要讲述你做的梦，请分享你如何用新方法解决梦境中的问题。

©版权声明：本文译者：WinterZhang，翻译来源：译言，地址：http://t.cn/RKhP582；原文地址：http://t.cn/RKhvm3H