0.8 The psychology of emotions, feelings and thoughts  (Page 84/89)

This emotional nature of emotion (separate from higher order thinking or learning ability) is best demonstrated during dreaming, where a person is entirely unconscious and therefore one can see how emotions (which are unconscious thoughts) function. Dreams are random, chaotic and rarely make sense – that is a reflection of the nature of emotion itself. During a dream you rarely know who you are and things occur which often reflect that you really don’t know where you are. There isn’t a strong sense of self in dreams because you can’t think clearly about yourself. “Thinking” is something which doesn’t really occur in dreams, because if you were thinking you’d realize that you were dreaming, and your mind would switch from its unconscious thinking which consists of making up an elaborate story for a dream to conscious thinking where you wouldn’t do that, or be capable of making up such a complex story and complex visual data that quickly. Emotion can really be defined then just as complicated confusion, such as exists in dreams, which are almost entirely emotional.

Dreams are so out of the ordinary in order to generate more feeling and emotion. The out of the ordinariness in dreams, however, also makes them less logical and make less sense. This means that in order for something to be emotional, it needs to not make sense; if it made sense, then it would be conscious thought not emotion, and that emotion therefore could be defined simply as stuff that doesn’t make sense that you think about, not just as unconscious thought. And “stuff that doesn’t make sense” isn’t going to be remembered because it isn’t stuff that you can think about consciously because it doesn’t make sense. Dreams still make sense to some degree, since there are events in them which are at least somewhat real. So while emotions make some sense, they still make less sense than conscious thought. That is, if you are feeling a lot then are you emotional, and if you are emotional then a lot of stuff is going on in your brain. It could be that emotional development causes people to focus more on things they enjoy as they get older and block out the things which they don’t like (this makes sense as it would be good emotional development) and that therefore they get to be more emotional and experience emotions better. That is, maybe people can separate themselves from the things they don’t enjoy and attach themselves to the things they do. Adults might even seem to be asking the question, “how does that relate to my emotions?” (Since they learn to separate out things they like from things they don’t like better, they’d have to relate everything to their emotions more.) This might mean that adults are capable of being both more distant and more “close” than teens/younger adults because of their emotional development, they simply don’t treat things as equal anymore and possibly as a result gain more feeling. The down side of getting older on the other hand is that the things you enjoyed before are now older and you potentially don’t enjoy them as much because of that (they are less “fresh”). More unconscious thinking (emotion) probably also helps to maintain a more emotionally developed mind, as emotionally developed minds would need to think more about their emotions since they have more of them. This means that as people get older they would get more unconscious, but more intelligent emotionally.