No one knows why we dream. It stands to reason that dreams have some purpose because nearly everyone dreams, and we dream 3 to 6 times every night, though most people rarely remember them. Within five minutes after a dream, most people have forgotten 50 percent of their dreams. In another five minutes, they’ve forgotten all of them.
People typically have several dreams each night that grow longer as sleep draws to a close. Over a lifetime, a person may dream for five or six full years. The types of dreams you have change depending on your age and life circumstances.
Psychology Today offers a simple definition: “Dreams are the stories the brain tells during the REM (rapid eye movement) stage of sleep.” But why does the brain tell these stories to itself?
Dreams Help Process Intense Emotions
Dreams can be a portal into your mental state, says Dr. Rahul Jandial, neurosurgeon, neuroscientist, and author of This is Why You Dream: What Your Sleeping Brain Reveals About Your Waking Life. Some dreams, he believes, are worth paying attention to; others not so much. It’s worth considering the possible causes of an intense dream. “Dreams with a strong emotion and a powerful central image, those are ones not to ignore,” he says. Strong, negative emotional states like anxiety and stress are known to trigger bad dreams. This may be why up to 80 percent of those with PTSD experience frequent nightmares.
If they recur, anxiety dreams are among those we need to heed. When you’re experiencing more stress or anxiety, you tend to dream more, too. Nightmares or stressful dreams — for example, about being chased or being in a frightening situation — are also common when you’re anxious, says behavioral sleep medicine expert Michelle Drerup at the Cleveland Clinic.
“That’s one of the theories of why we dream. Our dreams might help us process and manage our emotions.” Culture or societal norms may also be a factor, she notes. “There seems to be some cultural influence on dreams. For example, the same type of dream might be more common in Germany.”
“The dreaming brain is serving a function, and if it gives you a nugget of an emotional and visual dream, reflect on that,” Jandial notes. “That’s a portal to yourself that no therapist can even get to.”
Paying attention to powerful dreams is easier said than done since we forget, on average, 95 percent of our dreams when we wake up.
So, if we forget most of our dreams, why do we have them? Theories abound. Freud believed dreams express repressed content, ideas, or themes. Carl Jung, who famously broke with Freud over the role of the unconscious, maintained that “… the dream is a spontaneous self-portrayal, in symbolic form, of the actual situation in the unconscious.”
Help With Learning And Organizing Memories
According to a more recent theory, dreaming can help you learn and develop long-term memories. In other words, dreams consolidate memory tasks and learning that have occurred during the day. In that respect, they perform a clerical function. Other theories see dreams as a unique state of consciousness that incorporates the present experience, processing of the past, and preparation for the future.
Real Life Simulation Preparedness
More pertinently, dreams may prepare us for possible future threats, which is related to the theory of dreams as a cognitive simulation of real-life experiences, a subsystem of a waking default network (involved in daydreaming).
In other words, we can rehearse our feelings in our dreams. “… [D]reaming may represent important cognitive functioning,” says Drerup, “Brain activity that occurs when we’re dreaming is similar to the memory processing brain activity we experience when we’re awake.” Dreams may also provide a safe space where problems that are too overwhelming, contradictory, or disturbing to deal with by the conscious mind adequately can be integrated and resolved.
Dreams may provide a safe space where problems that are too overwhelming, contradictory, or disturbing to deal with by the conscious mind adequately can be integrated and resolved.
Instant Replay Of The Day
Dreams could also be an instant replay of the day’s events, charged with emotions and involving many jump cuts and strange juxtapositions. This is called the continuity hypothesis, which states that most dreams reflect the same concepts and concerns as our waking thoughts.
There is also a “discontinuity hypothesis,” which holds that the dream and waking states are fundamentally distinct and unrelated. Nonetheless, evidence suggests a connection, possibly a strong one. Studies of the dreams of psychiatric patients and patients with sleep disorders, for example, have found that their daytime symptoms and problems are reflected in their dreams.
Spur Creativity
Dreams may spur creativity. In this theory, dreaming aids in problem-solving, coming up with solutions that may have eluded the dreamer’s waking life. In one famous instance, August Kekulé, a 19th-century German chemist, had a dream that featured the ouroboros (the mythical snake eating its tail), which inspired him to derive the ringlike composition of carbon atoms that make up the benzene molecule, a problem that he’d failed to solve in waking life.
Dmitri Mendeleev arrived at his periodic table in a dream. “All the elements fell into place as required,” he recounted in his diary. “Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper.” Cosmologist Stephon Alexander dreamed about the role of symmetry in cosmic inflation. In contrast, Einstein’s dream, in which he saw cows jumping up and moving in a wavelike motion, led to one of the central tenets of his theory of relativity.
Good Housekeeping
Dreams may have a culling function. It’s the brain’s way of “straightening up,” removing information that is not useful or incorrect. There is also a theory that dreams have no purpose whatsoever. Dreams could be incidental to sleep, a gratuitous process that contains the waste products of the day to which we may be tempted to impute importance that they don’t deserve.
With so much unknown about dreams and so many competing theories, dream experts in neuroscience and psychology continue their research with the possibility that they will never conclude why we dream.
Leslie Alan Horvitz is an author and journalist specializing in science and a contributor to the Observatory. His articles have been published by Travel and Leisure, Scholastic, Washington Times, and Insight on the News, among others. Horvitz has served on the board of Art Omi and is a member of PEN America. Find him online at lesliehorvitz.com.
This article was produced by Earth Food
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