The science of why we dream

In the third millennium BCE, Mesopotamian kings recorded and interpreted their dream on was tablets. A thousand years later, Ancient Egyptians wrote a dream book listing over a hundred dreams and their meanings. And in the years since, we haven’t paused in our quest to understand why we dream. So, after a great deal of scientific research, technological advancement and persistence, we still don’t have any definite answers, but we have some interesting theories.

1. We dream to fulfil our wishes. In the early 1900s, Sigmund Freud proposed that while all of our dream, including our nightmares, are a collection of images from our daily conscious lives, they also have symbolic meanings, which relate to the fulfilment of our subconscious wishes.

2. We dream to remember. To increase performance on certain mental tasks, sleep is good but dreaming while sleeping is better. In 2010, researchers found that subjects were much better at getting through a complex 3-D maze if they had napped and dreamed of the maze prior to their second attempt. Researchers theorized that certain processes could happen only when we are asleep.

3. We dream to forget. There are about 10,000 trillion neural connections within the architecture of your brain. They are created by everything you think and everything you do. A 1983 neurobiological theory of dreaming, called reverse learning, holds that while sleeping, and mainly during REM sleep cycles, your neocortex reviews these neural connections and dumps the unnecessary ones. Without this, your brain can be overwhelmed with useless thoughts and parasitic thoughts that could disrupt the necessary thinking you need to do.

4. We dream to solve problems. Unconstrained by reality and the rules of conventional logic, in your dreams, your mind can create limitless scenarios to help you grasp problems and formulate solutions that you may consider while awake. John Steinbeck called it the committee of sleep and research has demonstrated the effectiveness of dreaming on problem solving.

As technology increases our capacity for understanding the brain, we will discover the definitive reason for them. But until that arrives, we’ll just have to keep on dreaming.

Enjoy the weekend folks.