Scientifically why do we dream

There are significant differences between the neuroscientific and psychoanalytic approaches to dream analysis. Neuroscientists are interested in the structures involved in dream production, dream organization, and narratability.

However, psychoanalysis concentrates on the meaning of dreams and placing them in the context of relationships in the history of the dreamer. Reports of dreams tend to be full of emotional and vivid experiences that contain themes, concerns, dream figures, and objects that correspond closely to waking life. Nightmares are distressing dreams that cause the dreamer to feel a number of disturbing emotions. Common reactions to a nightmare include fear and anxiety.

Lucid dreaming is the dreamer is aware that they are dreaming. They may have some control over their dream. This measure of control can vary between lucid dreams. They often occur in the middle of a regular dream when the sleeping person realizes suddenly that they are dreaming.

Some people experience lucid dreaming at random, while others have reported being able to increase their capacity to control their dreams. For example, during exam time, students may dream about course content.

People in a relationship may dream of their partner. Web developers may see programming code. These circumstantial observations suggest that elements from the everyday re-emerge in dream-like imagery during the transition from wakefulness to sleep. A study of adult dream reports found:.

Another study investigated the relationship between dream emotion and dream character identification. Affection and joy were commonly associated with known characters and were used to identify them even when these emotional attributes were inconsistent with those of the waking state.

The findings suggest that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, associated with short-term memory, is less active in the dreaming brain than during waking life, while the paleocortical and subcortical limbic areas are more active.

Freud maintained that undesirable memories could become suppressed in the mind. Dreams ease repression by allowing these memories to be reinstated. A study showed that sleep does not help people forget unwanted memories. Instead, REM sleep might even counteract the voluntary suppression of memories, making them more accessible for retrieval. The findings of one study suggest that:. Dream-lag is when the images, experiences, or people that emerge in dreams are images, experiences, or people you have seen recently, perhaps the previous day or a week before.

The idea is that certain types of experiences take a week to become encoded into long-term memory, and some of the images from the consolidation process will appear in a dream. Events experienced while awake are said to feature in 1 to 2 percent of dream reports, although 65 percent of dream reports reflect aspects of recent waking life experiences.

The dream-lag effect has been reported in dreams that occur at the REM stage but not those that occur at stage 2. A study exploring different types of memory within dream content among 32 participants found the following:.

Researchers suggest that memories of personal experiences are experienced fragmentarily and selectively during dreaming. The purpose may be to integrate these memories into the long-lasting autobiographical memory. A hypothesis stating that dreams reflect waking-life experiences is supported by studies investigating the dreams of psychiatric patients and patients with sleep disorders.

In short, their daytime symptoms and problems are reflected in their dreams. Many authors agree that some traumatic dreams perform a function of recovery. One paper hypothesizes that the main aspect of traumatic dreams is to communicate an experience that the dreamer has in the dream but does not understand. This can help an individual reconstruct and come to terms with past trauma.

The themes of dreams can be linked to the suppression of unwanted thoughts and, as a result, an increased occurrence of that suppressed thought in dreams. The results demonstrate that there were increased dreams about the unwanted thought and a tendency to have more distressing dreams.

They also imply that thought suppression may lead to significantly increased mental disorder symptoms. Research has indicated that external stimuli presented during sleep can affect the emotional content of dreams. For example, the positively-toned stimulus of roses in one study yielded more positively themed dreams, whereas the negative stimulus of rotten eggs was followed by more negatively themed dreams.

Up to now, the frequencies of typical dream themes have been studied with questionnaires. These have indicated that a rank order of 55 typical dream themes has been stable over different sample populations.

Some themes are familiar to many people, such as flying, falling, and arriving late. For example, from to , there was an increase in the percentage of people who reported flying in dreams. This could reflect the increase in air travel. Relationships : Some have hypothesized that one cluster of typical dreams, including being an object in danger, falling, or being chased, is related to interpersonal conflicts.

Sexual concepts : Another cluster that includes flying, sexual experiences, finding money, and eating delicious food is associated with libidinal and sexual motivations. Fear of embarrassment : A third group, containing dreams that involve being nude, failing an examination, arriving too late, losing teeth, and being inappropriately dressed, is associated with social concerns and a fear of embarrassment.

In neuroimaging studies of brain activity during REM sleep, scientists found that the distribution of brain activity might also be linked to specific dream features. Several bizarre features of normal dreams have similarities with well-known neuropsychological syndromes that occur after brain damage, such as delusional misidentifications for faces and places. Dreams were evaluated in people experiencing different types of headache.

Results showed people with migraine had increased frequency of dreams involving taste and smell. This may suggest that the role of some cerebral structures, such as amygdala and hypothalamus, are involved in migraine mechanisms as well as in the biology of sleep and dreaming.

Music in dreams is rarely studied in scientific literature. However, in a study of 35 professional musicians and 30 non-musicians, the musicians experienced twice as many dreams featuring music, when compared with non-musicians. Musical dream frequency was related to the age of commencement of musical instruction but not to the daily load of musical activity. Nearly half of the recalled music was non-standard, suggesting that original music can be created in dreams.

It has been shown that realistic, localized painful sensations can be experienced in dreams, either through direct incorporation or from memories of pain. However, the frequency of pain dreams in healthy subjects is low. After all these years, researchers are still baffled by many aspects of how and why it operates like it does.

Scientists have been performing sleep and dream studies for decades now, and we still aren't percent sure about the function of sleep , or exactly how and why we dream. We do know that our dream cycle is typically most abundant and best remembered during the REM stage of sleep. It's also pretty commonly accepted among the scientific community that we all dream, though the frequency in which dreams are remembered varies from person to person.

The question of whether dreams actually have a physiological, biological or psychological function has yet to be answered. But that hasn't stopped scientists from researching and speculating. There are several theories as to why we dream. One is that dreams work hand in hand with sleep to help the brain sort through everything it collects during the waking hours. Your brain is met with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of inputs each day. Some are minor sensory details like the color of a passing car, while others are far more complex, like the big presentation you're putting together for your job.

During sleep, the brain works to plow through all of this information to decide what to hang on to and what to forget. Some researchers feel like dreams play a role in this process. It's not just a stab in the dark though -- there is some research to back up the ideas that dreams are tied to how we form memories.

Studies indicate that as we're learning new things in our waking hours, dreams increase while we sleep. Participants in a dream study who were taking a language course showed more dream activity than those who were not. In light of such studies, the idea that we use our dreams to sort through and convert short-term memories into long-term memories has gained some momentum in recent years.

A far more productive function of dreaming is problem-solving, as the sleeping brain continues to work on jobs the waking mind handled during the day. In one study at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, 99 people were administered a task that required them to navigate through a three-dimensional maze. During the course of their practice sessions, they were given a minute break. Some were asked to engage in quiet activities like reading; others were were instructed to try to take a nap.

Those who did nap and who happened to dream about the maze showed a ten-fold improvement on the task in the next session compared to the other subjects. Finally — give Freud his due — there are dreams that appear to be strictly wish-fulfillment.

Dreams about flying may represent a desire for freedom. Dreams about finding new rooms in your home may express a desire for opportunity or novelty. And as for sex dreams? But our minds would not be as rich nor our brains as nimble nor our wishes so often fulfilled — if only in vivid fantasy. The screening room of the sleeping brain may sometimes wear you out, but like all good theaters, it will rarely leave you bored.

Write to Jeffrey Kluger at jeffrey. By Jeffrey Kluger. Get our Health Newsletter. Sign up to receive the latest health and science news, plus answers to wellness questions and expert tips. Please enter a valid email address. Please attempt to sign up again.