Dreaming

Dreams: Why They Happen & What They Mean

Dreams are one of the most fascinating and mystifying aspects of sleep. Since Sigmund Freud helped draw attention to the potential importance of dreams in the late 19th century, considerable research has worked to unravel both the neuroscience and psychology of dreams.

Despite this advancing scientific knowledge, there is much that remains unknown about both sleep and dreams. Even the most fundamental question — why do we dream at all? — is still subject to significant debate.

While everyone dreams, the content of those dreams and their effect on sleep can vary dramatically from person to person. Even though there’s no simple explanation for the meaning and purpose of dreams, it’s helpful to understand the basics of dreams.

Dreams are images, thoughts, or feelings that occur during sleep. Visual imagery is the most, but dreams can involve all of the senses. Some people dream in color while others dream in black and white, and people who are blind tend to have more dream components related to sound, taste, and smell.

Studies have revealed diverse types of dream content, but some typical characteristics of dreaming include the following: 

• It has a first-person perspective.
• It is involuntary.
• The content may be illogical.
• It provokes strong emotions.

Debate continues among sleep about why we dream. Different theories about the purpose of dreaming  include:

• That dreaming may serve an important cognitive function of strengthening memory and informational recall.
• The ability to engage with and rehearse feelings in different imagined contexts may be part of the brain’s method for managing emotions.
• Periods of dreaming could be the brain’s way of “straightening up,” clearing away partial or unnecessary information.
• Dream content may be a form of distorted instant replay in which recent events are reviewed and analyzed.
• Incidental brain activity: This view holds that dreaming is just a by-product of sleep that has no essential purpose or meaning.

Experts in the fields of neuroscience and psychology continue to conduct experiments to discover what is happening in the brain during sleep, but even with ongoing research, it may be impossible to conclusively prove any theory for why we dream.