Nobody really knows why we dream; it may be a way to rehearse dealing with difficult problems or it may be linked to learning.
Dreams are among the great mysteries of the human condition,along side consciousness and the meaning of life. They can be bizarre and boringor inconsequentia land full of meaning.In ancient times,dreams were believed to be messages from the gods or the voyaging of the spirit to other i. Only recently have sleep scientists learned enough about dreaming to speculate about whether it has any function and what that function might be.
So what do we know about dreams?Children under the age of ten don’t dream that much, but over the age of ten you can expect to have at least four dreams a night,varying in length from five to 34 minutes,although the vast majority of our dream sare not remembered.Dreams mostly happen duringa phase of sleep known as rapid eye movement(REM) sleep,during which your brain and body are aroused almost as if you are awake. Although you can also dream in other stages of sleep,REM dreams tend to be the most vivid and memorable.
We also know that although dreams can be about anything,there are some common features that pop up a lot. One of the most common dreams is being chased or followed.Dreams usually feature the dreamer as him or herself, and most of the other people in the dream will be familiar in one way or another. Dreams often have bizarre content,in termsof people behaving oddly or things changing their nature. Dreams tend to be very emotional and mostly feature bad emotions, such as fear, anxiety and anger.
Sleep experts have a numberof theories to explain why we dream and why dreaming evolved in the first instance.The psychoanalytic theory says that dreams help us to deal with emotional and psychological problems,but if this were true wouldn’t it help to remember our dreams?
Random activation theory says that! dreams have no meaning or purpose,and are just the by-productof what happens to the brain when it goes to sleep.But if this is true,why have we evolved to have REM sleep,which uses up a lot of energy – almost as much as being awake? By itself,this suggests that there must be a very good reason why we dream.
There is some evidence for this third theory: people who learn new things during the day are likely to have more and longer periods of REM sleep in the night. But there isn’t really any evidence that dreams are particularly helpful, or that people improve after dreaming.
Another set of theories says that dreams evolved because they helped early humans to perform better during the day, perhaps by letting people rehearse situations and how they would deal with them in a kind of virtual reality simulator. In particular there is a theory called the ‘threat simulation theory’, which says that dreams are a safe way to practise how to deal with threatening situations.This would explain why negative emotions are such a common feature of dreams, and why so many dreams are about being chased or being in danger.