Ben Reihanian Week 11 - Why do we Dream?

 Why do we Dream?

    Since the dawn of time, humankind has been fascinated with dreams. Mesopotamian kings would have their servants record the happenings of their dreams on wax tablets to interpret them. In ancient Egypt, people wrote a dream book that listed hundreds of meanings behind common dreams. Ever since then, humans have continued the quest of understanding why we dream. Even with the technology and understanding of the sciences, we still do not have definite answers on the reasons behind why we dream, but there are a few very interesting theories. We dream to fulfill our wishes, to remember, to forget, to keep our brains working, to rehearse, to heal, to solve problems, 

    We dream in order for our wishes to be fulfilled. While all of our dreams, including nightmares, are a compilation of imagery from our everyday conscious life, Sigmund Freud hypothesized in the early 1900s that they also contain symbolic meanings that connect to the fulfillment of our subconscious goals. When we wake up from a dream, everything we recall is a symbolic picture of our unconscious basic ideas, wants, and desires, according to Sigmund Freud. By evaluating those recalled parts, Freud felt that the unconscious material would be disclosed to our conscious mind, and psychological disorders resulting from its repression could be addressed and resolved.

    We dream in order to remember. Sleep is beneficial for improving performance on specific mental activities but dreaming while sleeping is even better. Researchers discovered in 2010 that participants were substantially better at navigating a complicated 3-D maze if they had slept and dreamt about it before their second attempt. They were ten times better at it than those who simply thought about the maze while awake between tries and those who napped but did not dream about it. According to researchers, some memory processes may only occur when we are sleeping, and dreams are a clue that these processes are occurring.

    We dream to forget. The architecture of your brain has around 10,000 trillion neural connections. Everything you think and do contributes to their creation. Reverse learning, a neurobiological hypothesis of dreaming proposed in 1983, states that your neocortex analyzes these neural connections while sleeping, mostly during REM sleep cycles, and discards the ones that aren't essential. Without this unlearning process, which manifests itself in dreams, your brain may become overwhelmed by meaningless connections, and parasite ideas may interfere with the critical thinking you need to accomplish while awake.

    We dream in order to keep our minds active. According to the ongoing activation idea, your dreams are the product of your brain's need to constantly consolidate and develop long-term memories in order to function effectively. So, when external input falls below a particular level, such as when you're sleeping, your brain automatically generates data from its memory storages, which appears to you in the shape of the ideas and experiences you experience in your dreams. In other words, your dreams may be a random screen saver that your brain activates to keep it from shutting down totally.

    We dream to rehearse. Dangerous and hazardous events are typical in dreams, and the primal instinct rehearsal hypothesis claims that the significance of a dream is important to its function. Whether you're being followed by a tiger through the forest or fighting an assassin in a strange place, these dreams enable you to train your fight or flight instincts and keep them sharp and reliable in case you need them in real life. It does not, however, have to be unpleasant all of the time. For example, dreams about someone you're attracted to are actually thought to be tied to giving your biological reproductive instincts practice.

    We dream to heal. Stress neurotransmitters in the brain are far less active during the REM period of sleep, even during dreams of terrible events, leading some researchers to believe that one goal of dreaming is to take the sting out of unpleasant experiences so that psychological healing may take place. When you review traumatic experiences in your dreams with less mental stress, you may have a better understanding of them and be better able to process them in psychologically healthy ways. Sleep disturbances are common in people with certain mood disorders and PTSD, prompting some experts to speculate that a lack of dreaming may be a contributing cause to their diseases.

    We dream to solve problems. Your mind may invent unlimited situations in your dreams, outside of reality and conventional reasoning, to help you understand issues and generate answers that you might not consider when awake. It's been dubbed the "committee of sleep" by John Steinbeck, and studies have shown that dreaming may help you solve problems. It's also how famed chemist August Kekule found the structure of the benzene molecule, and why sleeping on a problem is sometimes the greatest solution.

    These are only a handful of the most well-known hypotheses. It's possible that, as our capacity to comprehend the brain improves, we'll one day find the definitive cause for them. But until that day comes, we'll have to continue dreaming.