Why Exactly Do We Dream?

Dreams are one of the most fascinating and mystifying aspects of sleep.

Research shows that dreaming is not just a by-product of sleep but serves its own important functions in our well-being.

Despite advancing scientific knowledge, there is much that remains unknown about both sleep and dreams, and 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, the potential impact of nightmares, and steps that you can take to sleep better with sweet dreams.

What Are Dreams?

Dreams are images, thoughts, or feelings that occur during sleep. Visual imagery is the most common, 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:

• It has a first-person perspective.
• It is involuntary.
• The content may be illogical or even incoherent.
• The content includes other people who interact with the dreamer and one another.
• It provokes strong emotions.
• Elements of waking life are incorporated into content.

Although these features are not universal, they are found at least to some extent in most normal dreams.

What is the Purpose of Dreams?

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

• Building memory: Dreaming has been associated with consolidation of memory, which suggests that dreaming may serve an important cognitive function of strengthening memory and informational recall.
• Processing emotion: The ability to engage with and rehearse feelings in different imagined contexts may be part of the brain’s method for managing emotions.
• Mental housekeeping: Periods of dreaming could be the brain’s way of “straightening up,” clearing away partial, erroneous, or unnecessary information.
• Instant replay: 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.

When Do We Dream?

On average, most people dream for around two hours per night. Dreaming can happen⁷ during any stage of sleep, but dreams are the most prolific and intense during the rapid eye movement (REM) stage.

During the REM sleep stage, brain activity ramps up considerably compared to the non-REM stages, which helps explain the distinct types of dreaming during these stages. Dreams during REM sleep are typically more vivid, fantastical, and/or bizarre even though they may involve elements of waking life. By contrast, non-REM dreams tend to involve more coherent content that involves thoughts or memories grounded to a specific time and place.

REM sleep is not distributed evenly through the night. The majority of REM sleep happens during the second half of a normal sleep period, which means that dreaming tends to be concentrated in the hours before waking up.

Do Dreams Have Meaning?

How to interpret dreams, and whether they have meaning at all, are matters of considerable controversy. While some psychologists have argued that dreams provide insight into a person’s psyche or everyday life, others find their content to be too inconsistent or bewildering to reliably deliver meaning.

Virtually all experts acknowledge that dreams can involve content that ties back to waking experiences although the content may be changed or misrepresented. For example, in describing dreams, people often reference people who they recognize clearly even if their appearance is distorted in the dream.

The meaning of real-life details appearing in dreams, though, is far from settled. The “continuity hypothesis” in dream research holds that dreams and waking life are intertwined with one another and thus involve overlapping themes and content. The “discontinuity hypothesis,” on the other hand, sees thinking during dreams and wakefulness as structurally distinct.

While analysis of dreams may be a component of personal or psychological self-reflection, it’s hard to state, based on the existing evidence, that there is a definitive method for interpreting and understanding the meaning of dreams in waking, everyday life.

What Are Types of Dreams?

Dreams can take on many different forms. Lucid dreams occur when a person is in a dream while being actively aware that they are dreaming. Vivid dreams involve especially realistic or clear dream content. Bad dreams are composed of bothersome or distressing content. Recurring dreams involve the same imagery repeating in multiple dreams over time.

Even within normal dreams, there are certain types of content that are especially identifiable. Among the most recognizable and common themesin dreams are things like flying, falling, being chased, or being unable to find a bathroom.

I personally have come to identify several types of dreams in my work on my own dreams, as well as those of clients.  The categories I identified are:

• Smokestack dreams – these dreams often contain incidents – large or small that left you with unexpressed emotions (frustration, anger, etc) that get “burned off” at night.
• Snapshot dreams – these dreams are the universe showing you the current state of play in your life, i.e. this is how it is with your soul at this time.
• Problem solving/Creativity dreams – even when we can’t figure out something while awake, the unconscious mind keeps working on it (like a computer subroutine) until a solution suggests itself.  Many inventions – like Google, sewing machines, Einstein’s e=mc² and Paul McCartney’s song Yesterday, all came off the back of dreams.
• “Big Medicine” dreams – These dreams are truly life-changing and are usually so vivid you will actually remember them for the rest of your life. A big medicine dream saved my life – literally – from 9/11.  But they aren’t always dire in nature – another big medicine dream brought an old flame back into my life and we married and spent 25 happy years together until he passed away from cancer.

What Are Nightmares?

In sleep medicine, a nightmare is a bad dream that causes a person to wake up from sleep. This definition is distinct from common usage that may refer to any threatening, scary, or bothersome dream as a nightmare. While bad dreams are normal and usually benign, frequent nightmares may interfere with a person’s sleep and cause impaired thinking and mood during the daytime.

I have found that, when clients come to me all frazzled because of a nightmare, if there are no possible medical reasons (e.g. obstructive sleep apnoea, obesity, etc.) causing the nightmares, that they are usually about something which the dreamer hasn’t expressed openly their fears around.  Once we’ve gone through the dream, the usual response I get is – “Is that all it is?”

Do Dreams Affect Sleep?

In most cases, dreams don’t affect sleep. Dreaming is part of healthy sleep and is generally considered to be completely normal and without any negative effects on sleep.

Nightmares are the exception. Because nightmares involve awakenings, they can become problematic if they occur frequently. Distressing dreams may cause a person to avoid sleep, leading to insufficient sleep. When they do sleep, the prior sleep deprivation can induce a REM sleep rebound that actually worsens nightmares. This negative cycle can cause some people with frequent nightmares to experience insomnia as a chronic sleep problem.

For this reason, people who have nightmares more than once a week, have fragmented sleep, or have daytime sleepiness or changes to their thinking or mood should talk with a doctor. A doctor can review these symptoms to identify the potential causes and treatments of their sleeping problem.

How Can You Remember Dreams?

For people who want to document or interpret dreams, remembering them is a key first step. The ability to recall dreams can be different for every person and may vary based on age¹⁴. While there’s no guaranteed way to improve dream recall, experts recommend certain tips:

• Think about your dreams as soon as you wake up. 90% of a dream is forgotten within the first five minutes of waking. Before sitting up or even saying good morning to your bed partner, close your eyes and try to replay your dreams in your mind.
• Have a journal or app on-hand to keep track of your dream content. For most people, a pen and paper on their nightstand works well, but there are also smartphone apps that help you create an organized and searchable dream journal.
• Try to wake up peacefully in the morning. An abrupt awakening, such as from an alarm clock, may cause you to quickly snap awake and out of a dream, making it harder to remember the dream’s details.

Take your dreams seriously – they really are a fount of wisdom an instruction.

In the lead-up to bedtime, tell yourself that you will remember your dreams, and repeat this mantra before going to sleep. While this alone can’t ensure that you will recall your dreams, it can encourage you to remember to take the time to reflect on dreams before starting your day.

What I have found is that the more effort you make to remember your dreams, your unconscious will help you to remember more of them.

Why Your Brain Needs to Dream

Recent work in my neuroscience lab and the work of other scientists has shown that dreams may have a very particular function important to our well-being. Here are the two main ways dreams help us.

Dreaming is like overnight therapy

It’s said that time heals all wounds, but research suggests that time spent in dreams is what heals. REM-sleep dreaming appears to take the painful sting out of difficult, even traumatic, emotional episodes experienced during the day, offering emotional resolution when you awake the next morning.

For example, in a study conducted at the University of Chicago, researchers looked at three sets of women – women happily married and two groups of women who were divorced and diagnosed as clinically depressed; what the researchers found was that during sleep studies conducted, the women who were woken up during REM sleep and asked what they were dreaming about, it was about their relationship or erstwhile partner.  The women who did NOT dream (or couldn’t recall them) took longer to heal from their relationship and did not recover as well as the women who dreamed.

REM sleep is the only time when our brain is completely devoid of the anxiety-triggering molecule noradrenaline. At the same time, key emotional and memory-related structures of the brain are reactivated during REM sleep as we dream. This means that emotional memory reactivation is occurring in a brain free of a key stress chemical, which allows us to re-process upsetting memories in a safer, calmer environment.

The evidence points toward an important function of dreams: to help us take the sting out of our painful emotional experiences during the hours we are asleep, so that we can learn from them and carry on with our lives.

Dreaming enhances creativity and problem-solving

It’s been shown that deep non-REM sleep strengthens individual memories. But REM sleep is when those memories can be fused and blended together in abstract and highly novel ways. During the dreaming state, your brain will cogitate vast swaths of acquired knowledge and then extract overarching rules and commonalties, creating a mindset that can help us divine solutions to previously impenetrable problems.

While the benefits of dreaming are real, too many of us have problems getting a full eight hours of sleep and lose out on these advantages. Alternatively, we may think we’re the exception to the rule—that we’re one of those people who doesn’t happen to need a lot of sleep. But nothing could be further from the truth. Research clearly shows that people who overestimate their ability to get by on less sleep are completely wrong.

Six suggestions to improve your sleep

So how can we be sure to get enough sleep and experience a dream state? While we may be tempted to use sleeping pills to get to sleep, this has been shown to be detrimental to dreaming. Instead of taking pills, here are some simple ways to enhance your sleep:

• Make sure your room is dark and that you are not looking at bright light sources—i.e., computer screens and cell phones—in the last hour or two before going to bed. You may even want to start dimming lights in your house in the earlier parts of the evening, which helps to stimulate sleepiness.
• Go to bed and wake up at approximately the same time every day. This helps “train” your brain to relax in preparation for sleep.
• Keep the temperature in your house cool at night—maybe even cooler than you think it should be, like around 65 degrees. Your body temperature needs to drop at night for sleep, and a lower room temperature helps signal your brain that it’s time to sleep.
• If you have trouble falling asleep, or wake in the night feeling restless, don’t stay in bed awake. That trains the brain that your bed is not a place for sleeping. Instead, get up and read a book under dim light in a different room. Don’t look at your computer or cell phone. When sleepiness returns, go back to bed. Or if you don’t want to get out of bed, try meditating. Studies suggest it helps individuals fall asleep faster and also improves sleep quality.

• Don’t have caffeine late in the day or an alcohol-infused nightcap. Both of these interfere with sleep—either keeping you awake or stimulating frequent wake-ups during the night.
• Some suggested crystals to encourage/enhance dreams are Kyanite – for dream recall; Mangano Calcite for the prevention of nightmares and Moonstone for lucid dreaming, especially during the new moon.  Wear the crystal on your person and/or put under your pillow at night. Crystals generally work slowly, as they take time to “vibe” with you, so you will need to have them on or near you (if a large crystal) for several days to start the feel their impact.

Kyanite

Mangano Calcite

Moonstone

Sleep is the single most effective thing we can do to rest our brain and physical health each day. Along with sleep, dreaming provides essential emotional first aid and a unique form of informational alchemy. If we wish to be as healthy, happy, and creative as possible, these are facts well worth waking up to.