Why We Dream
Although the question of “why we dream” is one that is currently receiving a lot of attention in the scientific community, the truth is that we really don’t know the answer. Until relatively recently, most psychiatrists and psychologists followed the work of Sigmund Freud and believed that dreams were a way of dealing with thoughts that we could not or did not want to deal with in our waking lives. In this way, dreams were thought to resolve issues that were too painful or thoughts that were too bizarre for “real” life. A whole field of making sense of these dreams was born.
However, our current understanding of how the brain works during sleep, together with a more scientific approach to studying dreams, has caused many to abandon such long-held ideas. What we know is that during dreaming sleep, the brain is as active as it is during waking – just in a different way. It is disconnected from the rest of the world. Brain activity, then, can be totally spontaneous, free to bounce around to any number and combination of thoughts, with no apparent logical order. The result is experiences that seem very real, often indistinguishable from when one is awake, but they progress in a weird and unpredictable way.
Our understanding of dreams is benefited by other knowledge we have about the brain. The brain itself is like clay – it can be molded and changed as a result of activity. This is why dreams aren’t totally random, but often reflect experiences or thoughts that one had during the day. Therefore, an important but unresolved question is whether the “spontaneous” activity of the dreaming brain is merely a reflection of the changes that happened as a result of our daily experiences, or whether this activity also contributes to further modifying the brain. These are the questions that the scientific study of sleep, specifically dreaming sleep, will hope to answer in the coming years.
