Last week, you might have dreamed about your ex, last night it was a dream about your long-lost friend, and tomorrow it may as well be a dream about your husband or wife. And the irony is that you’re not even married yet!
Your dreams may sometimes be shockingly vivid and other times extremely vague, they can be bizarre and confusing or they can be what you were exactly hoping for.
No matter the case, we all have dreams. Whether in the form of daydreaming, mind wandering, or night dreaming, they all involve images, thoughts, and emotions that we experience during certain stages of sleep.
Now in order to understand the many theories suggested to explain why we have dreams, we first need to understand how and when do dreams occur.
Stages of sleep:
According to the National Sleep Foundation, our sleep cycle consists of two main stages: non-rapid eye movement (NREM) and rapid eye movement (REM) stages.
NREM stage takes about 75% of our sleep, but we’re more interested in the 25% left since most dreams occur in the REM stage. So, what is REM sleep?
Rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep was only discovered in the 1950s. And until then, most scientists thought that sleep was just a time when your brain gets turned off.
In 1952, researchers at the University Of Chicago found a unique type of electrical activity that occurs during a certain stage of a person sleep. When researchers awoke people during this stage, they almost always reported that they had been dreaming.
It was called REM because this stage of sleep is marked by random movements of the eyes. What does that mean? Well, your eyes are rapidly moving from one side to another under the eyelids when you reach this stage of sleep.
What’s more interesting about REM sleep is that if you take a look at the electrical activity of the brain during this stage, it almost exactly mimics the way the brain acts when it’s awake.
The only difference is that the production of the chemicals inside the brain (like serotonin and histamine) is almost completely blocked and that causes the muscles to stop moving!
This explains why you can dream about flying, running around, and fighting samurais. But your body doesn’t really move which is often referred to as sleep paralysis.
If you think about it, it’s sort of like a safety dreams net. Just imagine what would happen if every time you have a wild dream you end up acting out on it, that would simply be a catastrophe.
REM atopia is a condition in which the inhibition of neurotransmitters release is no longer in action, patients will sleep walk and play the role their dreams are casting them.
REM atopia is part of a large spectrum of sleep disorders such as Narcolepsy, Insomnia, and Circadian rhythm disorders.
Why do we have dreams?
Now, everyone knows the benefits of sleeping and how much it’s important for our health. Scientists have established the role of it, but little can be said about dreams. It’s been difficult for researchers to explain the role of dreams.
We all know that dreams have some sort of relationship with our recent activities, what happens during our day, who we speak with, or think about lately. But the truth is, there’s no definitive proof of that.
Let me switch gears to discuss some of the theories that are meant to explain the reason we dream.
Activation synthesis model of dreaming theory:
In 1977, Allan Hobson and Robert McClarley came up with the theory that since the unconscious part of our brain is busy organizing memories when we sleep, our conscious brain is bound to detect that (through the electrical impulses that happen during REM sleep).
When that happens, our cortex freaks our since it doesn’t know what all of this means. It tries its best to synthesize the noise coming from all the work being done in our unconsciousness. So, It makes a cohesive story. Also known as a dream.
This would explain why dreams are often random. They’re not supposed to make sense; they’re not an actual message from our brain. And overall, they don’t really serve a primary purpose; they’re just an accidental result of a more important process.
On the other hand, other researchers don’t believe that. They think that dreams do serve a purpose and they came up with some theories to explain why we have dreams. Here are some of them:
Psychoanalytic Theory of Dreams:
Sigmund Freud’s theory of dreams, in psychology, suggested that dreams represented unconscious desires, thoughts, and motivations. And that these repressed wishes find their way into our awareness via dreams.
So, according to Freud, the father of dreams, every night when we fall asleep, we disconnect from our conscious thought processes. The lights go off and we’re protected from external stimuli (like noise and pain). But our internal stimuli (like emotions and fears) are still rumbling around, seeking a way to be heard. And so dreams form.
Dreams prepare us for threats:
One of the areas of the brain that’s most active during dreaming is the amygdala. The amygdala is the part of the brain that’s associated with the survival instinct and the fight-or-flight response.
This theory suggests that because the amygdala is more active during sleep than when we’re awake, it may be our brain’s way of getting us ready to deal with threats.
Dreams help us solve problems:
A scientist named Harry Fiss came up with the theory that our dreams help us to register very subtle hints that go unnoticed during the day. This explains why “sleeping on it” can provide a solution to a problem.
Conclusion
All of the theories mentioned above are quite popular today, but not everybody agrees on them and most importantly, they barely scratch the surface of the scientific study of dreams.
Dreams are still pretty much a mystery. But if you want know more about oneirology and the psychology behind dreams, try reading Bulkeley Kelly’s Book, An Introduction to the Psychology of Dreaming.
In this book, Kelly explains the historical development of dream psychology across a century of thought and research, from Freudian psychoanalysis to modern neuroscience. One thing that i really liked was that it provides a specific template for analyzing each theory of dream psychology in terms of its formation, function, and interpretation.