Psychology Facts

▼ Dreams ▼

》Dreams are a blend of images, memories, emotions, and other subconscious stimuli that humans and some animals experience during sleep. The subconscious mind draws from real-life experiences to create these surreal and sleep-induced phenomena. While dreams can sometimes form coherent narratives, they can also appear as a series of random impressions.

》Dreaming is most frequent in the morning. You may notice that you remember your dreams better just after waking up. This is because you spend more time in the REM stage of sleep right before waking, which results in vivid and longer dreams. While it's possible to dream during the deep sleep phases common throughout the night, these dreams are typically harder to recall after waking up hours later.

》Two types of memory can underpin a dream:

- Autobiographical memories, which are enduring memories about oneself.

- Episodic memories, referring to memories of specific episodes or events.

A study investigating various memory types within dream content among 32 participants revealed the following:

- Only one dream (0.5 percent) featured an episodic memory.

- The majority of dreams in the study (80 percent) incorporated autobiographical memory features to a low to moderate extent.

》There is a condition known as REM sleep disorder, where individuals physically act out their dreams. This can lead to injuries such as broken arms and legs, damaged furniture, and in at least one reported instance, even a house burning down.

》In rare cases of REM disorder, some people don't dream at all. These individuals experience significantly reduced creativity and perform poorly on tasks that require creative problem-solving.

》In children, recurring dreams commonly involve:
- Encounters with animals or monsters
- Physical aggression
- Falling
- Being chased

》While you dream, part of your brain shuts down. Specifically, the prefrontal cortex—the region responsible for making sense of the wide array of stimuli encountered while awake—becomes inactive. This inactivity causes dreams to take on their bizarre and sometimes nonsensical quality, as you lose the ability to rationally sift through brain activity.

》Numerous theories attempt to explain the purpose of dreaming. Are dreams simply a component of the sleep cycle, or do they fulfill other functions?

Potential explanations include:

- Reflecting unconscious desires and wishes

- Interpreting random signals from the brain and body during sleep

- Consolidating and processing information acquired throughout the day

- Acting as a form of psychotherapy

》Based on evidence and new research methodologies, researchers propose that dreaming serves the following functions:

- Offline memory reprocessing: the brain consolidates learning and memory tasks,
supporting and recording waking consciousness

- Preparation for potential future threats

- Cognitive simulation of real-life experiences, as dreaming is a subsystem of the waking default network, active during daydreaming

- Development of cognitive capabilities

- Reflection of unconscious mental function in a psychoanalytic manner