To determine what we dreamed, it is not at all necessary to remember our dream. In any case, this is the conclusion reached by Japanese neuroscientists.
“The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to the knowledge of the unconscious,” said Freud*. But how to interpret if many fail to even remember them? Japanese neuroscientists were able to determine whether a particular image is present in a dream**. The tomograph recorded the brain activity of sleeping volunteers, and then they described what they saw in a dream. So it was possible to establish which signals in the brain of a sleeping person correspond to the most common images of dreams (“man”, “woman”, “road”, “house”, “tree” …). True, it is not yet possible to form an image in the form of a clear picture, we all see the same object in different ways. But it became clear: the key role in the creation of dreams is played by those two parts of the midbrain that are “responsible” for guessing and predicting events. Well, the idea of the prophetic power of dreams is not just superstition?
* Z. Freud “The Interpretation of Dreams” (ABC, 2013).
** Science, 2013, vol. 340, № 6128.