Why do people dream

Dreams are the subjective perception of images that arise in the mind of a sleeping person. They can be a reflection of our visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory and olfactory sensory representations. Dreams, depending on emotional experiences, can be romantic, sad or scary. Why do we dream and can we control them? What part of the brain is responsible for the formation of dreams, and what do men dream more often than women? Scientists have been struggling to solve the mystery of dreams for many years, and today experts have several versions of the answer to the question of why a person dreams.

What is sleep

According to scientists, sleep is a set of experiences deeply rooted in the human mind. Dreams can be very realistic, abstract, both fantastic and quite plausible events can occur in them with the participation of both strangers and people who are well known to the sleeper. A dream can consist of a variety of “pictures”, thoughts and emotions. They can be both very clear and vague, overflowing with joy or frightening images, understandable or obscure, confusing.

How dreams are born

There are many concepts that explain why we dream. Some researchers believe that these are images of unfulfilled desires. There is also an opinion that a dream is a set of events that the brain processes for a certain time, and at night “throws” them into consciousness.

Most scientists agree that the place of “birth” of a dream is the hippocampus. This is the area of ​​the brain that controls feelings, emotions, and memory. It is also in this part of the brain that memories of the events of the day are stored. Some of this information goes to the cerebral cortex, which is responsible for long-term memory. However, some scientists suggest that “data” from long-term memory can be returned to a person in the form of a dream.

Why do we dream: the most common theories

Nowadays, scientists have proposed many theories that, to one degree or another, explain why and why a person sees dreams. But a unified agreement in the scientific world has not yet been reached.

Some researchers suggest that dreams play no role at all and serve no purpose, while others are convinced that night visions are extremely important for maintaining a person’s mental, emotional and physical health. Therefore, let’s look at the most famous theories about the formation and role of dreams.

Psychoanalytic Theory, or Hidden Desires

The author of this theory is considered to be Sigmund Freud. It was he who first suggested that dreams are unconscious desires and thoughts. According to Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, people are guided by aggressive and sexual instincts, which are suppressed in the conscious, but find their way into consciousness through dreams.

Simply put, according to Freud, in dreams people see what they want to achieve. In this case, the dream can be either literal (exactly show a person’s dream) or symbolic (you will need a special interpretation of what you saw in a dream).

Freud’s theory contributed to the development of the popularity of the interpretation of dreams, which remains in great demand today. Freud’s followers are sure that the study of dreams helps a person to understand his fears and desires hidden in the subconscious.

Effective-synthetic theory, or Consequence of the electrical activity of the brain

This theory was first proposed in 1977 by psychiatrists Alan Hobson and Robert McCarley. Today, this theory is no less popular than the teachings of Freud.

According to the authors of the theory, one should not look for a semantic load in dreams, since this is just the result of electrical impulses that occur in certain parts of the brain. In particular, Hobson suggested that during REM sleep, the amygdala and hippocampus are activated, which are responsible for emotions, perceptions and memories. At this time, the brain tries to “digest” and find meaning in the signals, as a result of which the dream is formed. Hence the plots of night visions, in which events from real life and fictional are intertwined, which, in fact, surprises many.

Information Processing Theory

This is one of the main theories explaining why we have dreams. It lies in the fact that sleep allows you to bring together and process all the information received during the day. Some experts believe that dreams are a “by-product” of information processing. Since during the day a person deals with a lot of different information and memories, this explains, according to the supporters of the idea, the huge variety of images and emotions experienced during sleep.

By the way, in the course of recent studies, scientists have found that if a person falls asleep shortly after an unpleasant incident for himself, then after waking up (regardless of how long the dream lasted), he will clearly remember everything that happened, as if it happened a few minutes ago. This fact served as another confirmation that in a dream the brain systematizes, processes and remembers information. Hence another conclusion of scientists: if a certain event brought a person psychological trauma, he should try not to sleep for as long as possible – so some memories will have time to be erased before the brain processes them in a dream and sends them to long-term storage.

The theory of natural selection of thoughts, or the Modern theory of dreams

Its author is a psychiatrist who studies the nature of sleep, Ernest Hartman. He sees dreams not as a stream of random images and emotions, but as a therapeutic session. According to the researcher, the sharper the emotions experienced by a person in real life, the brighter his dreams. The human brain in this way tries to smooth out the negative effects of psychological trauma. The latest study on dreams has been conducted by neuroscientists at the University of Wisconsin. They argue that during sleep, new information is processed and embedded in the neurons of the brain. After waking up, a person is again ready to receive new information and there is no excessive load on the psyche.

The Theory of Permanent Activation, or Sorting of Memories

The author of this teaching is the psychiatrist Zhang Jie. The essence of the theory is that the human brain constantly produces nerve impulses – both during wakefulness and during the night’s rest. Also, the brain constantly passes through itself and memories. At some point, these memories move from short-term memory to long-term memory. It is at this moment, according to Zhang Jie, that a person has a dream.

Theory of reverse learning, or getting rid of unnecessary

Every day the human brain accumulates new memories, develops new chains of associations and connections. Some of them are of no use to a person and are, so to speak, informational garbage, from which the brain gets rid of from time to time. So, some experts argue that night visions are nothing more than the very cleansing of the brain from debris. Simply put, during sleep, a person gets rid of useless or unwanted thoughts, memories, images. The authors of this theory argue that this is how the brain protects itself from overload and clutter with unnecessary information.

The theory of a modified instinct of self-preservation

A group of specialists conducted a study during which they found a clear similarity between the behavior of animals pretending to be dead in order to avoid death, and the state of a person when he has dreams.

Scientists have found that while a person is dreaming, his brain works in the same way as during wakefulness. The only difference is the lack of physical activity. A similar thing happens with animals that pretend to be dead, hoping that in this state the predator will not touch them. After studying the data obtained, the scientists suggested that the ability to sleep was inherited by humans from wild animals and was somewhat transformed in the course of evolution.

Defense rehearsal theory

The basis for this theory was the teachings of the neurologist and psychologist Antti Revonsuo. In his opinion, the main task of sleep is to model different types of situations and work out the body’s reactions to them. That is, it is a kind of rehearsal of everything that can potentially happen to a person. In the event of a threat in real life, the body will already know how to react. According to the author of this version, the survival of each individual and the whole species depends on dreams. Meanwhile, positive dreams that are not associated with a potential threat do not fit into Revonsuo’s theory.

Theory solves a problem

This version is by Deirdre Barrett, a professor of psychology at Harvard University. To some extent, her theory echoes Revonsuo’s version. But, in her opinion, dreams for a person are a kind of theater in which you can play out different situations (not only potentially dangerous ones) and find answers to exciting questions, choose a behavior model to solve a problem. The professor conducted a study during which an interesting detail was discovered. If you set a certain task for a person before going to bed, then after waking up he will solve it much faster than without sleep.

Why do we have nightmares

We should also talk about the origin of nightmares. Bad dreams are usually caused by stress, anxiety, or as a reaction to certain medications (sometimes this happens). If nightmares recur quite often, this can be regarded as a sign of a sleep disorder. If this is so, then only the thought of sleep makes a person restless, he does not want to go to bed, so as not to see a terrible night vision again.

Nightmares at different stages of life can be dreamed of by most people, and according to estimates by American psychiatrists, about 5% of the world’s population see nightmares regularly.

Interesting facts about dreams

1. “I’m not dreaming!”

If you think that you are not dreaming, then most likely you are mistaken. Scientists have calculated that a person can see 3-6 dreams per night. The exception is people with mental disorders. Here they actually can not see dreams. The average dream lasts 5 to 20 minutes. But after waking up, 95% of us do not remember what we saw in a dream. Whether a person remembers his dream also depends on the phase of sleep he woke up in. If in the phase of REM sleep, then remembering the vision is quite realistic, if in the phase of slow sleep, it is unlikely that the dream will remain in memory.

2. How long can you stay awake?

Scientists have found that it is physically impossible for a person to stay without sleep for longer than 10 days. Already after 2-3 sleepless days, an increase in body temperature, a decrease in immunity, hallucinations, disorientation in time and space, a decrease in cognitive abilities, concentration and creativity to indicators close to zero are possible.

3. What do children and adults dream about?

Newborns and young children need sleep for more than just rest. It also promotes brain development. By the way, some scientists suggest that babies born prematurely dream during almost the entire rest, and children under the age of 2 see “pictures” for half the time of sleep. The shortest period of dreams in the elderly is only 6-10% of the time of the total duration of night rest.

Scientists have also found that the dreams of most women are associated with family and children, and men’s visions can often contain notes of aggression. But even more scientists were interested in the night visions of the elderly. Their dreams are usually filled with emotions. In addition, after waking up, older people can often recall emotions and even smells that they felt during a night’s rest.

4. Alcohol and sleep

It is widely believed that after drinking alcohol it is easier to fall asleep. It is a myth. Already after a few bottles of beer or a bottle of wine, the sleep cycle is disturbed. Therefore, the next day (even if the night’s rest lasted 8-9 hours), the person feels tired.

5. In winter, you want to sleep longer.

Probably, many people have noticed that in autumn and winter they want to sleep longer. If earlier you took it as a sign of your own laziness, now you can be calm. Scientists have confirmed that from October to April, when daylight hours are shorter, our need for sleep increases by about 30 minutes.

6. What does the blind dream about?

Have you ever wondered if blind people can dream? Scientists were also interested in this issue and in the course of scientific experiments they made interesting discoveries. It turns out that people who were originally sighted, but eventually lost this ability, see colorful dreams filled with pictures, images and emotions. That is, their sleep is no different from the dreams of the sighted. People who are born blind do not see pictures in their dreams. Their nightly “visions” are a mixture of sounds, smells, emotions, touch sensations.

7. In sleep we are paralyzed.

While a person is sleeping, his body is partially paralyzed. Thanks to this, during rest, a person cannot harm himself, since he does not physically react to what is happening in a dream. At the moment of waking up, paralysis disappears, although sometimes there are exceptions, when even after waking up the body remains motionless for some time and the person cannot speak. This condition is called sleep paralysis – it seems to a person that he has woken up and continues to dream in reality.

8. Unfamiliar faces in a dream – who are they?

Often in a dream you can clearly see the faces of complete strangers. Who are they? How does our brain create these images? It turns out that a person has already seen all these faces in real life, at least briefly. This may be, for example, a person from early childhood whom you never remembered, but the brain recorded his image and eventually gave it out in a dream.

9. If you want to remember a dream, don’t look out the window.

This very common opinion is nothing more than a delusion, although there is some truth in it. The fact is that immediately after waking up, night vision is stored in the short-term memory of the brain. Therefore, approximately 5 minutes after waking up, we will remember only half of what we saw in a dream, after 10 minutes – no more than 10%. And if, immediately after waking up, the brain is filled with new information, for example, what was seen outside the window, then it will even more quickly displace the dream from memory. That’s the whole secret of the relationship between windows and dreams.

10. Are there prophetic dreams?

From 18 to 38% of people claim that they have had prophetic dreams at least once. Meanwhile, today there is no scientific evidence and explanation for this fact.

What do our dreams depend on?

Scientists put forward a variety of versions explaining why we have certain dreams. A person has no control over many of these factors, but sometimes it is quite possible to “adjust” your night vision.

For example, what a person dreams of depends largely on the state of his health. If in the last two or more days a person slept very little or did not sleep at all, then at the first proper rest, he is likely to see very vivid emotional dreams, which in most cases he will be able to remember in the morning. This is due to the increased activity of certain parts of the brain.

Another catalyst for vivid dreams is pregnancy. Changes in hormonal levels affect the ability of the brain to process thoughts and experiences, and this affects the quality of night visions.

Psychiatric disorders such as depression, anxiety, or bipolar disorder can cause frequent and very realistic nightmares. By the way, taking antidepressants and antipsychotics in some cases also increases the chances of having a nightmare.

The human brain, like the dreams it produces, is still a mystery to scientists today. Perhaps, over time, we will learn more about the nature of night dreams and their role. In the meantime, scientists continue to argue whose theory about the nature of sleep is more plausible.