Question: why do we have dreams ?

Alex Reid answered on 8 Nov 2018: last edited 8 Nov 2018 10:12 pm

Hi thank you for your question, it is great. I have actually answered a similar question elsewhere so I hope you don’t mind if I give you a similar answer!

Why do we dream? Our best understanding of dreams at the moment is that they are a by-product of other processes going on during sleep. Specifically, during sleep your brain engages in a lot of what we call ‘memory consolidation’, this is a process (or series of processes) which help prepare your memories for future use. During this, memory fragments get moved and shuffled around in your brain as different brain regions ‘talk’ to each other. Dreams are probably when your brain ‘overhears’ this conversation. It is your mind trying to make sense of this jumble of information. As such, dreams may have no direct ‘function’, like a heart or lung, and instead are a bit more like the heat that comes off a car engine. A car engine was not made to make heat, it was made to move the car!, nevertheless we still get heat.

A related answer to your question is what do dreams mean? Well they might not mean anything in and of themselves, they are a byproduct after all. However this does not mean they might not be personally meaningful, and they can often reveal things that you might not have directly thought about. They are often used, with some success, in discussions for some therapies to help people with ongoing issues. They are also inherently creative, and have inspired a lot of excellent art, in particular the surrealist movement (check out here to see some paintings of dreams: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealism).