• Question: Why do we dream?

    Asked by anon-181140 on 1 Jun 2018. This question was also asked by anon-181747.
    • Photo: Joanne Sharpe

      Joanne Sharpe answered on 1 Jun 2018:

      This is such a good question, such a good question in fact, that even scientists aren’t sure! Dreaming is one of life’s mysteries, but we do know that when we sleep we move between different stages, and dreams mainly occur in a stage called REM (rapid eye movement), when the brain is most active. It has been suggested that we can have up to 6 dreams per night. Some scientists think that dreams are our brain’s way of processing our emotions and evaluating what has happened that day, a bit like a filing system. Others say that they are meaningless and nonsensical, and serve no purpose.

    • Photo: Camille Parsons

      Camille Parsons answered on 4 Jun 2018:

      I honestly don’t know why we dream. My current area of research is the human skeleton and muscle. But it would be great for us all to understand about why we dream, especially if we could choose to only have the good dreams and never have the nasty scary ones again!

    • Photo: Laura Hemming

      Laura Hemming answered on 11 Jun 2018:

      In addition to what Jo has said – there’s also a theory that dreaming is just a way for our neurons to fire off whilst we’re sleeping to make sure that they don’t get too bored overnight! Mad, eh?

Comments

  • Photo: Nathan

    Nathan commented on :

    Great answers 🙂 no one can say for certain why we dream. Another interesting theory is that perhaps dreaming helps us to prepare for events in our life by allowing us to “practise” skills and behaviours while we sleep… When we dream, we’re typically in a state of sleep called REM. We’re essentially paralysed below the neck (our eyes move very quickly though – hence Rapid Eye Movement or REM). This paralysis stops us from acting out whatever is going through our minds. Recent evidence has shown that when mice learn a task, the same pattern of brain activation occurs when they’re dreaming as when they are learning the task in the first place – except much faster! This suggests that they’re “playing” the dreams over in their head on “fast forward” to learn whatever needs learning. As if that wasn’t interesting enough, some people have speculated that this finding could have something to do with why our perception of time is so distorted when we dream…