Why do we dream?

Next to writing, I like sleeping, mostly because I look forward to dreaming.  Many times I have dreamt of how I will write about a certain topic. Other times, dreams confuse me because there have been times when it seemed I was already awake when I was experiencing the dream which does not make sense. But the bottom line is, very few things can beat the amusement value of dreams. How else can I meet dead people, fly out into space riding a fiber optic broom and be back in time for breakfast within six or seven hours of a good night’s sleep?

But why do we dream? What is the use, if any, of any of the webs we weave when we are not awake?

We are brewing the same desires, frustrations, ideas, when we sleep as when we are conscious but they marinate in a different kind of state. I once had a conversation with those who keep watch over the Tubbataha Reef. They spend months at a time by themselves, mostly in two’s. One of them told me that their days there were mostly so undifferentiated, deprived of social interaction, that they had dreams that replayed themselves over and over again! This may be proof that if dreams were made of the same stuff as your waking hours, then they could be replayed if your waking hours do not have new inputs. Hearing that, I could not help but expand my definition of “poverty.”

We dream only when we are asleep, and not immediately but only when we enter a stage called REM (Rapid Eye Movement). Freud used to “own” the interpretation of this dream state and attribute what we dream about mostly to our repressed desires. But scientists have moved on since Freud and now, we have neuroscientific studies trying to give other explanations as to why we dream, other than repression.

In the November-December 2011 issue of the Scientific American Mind, the cover topic is dreams and the author is Deirdre Barrett, faculty of the Harvard Medical School. She cited studies that looked at what happens to us when we dream or do not dream (when we do not reach REM). The studies revealed that dreams do help us, first, in consolidating new learning; second, in consolidating our memory; third, in coming up with creative solutions; and also in problem-solving. Not a bad deal when you can do all these while sleeping.

The studies looked at brain scans of people dreaming and saw that the brain was as active sleeping as it was when it was awake. Barrett called it a state which is “visually rich and logically loose.” In that state, the bounds of visualization according to what is “normal” break apart and connections are made where they were not present when you were awake. The dreaming brain has its visual cortex and the part perceiving motion to be more active but the parts associated with logic, social propriety, and will are more subdued in activity. The parts of the brain that keep watch over the environment, alert to certain smells, sounds, movements, pain and that part which bodily reacts to these cues are also muted. Good thing we are paralyzed when we dream because imagine if our bodies reacted to the weirdly concocted scenarios that we experience by dreaming! That is what sleepwalkers and the people they live with have to endure.

But dreams need not always be the “hidden” world where your other self (or selves reside). You can access your dreams and even partly direct them and you need not go to some witch or psychic to do that. I have observed that about my own dreaming and waking self for decades and I have learned how to do it. Just think about the ideas you are trying to make sense of before you sleep and cradle them until you doze off. Wake yourself up at some unholy hour and write down whatever you remember. Many times, the dream will be connected to your waking life and you will get some insight. The bigger problem is whether your own handwriting being awakened at 3 a.m. would be legible for even yourself to read.

So there you go, that is what science has to say, so far, about why we dream. But I think that sometimes, dreams could be so comforting, the perfect home for your desires that the real question that comes to mind when you open your eyes is, “why do I have to wake up?”

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