Why Do We Dream?

Dreams Are Divine Communications

Dreams Are Wish Fulfilments

Sigmund Freud thought that his theory of dreams was his most valuable discovery, important for giving a scientific explanation of why people dream and also for suggesting dream analysis as a useful part of psychotherapy. Dreams are symptoms of unconscious wishes that may be at the root of psychological problems.

Dreams Are Byproducts of Neural Processing

J. Allan Hobson was a Harvard psychiatrist who pioneered the first serious scientific alternative to Freud’s ideas about dreams. He proposed that dreams are brain processes resulting from neural activations that occur during rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep, without the usual sensory and motor inputs that are blocked by the thalamus. The brain tries to make sense of these activations using its memories, but the results are delusional and of little psychological significance.

Dreams Are Emotional Regulation

Not all neuroscientists think that dreams are useless. Matthew Walker describes many valuable biological functions of sleep, including restoring the brain, metabolism, immune system, and cardiovascular system. He also thinks that the neural processes of dreaming bring important benefits for regulating the emotions and creativity.

Dreams Are Cognitive Explorations

An alternative function of dreams is proposed by neuroscientists Antonio Zadra and Robert Stickgold. They propose a model of dream function called NEXTUP for “network exploration to understand possibilities.” Dreaming serves to extract new knowledge from existing memories by discovering and strengthening existing associations.

Dreams Are Predictive Processing

In his later years, J. Allan Hobson tied his activation-synthesis view of dreaming to the increasingly popular view that the brain functions primarily as a prediction engine operating by Bayesian inference. Hobson came to see dreams not as random but as having useful benefits in making predictions.

What Causes Dreams?

Dreams result from unusual patterns of neural firing that occur during sleep. In order to restore the body and brain, sleep shuts down the body’s sensory inputs and motor activities that normally constrain neural firings. Aberrant neural signals may also result as side effects of memory consolidation and the replenishment of neurotransmitters that were depleted during the brain’s daily activities."