Why Do We Dream: Elucidating the Theories behind the Elusive Realm of Dreaming

Dreaming has always been mystifying and an alluring feature for human beings since times unknown and continue to be so. From the Mesopotamians, who gave the meanings of dreams for the first time, to the scientific theories of today, humanity stands in an effort to unravel the importance of these night visions. Though everything is yet vague, a number of theories throw light upon the reasons for which we dream. In this blog, we will look at some of the big concepts that try to demonstrate, in intriguing ways, how our minds use dreams-from Freud's wish-fulfillment hypothesis to using dreams as a means of problem-solving.

1. Dreams as Wish Fulfillment: Freud's Theory

The Vienna psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud held the view, at the dawn of the 20th century, that a person's dreams represent his unconscious wishes, thoughts, and unresolved conflicts. Dreams to Freud were a sort of royal road to wish-fulfillment whereby unconscious wishes, involving mostly infantile instinctive urges and emotions, could be expressed and relieved. He held the belief that the illogical images and disjointed events that we do remember from our dreams are actually symbols for these unconscious urges.

Freud divided the dream into two parts:

• Manifest content: Is the remembered content of the dream: usually a bunch of disjointed, nonsensical images and plot fragments.
• Latent content: Refers to the hidden, vague meaning of the dream, which is usually linked to the suppressed desire or unresolved psychological problem.

In other words, Freud said, "Through these remembered elements one is enabled to reach the unconscious mind, a view on the repression of thoughts and feelings." He used dreams as the practical door towards the research of unresolved psychological matters that may then be solved by psychoanalysis.

Key Takeaway:

The dream is not just a random juxtaposition of images, according to Freud's guess, but rather symbolic expressions of our unconscious desires, a means toward much better self-awareness and indeed psychological cure.

2. Dreams as an Active Recorder: Consolidation and Learning

Research on the relationship between sleep and memory provides some interesting facts that might point out dreams as an important function related to memory processing and learning. For instance, one study conducted in 2010 demonstrated how sleeping-and therefore dreaming-about a challenging task-finding lower-cost ways to navigate through a 3-D maze-. Graduation ceremonies across the country are cancelled or replaced with virtual events due to Coronavirus. It means that the related dream improved memorizing and learning of the task.

Generally, the dream and particularly in REM sleep helps to restructure the brain and to reorganize newly acquired data, which is useful to retain and give better performance in various activities.

Key Takeaway:

This reinforces the memories and skills learnt during the day, therefore fortifying our memories and assisting our cognition performance.

3. Dreams as a Means of Forgetting: Reverse Learning Theory

Another hypothesis is the reverse learning hypothesis, which mentions that through dreams, the brain gets rid of extra neural connections. Trillions of connections are in our brain, each time we think and act, and those could never be maintained. The theory of reverse learning, postulated in the year of 1983, had suggested that through dreaming, we "unlearn" superfluous information that does not need to be stored in our brains.

During REM, the brain eliminates some of the neural connections in order not to be cognitively overwhelmed-to get rid of the ones the brain does not need. Without unlearning or forgetting what's irrelevant or parasitic within one's thought processes, one could never focus and function rightly in life.

Key Takeaway:

Dreams help the brain manage the vast number of neural connections by discarding unimportant information, ensuring cognitive efficiency and preventing mental overload.

4. Dreams as Rehearsal for Survival: Practicing Instincts

Another powerful theory of dream is survival instinct rehearsal. As one of the primitive instinct rehearsal theories suggests, a dream simulates a dangerous/threatening situation and provides the possibility to rehearse our flight or fight reactions in safety.

For example, some of the running-away-from-predators, fighting-off-attackers, or otherwise running-away-from-life-and-death-situation varieties of dreams are one form of mental rehearsal that keeps those instincts razor-sharp and ready for real-life situations if needed. Of course, this would have been very conducive to early humans who often had to go through a lot of real physical dangers.

Bottom Line:

Such dreams may rehearse survival instincts such as struggling or running away when confronted with threat; hence, they are rehearsals for whenever the situation presents itself in real life.

5. Trauma Processing through Active Dreams for Healing

Besides memory and survival instincts, dreams may also play an important role in emotional processing and psychological healing. Although traumatic experiences continue to be accurately reflected in our dreams, research studies have shown that the brain's stress neurotransmitters remain extremely inactive during REM sleep. Based on such observation, some researchers came up with a postulation that dreams help us enable the processing and working our way through tough emotions with less involvement of stress.

Traumatic dreams allow a person to reframe what happened and, maybe, see it from a different perspective, one that would give them a healing process emotionally from an experience. The sleep disruptions seen in patients with diagnoses of PTSD or depression may suggest that disturbed dreaming disrupts the ability to work through traumas.

Bottom Line:

But dreams may also help us heal emotionally from traumatic events by re-presenting us with the troubling situation in a less stressful setting where restoration, psychologically, can take place.

6. Using Dreams for Creative Problem-Solving

Because they are unencumbered by controls of both logic and reality, dreams are a 'privileged' state in which the mind is 'free' to ruminate outside the strictures placed upon daytime mentation. Indeed, this has led some to believe that dreams are an essential ingredient in creative problem-solving.

Free from the domain of the logical confines of the mind, the dreaming mind hence presents solutions that were otherwise not solvable by the conscious mind. Sometimes referred to as a "committee of sleep"; this was the description used by the author John Steinbeck, about helping to solve complex problems with the aid of dreams.

The famous examples include the dream about the structure of the benzene molecule, which came to August Kekule, and the creation of the periodic table by Dmitri Mendeleyev.

Key Takeaway:

These dreams allow your brain to survey situations and ideas unhampered by psychic interference about one's capabilities and immediately create a window open for new ways of solution finding.

7. REM Sleep and the Process of Dreaming

One way or another, both theories seem to point out that REM sleep is already a part of the whole dreaming process. REM sleep is characterized by rapid eye movements and is the time when most vivid dreams occur. During REM sleep, neurons in the brain fire at a fast speed, and during this period, most of the emotional processing, memory consolidation, and creative problem-solving associated with dreams is occurring.

REM sleep is considered to play an important role in physical and mental health; disturbance at this stage of sleep may affect the mood of a person, his cognition, and his health in general.

Key Takeaway:

REM sleep is the phase of sleep with associated dreaming, and its components are important for the control of mood, memorization, and problem-solving, thus being decisive in maintaining physical and psychic health.

Conclusion: The Elusive Mystery of the Dream

Despite millennia of curiosity and scientific inquiry as to why we dream, we really have continued not to know. Each one of these theories carries intriguing ideas from wish fulfillment, memory processing, and problem-solving, on the functions of dreaming. What is clear, however, is that dreams are of importance to maintaining our emotional, cognitive, and physical health. Perhaps someday, when technology and knowledge about the brain have developed far enough, it will become clear what dreams really are. For now, though, they rank with some of life's biggest mysteries.

Whether they help us to heal, prepare ourselves for survival, or simply work our way through both the most banal and most profound of life's experiences, one thing is certain: They are inextricably intertwined with being human. So in our continued search for a science of dreaming, the one sure thing remains: We will continue to dream-and to search for answers.