Freud said that on most nights, we dream. Dreams allow us to be what we cannot be, and to say what we do not say, in our more repressed daily lives. Dreams are lot like poetry,
- we use images more than words;
- we combine incongruent elements to evoke emotion in a more efficient way than wordier descriptions can; and
- we use unconscious and tangential associations rather than logic to tell a story.
Modern Theories on Why Dreams Exist:
1. We Dream to Practice Responses to Threatening Situations
In dreams, we often find ourselves naked in public, or being chased, or fighting an enemy, or sinking in quicksand. Dreams are an evolutionary adaptation: We dream in order to rehearse behaviors of self-defense in the safety of nighttime isolation. In turn, get better at fight-or-flight in the real world.
2. Dreams Create Wisdom
Sleep and dreaming are the process through which we separate the memories worth encoding in long-term memory from those worth losing. Sleep turns a flood of daily information into what we call wisdom: the stuff that makes us smart for when we come across future decisions.
3. Dreaming is Like Defragmenting Your Hard Drive
“we dream in order to forget.” Dreaming is a shuffling of old connections that allows us to keep the important connections and erase the inefficient links. Dreams are a reordering of connections to streamline the system.
4. Dreams Are Like Psychotherapy
Dreaming is like therapy on the couch: We think through emotional stuff in a less rational and defensive frame of mind. Through that process, we come to accept truths we might otherwise repress. Dreams are our nightly psychotherapy.
5. The Absence of Theory
Dreams have no meaning at all–that they are the random firings of a brain that doesn’t happen to be conscious at that time. The mind is still “functioning” insofar as it’s producing images, but there’s no conscious sense behind the film.