Why Do We Dream?

Dreams are stories and images that our minds create while we sleep. They can be entertaining, fun, romantic, disturbing, frightening, and sometimes bizarre (Nichols, 2018). According to Medical News Today, We may not remember dreaming, but everyone is thought to dream between 3 and 6 times per night. It is believed that each dream lasts between 5 to 20 minutes, and roughly 95 percent of dreams are forgotten by the time a person gets out of bed.

What Influences Dreams?

There are multiple factors that can influence our dreams. A major factor is health conditions. Mental health disorders such as depression, anxiety, bipolar, and other mood-related conditions, can trigger intense and sometimes disturbing or negative dreams and nightmares. According to healthline certain foods can also influence your dreams. Anything that affects your waking mood is likely to affect your unconscious mood as well. If a sugar crash makes you feel down during the day, those feelings could carry over into your sleep. Some of your hobbies and daily activities can also affect your sleep and in turn your dreams. If you are someone who exercises daily a good way to sleep more soundly is to exercise in the morning. A good run or other cardio workout before noon helps set your clock so that you’re more inclined to fall asleep faster and spend more time in deep sleep than if you didn’t exercise or if you exercised late at night (Sullivan, 2017).

Drinking Dreams

Contrary to what many believe and feel, alcohol does not help you sleep. According to Hill (2017) REM is the stage where we are most likely to dream, because our bodies are more energized. It is thought that REM sleep occurs because it is part of the process of storing memories, learning, and balancing our moods. When we consume alcohol before bed the alcohol causes REM sleep to decrease and then increase rapidly.

One of the reasons many people mistakenly think they are getting a good sleep after consuming alcohol is because they confuse the sensation of “blacking out” with a good nights sleep. Research done by the London Sleep Center shows that the more we drink, the less REM sleep we get. Sleeping after consuming alcohol causes us to be more likely to snore and have a feeling of unconsciousness. What happens next is as you are sleeping your blood alcohol level begins to drop, and your sleep becomes shallower and you start to wake up more frequently. This shallower sleep means you are now spending more time in REM sleep which can cause vivid dreams and nightmares. It is also the reason that you often wake up earlier after a heavy night of drinking.

Brain Regions Responsible for Dreaming

There is not just one specific area of the brain responsible for dreams. It turns out that the entire brain is active during dreams, from the brainstem to the cortex. According to Blackmore from Science Focus there are certain parts of the brain that have specific roles when it comes to our dreams. The amygdala is part of the limbic system, located in the mid-brain which deals with emotions in both waking and dreaming. The amygdala is mostly associated with fear and is especially active during dreams.

Our cortex is responsible for the particular content of our dreams. When we dream we see, hear, and feel things the same way we do when we are awake, so these regions responsible for those sensations in our cortex are just as active when we are asleep and dreaming. The cortex is responsible for conjuring up the people we talk to in our dreams, experiences of movement or flying , and even the monsters we may flee from (Blackmore).

Neurological Basis of Dreaming

Dreaming can be thought of as a protoconscious state which occurs mostly during Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, but also during other sleep stages such as stage 4 Slow Wave Sleep (SWS), the deepest sleep stage. Most dreams are reported during REM sleep. Some studies suggest that the essence of our dreams varies according to the sleep stage in which they occur. The emerging view in neuroscience is that dreams are related to memory consolidation happening in the brain during sleep. This may include reorganizing and recoding memories in relation to emotional drives as well as transferring memories between brain regions. An example of this is that during the day an individual stores their episodic memories in their hippocampus, and then at night the memories from this region are then transferred to the cerebral cortex, which is the region specialized for information processing, cognition, and knowledge. Studies have been done with animals during their sleep confirming that the neural activity of the hippocampus replays their events of the day (King, 2016).

Similarities Between Waking and Dreaming

In most dreams, perceptual modalities and submodalities that are present in wakefulness are also represented in our dreams. Experiences in most dreams have a clear sensory character which means that they are seen, heard, and felt and are not mere thoughts or abstractions. Many electroencephalogram (EEG) and neuroimaging studies have looked at brain activity during quiet wakefulness and compared it to what was observed during REM sleep, when subjects are most likely to report dreams. On the surface the EEG looks incredibly similar in active waking and in REM sleep.

researchers have found that their is remarkable consistency between an individuals cognitive and neural organization in both dreaming and waking. Studies done with children have shown that dream features show a gradual development that parallels their cognitive development when awake. Another example of how waking and dreaming are so similar is how patients with brain lesions that impair their waking cognition show the same deficits in dreams. For example, subjects with impaired face perception also do not dream of faces ( Nir & Tononi, 2010).

Dream Analysis

There are many different theories out there about dream analysis, or what our dreams mean to us essentially. According to computational neuroscientist Paul King, The memory consolidation process focuses on conflicts between past experience and biologically determined goals, which explains why motivational tensions surface in dream content. Dream analysis may reveal the underlying structure of the motivational forces driving our life strategy and choices. Stickgold et al (2001) propose that the emotional features of dreams “reflect an attempt, on the part of the brain, to identify and evaluate novel cortical associations in the light of emotions mediated by limbic structures activated during REM.” This means that the brain is trying to interlink our experiences of the world with our emotional drives. Dreams also allow the brain to explore hypothetical situations in some abstract way in order to refine action strategies for use in the future.

One of the most popular theories of dream analysis is essentially we all go through some sort of conflict or dissonance occurring in our lives, and our brain is trying to ease that tension and reduce that conflict for us through our dreams. We are uneasy when we experience either emotional or biological conflicts and some scientists claim that our dreams are our mind trying to work through these issues to help us feel more at ease and at peace with ourselves and our situations.

Why do we Have Nightmares?

According to Mayo Clinic, a nightmare is a disturbing dream associated with negative feelings, such as anxiety or fear that awakens you. A nightmare can involve these features:Your dream seems vivid and real and is very upsetting, often becoming more disturbing as the dream unfolds, Your dream storyline is usually related to threats to safety or survival, but it can have other disturbing themes,Your dream awakens you, you feel scared, anxious, angry, sad or disgusted as a result of your dream, and your dream causes distress that keeps you from falling back to sleep easily (Nightmare disorder, 2017). There are many factors that contribute to individuals experiencing nightmares. Some of the most prominent being stress and anxiety. Drugs that act on chemicals in the brain in order to treat certain conditions, such as antidepressants and narcotics, are often associated with nightmares. Some non-psychological medications, such as some blood pressure medications can also cause nightmares in adults. Some people have nightmares after having a late-night snack, which can increase metabolism and signal the brain to be more active. Another major factor that contributes to nightmares in adults is sleep deprivation. Nightmares in themselves can cause you to lose sleep, so it can be a vicious cycle of sleep deprivation and reoccurring nightmares (Sarkissian, 2017).

Conclusion

Many people are interested in the mystery of dreaming. We want to know: Why do dreams occur? What causes them? Can we control them? What do they mean? Unfortunately we are still not able to definitively answer all of these questions yet, however research has come a long way and been able to present us with some new and interesting theories about how and why we dream. Research has shown that the activity in our brain is incredibility similar when we are asleep to the activity of our brains when we are awake. There is not only one particular area of our brain that is responsible for dreaming, but rather the entire brain is involved in our dreams from the cortex to the brainstem. If we are curious as to what causes us to dream and what influences the content of our dreams, research has shown us that people with mental health disorders such as depression, anxiety, bipolar, and other mood-related conditions, can trigger intense and vivid dreams. Subsequently the medications for these particular conditions can also cause individuals to experience more vivid dreams. Many people want to make sense of the dreams they have, and looking into dream analysis there are many theories regarding the certain content of our dream and what it means. One of the most popular theories out there is that people simply dream about the events that have happened to them earlier on the day or previously in life, and that is the brain just recapping the day for you. Another popular theory is that we dream about emotional or biological conflicts we are facing and our dreams are the minds way of giving us a solution or hypothetical situation in which we can resolve our conflicts. Finally, some research has looked into nightmares specifically and the causes of them. Researchers have concluded that stress, anxiety, and sleep deprivation are the most common causes of nightmares in adults.

References

Blackmore, S. (n.d.). What happens when we dream? Retrieved from https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/what-happens-when-we-dream/

Hill, E. (2017, September 21). Drinking dreams: What they mean and how to cope with them –. Retrieved from https://joinclubsoda.co.uk/drinking-dreams-what-mean-how-cope/

King, P. (2013, October 03). What Is Dreaming? Retrieved from https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/10/what-is-dreaming.html

King, P. (2016, October 04). Why Do We Dream? Recent Developments In Neuroscience May Have The Answer. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/10/04/why-do-we-dream-recent-developments-in-neuroscience-may-have-the-answer/#6d9478495451

Nichols, H. (2018, June 28). Dreams: Why do we dream? Retrieved from https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/284378.php

Nightmare disorder. (2017, July 06). Retrieved from https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/nightmare-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20353515

Nir, Y., & Tononi, G. (2010). Dreaming and the brain: from phenomenology to neurophysiology. Trends in cognitive sciences, 14(2), 88–100. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2009.12.001

Sarkissian, C. (2017, January 28). What causes nightmares in adults? Retrieved from https://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/qa/what-causes-nightmares-in-adults

Stickgold, R., Hobson, J. A., Fosse, R., & Fosse, M. (2001, November 02). Sleep, learning, and dreams: Off-line memory reprocessing. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11691983

Sullivan, D., Ph.D. (2017, August 22). Why Do We Dream? The Role of Dreams and Nightmares. Retrieved from https://www.healthline.com/health/why-do-we-dream#what-influences-dreams