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The Evolutionary Incentive to Dream
A theory as to why dreaming became such a common phenomenon throughout the animal kingdom
Now, when I say “the evolutionary incentive to dream”, I mean the evolutionary incentive to witness our dreams. Fundamentally, I believe that dreams may be a process the brain undergoes for self-maintenance that the conscious mind needn’t necessarily be present for.
If we think of dreaming as one function of the brain and consciousness and memory formation as other functions, I’d hypothesize that consciousness/memory formation occurring while dreaming is actually something of a physiological-mental mishap. In other words, it was originally by chance that we ever experienced consciousness while that physiological action was taking place and to be conscious during it serves no direct purpose.
In other words, I believe there is some process that is happening in the brain every night, and when the part of the brain controlling base consciousness happens to activate at the same time, we witness this process and subjectively experience it as a “dream”. The reason this unnecessary and coincidental occurrence is so common is that it might actually offer a degree of Darwinian fitness.
Speaking just from personal experience, my dreams always tend to have the same…