Why do we dream when we sleep?

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 Why do we dream when we sleep?


Why we dream and the function of our dreams has been the point of debate for many years. Dreams are the stories and the images that our minds create while we sleep. They can be entertaining or fun, romantic, frightening, disturbing and sometimes bizarre. We may not remember our dreaming, but everyone is thought to dream between 3 and 6 times per night. It is also thought that each dream may last between 5 to 20 minutes. Around 95 percent of the dreams are forgotten by the time a person gets out of his/her bed. Dreaming can help you learn and develop many long-term memories. Blind people dream more with their other sensory components compared with the sighted people.

Are dreams merely a part of the sleep cycle, or do they serve some other purpose?

1. Representing the unconscious desires and wishes

2. Interpreting some random signals from the brain and body during our sleep

3. Consolidating and processing the information gathered during the day

4. Working as a form of psychotherapy

From few evidences and new research methodologies, researchers have speculated that dreaming serves the following functions:

1. Offline memory reprocessing, in which our brain consolidates learning and memory tasks and supports and records waking consciousness

2. Preparing for possible future threats

3. Cognitive simulation of the real life experiences, as dreaming is a subsystem of the waking default network, the part the mind actives during daydreaming.

4. helping develop cognitive capabilities

5. Reflecting unconscious mental function in a psychoanalytic way

6. A unique state of consciousness that incorporates experience of the present, processing of the past, and preparation for the future

7. A psychological space where the overwhelming, contradictory, or highly complex notions can be brought together by the dreaming ego, notions that would be unsettling while we awake, serving the need for psychological balance and equilibrium.

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