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Beep. Beep. Beep.
The sound of an alarm clock startles you out of a nearly unintelligible stream of consciousness. You sit up and shake your head, trying to remember what had just transpired in your fantasy world, and yet it’s already slipping from you.
Whether you’re jolting upright in a cold sweat or falling back into your pillow trying to get those “5 more minutes” of sleep, it may seem that the nonsensical movies in our heads can mean nothing. Especially because they’re so hard to remember.
We Dream…
Besides a select few people and newborn children , everyone has had a dream; that is to say ideas and images that are experienced while a person is in REM sleep.
To Process Our Emotions
After an eventful day IRL, your brain may resort to processing your emotions in the dream world.
Especially after trauma, we often struggle to make sense of the jumbled mess in our heads.
By turning feelings into visual situations, you can better understand yourself. Dreams may give you indicators of your connection to your mental state and help you deal with your real emotions.
For example, dreams with similar themes like being trapped or falling might mean you have unresolved conflicts or events in your life.
Of course, dream meanings are subjective and often different for each individual, so things like dream interpreters shouldn’t be something you seriously rely on.
It might be fun to get a second opinion, however. As long as you don’t put too much stock in your reading, there’s no harm in it.
Some dreams seem to exist just to torment and haunt you. Of course, the occasional scary night is common even in adults, but unusually repetitive nightmares might be a product of a condition like anxiety, depression, or PTSD.
Many relive versions of events nightly, which may lead to sleep disorders and problems.
These bad dreams do serve a purpose; they are set to inform and yes, even scare, us about possible threats in the real world.
They can also be evidence of your mental health; once you recognize symptoms like recurring dreams, you may become more aware of how unrecognized emotions have affected the rest of your life.
Seek help from mental health professionals if you feel your life has been disrupted by your dreams.
To Free the Creative Within You
Einstein’s famous theory of relativity. The Beatles classic, “Yesterday”.
Dreams have inspired countless strokes of genius throughout history in both creative and academic pursuits.
While you are awake, your conscious thought is trapped by society’s current understanding of reason, common sense, and logic.
When your subconscious takes over, inspiration and ideas are limitless.
Whether this is a useful byproduct or a legitimate purpose of our slumbering fantasies isn’t known yet, but while science figures it out — keep dreaming.
Many people stand by a notebook beside the bed, whether to jot down late-night thoughts or journal their dreams. If you’re a musician, keep your instrument close at hand.
You can even record ideas on your phone if you sleep with it (although it may help better your sleep if you keep electronic devices in a different room, especially close to bedtime).
To Help You Remember… or Forget
First, to get some neurological jargon out of the way — emotional and procedural memory.
Emotional memory is composed of the events during your waking hours that caused an emotional reaction.
Procedural memory, on the other hand, is like how you remember to ride a bike. Essentially, it’s what is often referred to as muscle memory.
This allows you to go about your life doing specific tasks without having to relearn how to do each thing.
Both are consolidated and solidified during sleep, and especially during the REM or dream period. As for the former, a study by psychologists S. Groch, I. Wilhelm, S. Diekelmann, and J. Born showed that participants who experienced longer REM sleep time remembered pictures they associated with emotions better than those who didn’t.
In other words, you’ll remember things better and be able to sort out emotions associated with your experiences if you “sleep on it”.
Procedural memory is also consolidated during REM sleep. During your dreams, you star in experiences (some incredibly bizarre) that may help you remember tasks for the real world.
From taking a test to riding a bike, your dreams help prepare you for reality.
To Practice for the Real World
There’s the procedural memory function of dreaming. However, living out these scenarios in a safe place can also help with things you haven’t experienced before.
Simulating social and physical threats in your dreams helps you better respond and avoid dangerous situations.
For example, there’s a fair chance you have not, in fact, fallen down an endless abyss screaming for the Nintendo character Mario’s mother.
However, there’s a fair chance you’ll dream a variation of it. Common dreams like these can mean your brain is preparing you to react appropriately in similar (albeit more realistic) situations, such as being embarrassed, injuring yourself, or performing tasks.
To (kind of) Predict the Future
Sometimes it seems like you have a psychic third eye in your dreams. You’re simply going about your day, and suddenly, you have deja vu.
You rack your brain, wondering why… until you realize you had dreamed about this exact event a couple of nights ago. Is it time to start selling your services as a mystical dream fortune teller?
Our brains constantly look for connections and patterns to make sense of the world around us.
If your dream is in any way similar to reality, you could see that as a prediction of the future.
Your subconscious mind that takes over during your dreams has made observations that — to put it simply — you aren’t conscious of.
If you half hear a news report you might then dream about it and find it exists in reality.
Chalk it up to your brain’s careful monitoring of your surroundings.
There’s also the possibility you essentially made things happen to match your dream.
Take the example of dreaming about that big promotion you’ve been working for. You vividly live through it, smiling and shaking your boss’s hand. Then, a few days later, you get that promotion.
This isn’t necessarily magic; you’ve wanted and worked for that promotion. The dream you had is simply additional motivation in showing you that goal is possible in reality.
Dreams — and Sleep — are Important!
While a true purpose of dreams hasn’t been established yet, there are many health (especially mental health) benefits to getting your beauty rest.
Try consistently going to bed and waking up at the same time.
Write out a healthy sleep schedule and stick to it; eventually, you will train yourself to wake up naturally and not disturb that precious REM sleep with a beeping alarm.
Sources and Further Reading
Adkins, Amy. “Why Do We Dream? – Amy Adkins.” TED, TED-Ed, 10 Dec. 2015, ed.ted.com/lessons/why-do-we-dream-amy-adkins.
Cherry, Kendra. “How Procedural Memory Works.” Verywell Mind, 10 May 2020, www.verywellmind.com/what-is-procedural-memory-2795478.
“Dreams.” International Association for the Study of Dreams, www.asdreams.org/aboutdreams/.
Franklin, Michael S., and Michael J. Zyphur. “The Role of Dreams in the Evolution of the Human Mind.” Evolutionary Psychology, Jan. 2005, doi:10.1177/147470490500300106.
Hartmann, Ernest. “Outline for a Theory on the Nature and Functions of Dreaming.” Dreaming, vol. 6, no. 2, 1996, pp. 147–170., doi:10.1037/h0094452.
Roland, Elisa. “13 World-Changing Ideas That Came from Dreams (Literally).” Reader’s Digest, Reader’s Digest, 27 Apr. 2018, www.rd.com/list/ideas-that-came-from-dreams/.
S. Groch, I. Wilhelm, S. Diekelmann, J. Born, “The role of REM sleep in the processing of emotional memories: Evidence from behavior and event-related potentials”, Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, Volume 99, 2013, Pages 1-9, ISSN 1074-7427, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nlm.2012.10.006.
Walker, M. P., & van der Helm, E. (2009). Overnight therapy? The role of sleep in emotional brain processing. Psychological Bulletin, 135(5), 731–748. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0016570
Written By Nikki Piedad
