Oneirology is a science that studies dreams. This discipline combines the features of psychology, neuroscience and much more, but even it does not answer the main question - why do people dream. Although there is no convincing solution, a number of interesting hypotheses have emerged.
Hidden desires
Sigmund Freud is the founder of psychoanalysis, a man who, among other things, was one of the first to study dreams. After analyzing the dreams of hundreds of patients, he was able to develop a theory that a number of people adhere to to this day. It says that dreams are hidden aspirations and suppressed desires of people.
According to Freud, people dream of the things they want to achieve, symbolically or literally. The founder of psychoanalysis, through the study of dreams, helped clients to bring out the deeply hidden aspirations and fears that surprised patients. They did not even suspect that such things could be in their subconscious.
Side effect of electrical brain activity
Psychiatrist Alan Hobson explains the occurrence of dreams in a completely different way. He believes that dreams do not carry a semantic load. According to him, these are simply the results of random electrical impulses in those parts of the brain that are responsible for memories, perception and emotions.
Hobson called his theory the "action-synthetic model." According to it, the brain interprets random signals, which causes colorful and not very plots. This “model” also explains why some people can create literary works that are essentially “waking dreams”. They are created by the authors through the interpretation of signals received by the limbic system of the brain.
Sending short-term memories for long-term storage
Psychiatrist Zhang Jie put forward the idea that the brain passes a chain of memories through itself, regardless of whether the body is awake or asleep. She called this idea "the theory of permanent activation." Dreams arise at the moment when short-term memories fall into the long-term memory departments for long-term storage.
Getting rid of trash
According to the "reverse learning theory", dreams help to get rid of a certain amount of unnecessary connections and associations that are formed in the brain during the whole day. In other words, dreams can serve as a mechanism for getting rid of "garbage" - from useless and unwanted thoughts. This, in turn, helps to avoid overloading from a large amount of information entering the head every day.
Systematization of information received during the day
This hypothesis is completely opposite to the "reverse learning theory". It says that dreams help you remember and organize information.
Several other studies support this hypothesis. Their results show that a person is better able to remember the information that is received right before bedtime. The apologists of this theory believe that dreams help a person to systematize and comprehend the information acquired during the day.
Recently, studies have been conducted that have revealed that if a person falls asleep immediately after some unpleasant incident, waking up he will remember all the events as if they happened a few minutes ago. Therefore, if a person has a psychosomatic trauma, it is better to keep him awake for as long as possible. The absence of dreams will erase unpleasant moments from memory.
Protective modified instinct, inherited from animals
Several scientists have conducted studies that indicate similarities in behavior between humans while sleeping and the behavior of animals pretending to be "dead."
The brain works at the time of dreaming in the same way as during wakefulness, but with differences in the motor activity of the body. The same is observed in animals depicting a corpse so that the predator does not touch them. This leads to the conclusion that dreams could have been inherited by humans from distant animal ancestors, having changed in the process of evolution.
Simulated threat
There is a "defense instinct theory" that fits well with the idea of the Finnish neuroscientist and philosopher Antti Revonusuo. He suggests that the function of dreams is needed for "rehearsal" and working out the body's response to various dangerous situations. A person who often met a threat in a dream will perform actions in reality much more confidently, because the situation is now "familiar" to him. Such training is capable of favorably influencing the survival of not only the human individual, but also the species as a whole.
True, the hypothesis has a flaw. She cannot explain why a person dreams of positive dreams that do not carry threats or warnings.
Solution
This hypothesis was created by Deirdre Barrett, a professor at Harvard University. In some ways, it is similar to the idea of the Finnish scientist Antti Revonsuo.
Professor Barrett believes that dreams for a person play the role of a kind of theater, on the stage of which you can find many questions and solutions to some difficulties. At the same time, the brain works much faster in a dream, because it is able to form associative connections faster.
Deirdre Barrett draws similar conclusions based on his research, which resulted in finding out that if you put a specific task before sleep, after awakening, he solves it much better than other "experimental".
Natural selection of thoughts
The theory of problem solving through sleep is close to the idea of natural selection of thoughts, which was developed by psychologist Mark Blencher. He describes dreams as follows: “A dream is a stream of random images, some of which the brain selects and stores for later use. Dreams are composed of many thoughts, emotions, feelings, and other higher mental functions. Some of these functions undergo a kind of natural selection and are stored in memory."
Psychologist Richard Coates thinks that the brain simulates a variety of situations during sleep in order to select the most appropriate emotional responses. Therefore, people in the morning do not worry about the scary and disturbing stories that they saw in their dreams - the brain, as it were, reports that this is just a "rehearsal".
Smoothing out negative experiences through symbolic associations
Proponents of this theory believe that sleep is not a stream of random images or imitation of various emotional reactions, but rather a semblance of a therapeutic session.
Ernest Hartman, one of the founders of the Modern Theory of Dreams, a researcher of the nature of sleep and a psychiatrist, writes: “A person's dreams are simple if some vivid emotion prevails in him. Trauma survivors usually dream of a monosyllabic emotion. For example, "I was lying on the beach and was washed away by a huge wave." If a sleeper is disturbed by several questions at once, his dreams will be more difficult. The higher a person's emotional arousal, the more vividly he will see dreams."
Hartman believes that dreams are an evolutionary mechanism through which the brain mitigates the negative effects of trauma. The brain shows them in a dream, in the form of associative images and symbols.
