Why Do We Dream?

alt Jordan Lite ON Aug 17, 2010, ivillage.com

Dreams. A good one can put you in an upbeat mood the rest of the day, while a bad one may leave you feeling troubled and down for hours. How much stock should we put in these mysterious nighttime narratives?

Everyone dreams (though not all of us remember) and dreams show up in texts as old as the Bible, pointing to their cultural—if not psychological—significance. But scientists still disagree about whether dreams serve any purpose at all, and if they do, what it is.

“Anyone who tells you they know is wrong,” says Ernest Hartmann, M.D., a psychiatry professor at Tufts University.

The idea that dreams reveal our unconscious desires or anxieties, or represent aspects of ourselves, permeates Western pop culture and still plays a role in psychotherapy. But those theories, put forth by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung in the late 1800s and early 20th century, are impossible to prove, and “still most interesting despite the fact that they’re not understood by science,” says Doug Davis, Ph.D., an emeritus professor of psychology at Haverford College. “What dream interpretation does is let you sneak up on something that you might not have stumbled upon otherwise.”

In fact, famous scientists and artists have reported that their dreams revealed solutions to problems they were stumped by in their waking life, or inspired their creative works. Among the most famous examples is the 19th century chemist August Kekulé, who said he figured out the ring-like structure of benzene, which was atypical of all known molecules, after dreaming of a snake biting its tail. More recently, Avatar writer/director James Cameron told the San Francisco Chronicle that the alien species in the film, the Na’vi, was inspired by a dream his mother had of a 12-foot tall, blue woman.

Those eureka moments may come from our dream states being more visually vivid than those of our waking lives, full of images we’ve never seen, says Deirdre Barrett, Ph.D., author of the 2001 book The Committee of Sleep: How Artists, Scientists and Athletes Use Dreams for Creative Problem-Solving—And How You Can, Too.

“There are two types of problems that seem especially likely to get solved in dreams, and they really seem to be those things that dreams are best at,” Barrett says. “One is if it’s a visual-spatial kind of problem–anything from an artist trying to get inspiration for what to paint next to inventors who are working on some three-dimensional, physical device, where visualizing how it should work is a part of the process. The other kind of problem that they seem especially likely to solve is one where the person is stuck exactly because the conventional wisdom is wrong. Some dreams are just better at helping you think more broadly and loosely.”

That’s not to say that dreams lack emotional import. Imaging studies have found that areas of the brain responsible for emotion are especially active during dreams. And Hartmann found that the intensity or emotional power of prominent images in people’s dreams, increased in the weeks following 9/11, even though dreamers weren’t dreaming of more towers or airplanes than before the terrorist attacks. They were, however, dreaming of more frightening run-ins with other people and animals, possibly indicating emotional stress or feelings of insecurity, according to the 2008 study, which was published in the journal . Dreams following trauma, Hartmann wrote there, are “guided by the emotion of the dreamer.”

For that reason, some scientists believe that nightmares or recurring dreams following trauma may help us work through traumatic experiences. Powerful images of terror and vulnerability (a tidal wave, for example) may be followed by dreams combining elements of the trauma and older material from the dreamer’s life. “The dreams seem to be ‘weaving in’ or integrating the traumatic experience,” says Hartmann. But others have found that dreams after trauma may actually perpetuate victims’ fears and anxieties while they’re awake, said Sean Drummond, Ph.D., associate professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in February 2010.

Which isn’t to say that only a powerful emotional event will spark a memorable dream. University of California, Santa Cruz, research professor in sociology G. William Domhoff has described dreams as reflective of our waking concerns—a kind of personality profile—and Barrett believes in a kind of continuum of thought process, with dreams falling on the fuzzier end. “Dreams are dealing with as broad a swath of our life as our waking thought is, but they are better and worse at some things compared to our waking thought,” Barrett says.

Want to see whether you think better asleep or awake? Barrett has found even mere mortals have found solutions in their dreamscapes using simple techniques. Half of students who wrote about a problem in their life before going to bed, then visualized it and told themselves they wanted to dream about it once the lights were out did, in fact, dream about their problem. Twenty-eight percent of dreams that were about a personal issue revealed a solution, as did 38 percent of those that were about objective problems, according to a study she published in 1993 in the journal Dreaming.

You can try out a more elaborate version of the technique by placing reminders near your bed. If you’re an artist, position a blank canvas nearby, or if you’re trying to work out something in a relationship, put the person’s photo on your bed stand and look at it before you go to sleep. “A simple state of intent increases the odds that you’ll have a dream on the topic and solve the problem,” Barrett says.

And getting more sleep will up your chances of remembering it. The tendency to recall dreams correlates with more time snoozing, Barrett says. And unless we wake up right after a dream, it won’t get stored as a long-term memory and is lost to sleep. So get in the habit of keeping a pen and paper or voice recorder by your bed so you can document any dreams you have when you first get up, Davis says, or at least of staying still for a moment to increase your chance of hanging on to it. If you don’t remember a dream, tune into your mood as you wake up—it may jog your memory.

While experts agree that dreaming can provide benefits—offering clarity, solutions, and catharsis for some—there’s still no consensus on exactly why we dream. Ultimately, it’s up to you to decide what, if anything, your dreams are telling you. When Davis’ daughter was a child, she used to ask her expert dad what her dreams meant. “I’d say, ‘I have no idea,’” Davis recalled, “‘but isn’t it amazing that this stuff happens?’”