Dreams. Why?

Why on earth does your brain take you on wild adventures when you sleep? What purpose does dreaming serve? Well, come take a deep dive into the mysterious world of dreams with me. From ancient beliefs about divine messages to Freud's kookie theories, I'll explore the cultural and scientific perspectives on what dreams might mean - everything from Egypt's dream books to Jung's dream symbology. I'll also explore the latest scientific insights into the biology of dreams (including brain imaging of the stages of sleep) and discuss some of the most popular theories about dreams (including the possibility that it's a survival tactic), which might give insight into why our brains concoct these surreal scenarios.

And hey, before you go, jump into the comments and spill the beans about your weirdest or favorite dreams! Ever flown like a superhero or danced with dinosaurs in dreamland? Share the dreamy details!

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#dreams #brainscience #dreaminterpretation #neuroscience #sleepscience

[Micetticat]

I think dreams are the combination of two phenomena. One is the rehearsal of actions and concepts learned during the day to consolidate memories. The other phenomena is the excitation of random pathways from white noise due to sensory deprivation. I think that the two mechanisms are related. Now let's unpause and see how wrong I was.

[danielkelley]

I’ve been a Lucid Dreamer my entire life. I’ve published a few How-To books on the subject. Lucid Dreaming eventually teaches you that we’re sort of dreaming most of the time, even while awake.

[tone]

My understanding has always been that dreams are the retroactive narrativizing of unrelated brain impulses while you sleep. Like, your brain is firing various neurons in order to organize information, but then when you wake up some of those signals are still floating around and your pattern-matching brain tries to figure out what it was thinking about, constructing a coherent(-ish) story out of largely random images. No idea how true that actually is, though. I guess I'll find out!

[TheMegHendy]

I have PTSD and my dreams feel like preparation for the future. I'm taking my days' worth of information, new and old, and I'm reorganizing it to better prepare for future situations. All of my dreams feature "flight" as an overall theme if we can call it that. It feels like an AI generated animation with the input: present memories to better protect myself in the future. This vagueness creates a slightly unhinged but fluid interpretation.

[theresemalmberg]

I am surprised you didn't mention lucid dreaming. Yes, it is a real phenomenon. I have very vivid dreams, in which I am not only aware that I am dreaming but in some cases I can even change the direction of the dream. When I mean vivid I mean all my senses are involved, sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. I also have a sense of direction and even location in my dreams so if the dream involved movement I am aware of am I headed north, south, east or west; locations involve real-life towns, cities, states, buildings, highways even if the dream locations differ from their real-life counterparts I am aware of where they are supposed to be taking place and what those differences are. I also dream about people and animals. I'd like to say that on whole I do enjoy my dreams.

[hrbsman]

I feel like it’s pretty simple to conclude your brain doesn’t just turn off just because you’re asleep, and since you’re not actively conscious your brain conjures random tidbits from recent memories and it uses those to supplement not experiencing an active consciousness. Idk it doesn’t seem to crazy to me, sometimes dreams can be interpreted as having meaning but also the one dream I’ve never forgot was when I shot a rocket launcher at a giant shark after watching jaws and constantly playing goldeneye.

[TrixiePowder]

I always thought dreaming was just a way our living bodies have learned "hey you kniw how i could add a whole 1/3 length to my life span? If we just lay still so i dont need to hunt and gather 24/7"

[amarlynk]

i think dreams are a combination of our memories and feelings, as well as our subconscious desires and fears

[amazinggrapes]

I regularly experience dreams where I'm not even a character, they're about as common as the alternative... is that strange? 😮

[Dippedinsilver]

When my dreams get strange or if I have a recurring dream, I become lucid. I almost always wake myself up, but I recently started trying to control my dreams. It’s starting to work a little. My lucid dreams are spontaneous, I’ve never tried it intentionally.

[saftheartist]

2:23
“I want your unbiased opinion, what do you think dreams are?”

- Animals like us have died since the beginning of time (as we know it), it could likely be a rehearsal process of this death phenomenon.
The universe and nature is bigger than a particular species survival.

[yorankoppes]

I have been interested in dreams for my whole life. For the last few years, I've been writing about my dreams, and I try to analyse and interpret them as well. For the last two years especially, my dreams have been getting even crazier than they already were (even though dreams were already the strangest part of life for me). I mostly attribute this to the fact that dream content seems to reflect what happens to you during the day. Since I spend a lot of time thinking about dreams, my dreams started to be about dreams, or dreaming, and that just pulls out a whole new level of craziness in dreams.

Here's an example from last week (crazy dreams also happen really often for me):
I was laying in bed, reading about a very old dream (SPOILER: this was already inside the dream). This dream I was reading about really didn't seem familiar, but as I was trying to remember the dream, I found myself experiencing it. I was driving on the highway, when people started driving in the wrong direction. I found out that the road was full of arrows, all in different directions, some of them even telling you to turn around, even though this was in the middle of the highway. Then I found myself back in bed, reading. The highway part felt like an ordinary dream, even though it was nested inside another dream, it was supposed to be a really old dream, and I didn't remember it. I read further but I still couldn't remember it. Then I arrived at a part where I started interpreting (this old dream that I still couldn't remember). I saw a lot of descriptive words, some of them I didn't even know, even though I was supposed to have written this myself. But it also was hard to read because it was dark. I turned on my light, then I closed my eyes. This was one of those lamps that takes a second to turn on, but after three seconds I still didn't see anything. If it had turned on, I would have seen light through my eyelids. I opened my eyes to see what was going on. But at that moment, when my eyes opened, in a snap, I was fully awake. My light was not at all turned on, and my diary was nowhere near my bed.

Dreams on this level of craziness happen to me pretty irregularly, but on average, I would still say multiple times a month. I think it's very fascinating how strange dreams can get, and I definitely recommend writing about your dreams if you're interested in these kinds of things (writing dreams down also helps with remembering them more often and more clearly).

[christophercrimson]

In my opinion, I think dreams are a recreation of life the subconscious mind makes when the conscious mind is absent. The subconscious mind is constantly being fed, images, feelings, and thoughts every second your awake. But it’s in the background. When you’re asleep, it is able to produce thoughts in the foreground. That’s why dreams can be strange and confusing because you’re seeing things you’ve imagined or seen before. And running off memory makes things a bit hazy. This is also why dreams can have “meanings” because it’s a reflection of the things you feel during waking hours.

[ndrmartin]

Just found this channel and am loving the content! I have been able to lucid dream since I could remember, with a distinct memory of my first lucid dream happening from a recurring nightmare that I was being chased. One day i kinda just realized I had been through this and needed to do something different so called for and basically summoned my grandpa to fight the monster. From this perspective of me just being able to do this for so long, I’ve always just seen dreams as our minds running away with our lived experiences and influenced by our imagination.

[Dippedinsilver]

I think dreams are a way for our brains to organize information and memories. Maybe they also help us confront anxieties fears in a safe way as well.

[ssatva]

I see dreams as a consequence of brains that can consider counterfactuals; we've got this equipment that can say 'yeah but what would I see if I were standing here tomorrow?' and that is some wild mechanisms we've got running. And then I suspect that we sort of 'exercise' these systems when we sleep, for some reason. I would love more of a model of why!
I see dreams as being akin to art, and assign them meaning accordingly, but no more... and sometimes they can be super blunt art.
Edit to add: I think human dreams are so weird because of the systems for counterfactuals; animal dreams may well be replays/rehearsals in a more direct sense, like young human dreams.

[thecheethamcompound]

I had for years, a reoccurring dream that I had purchased an old derelict house that was in dire need of repair.
During said repairs I discovered an entire second level that could not be seen from the street outside.
I would cautiously explore this level that was often (in dreamland) a living quarters.
I would find a static-filled television on, or a simmering frying pan on the stove—but never did I find the occupants.
On other occasions I would find rooms full of antiques, and look through drawers full of miscellaneous junk while always aware of a presence in the quarters—ghost like.
It haunted me.
It actually led me to write a book called Fade to Pale in 2007, if for no other reason but to cure me of the nightly anxiety that came with the nocturnal return to this house…
Dreams are amazing and important.
They led me to becoming a published writer…as disturbing as they were.

Don’t dismiss them, embrace their insistence and involve them in your evolution.
They’re you, after all.

[QQuandary]

I think when we sleep, our brains are reorganizing the information stored in our brains since the last time we slept like moving memories from short term to long term. Our dreams is partly a side effect. In the old days, we used to Defrag hard drives. If you paid attention to the process, you would realize that Defragging is very messy process. And that is why we don't used that process anymore. Can you imagine parts going from one side of the brain to the other side, and it had to pass through or effects the visual part of the brail. I'm pretty sure that the brain tries to prevents trauma by giving context to what you are seeing. if the brain didn't do this, the things that you dream about will give you trauma.

[abbiegilfilen]

Dreams are the best and worst parts of my subconscious going through preconceptions, imagining things without bound, occasionally mingling with other dimensions (yes I realize it’s not entirely scientific)

[demonsorrows]

(End of the vid comment. Again, sorry for length.)

My first vivid lucid dream was a crash course. All my senses working, no idea where I was, freaking out a bit.
The sky was purplish-blue of rolling storm clouds, some multi-colored flashes.
Really shortened version of events: I was forced outside a castle where hooded figures tied me down and vivisected me. I'll never forget the hollow feeling of my organs outside my body. I woke up crying in the dark of my room not wanting to get up thinking what's left of my organs could fall out. Since then, I've had lucid dreams almost every time I sleep. A lot of crazy nightmares I'd never want to go back to, a lot of places I wish I could've stayed. A lot of pain. If there's one thing I'd like to turn off it's feeling pain. A year or so after I started having them, one dream I ended up skydiving with someone and my parachute didn't open. I landed next to a kids playground and was mangled. The few minutes I was crawling before I died/woke up was horrible.

Many hundreds of deaths, amazing places, different planets and alien races, past, future, alternate realities, magic, advanced tech, ancient civilizations, traveling through the cosmos watching things form. Some dreams lasting years in dream-time despite only being asleep for 5-10 minutes, but it still takes me a moment to remember who and where I am afterwards. Kept dream journals, tape journals recording by voice, lost 7 years worth of them due to a family member not paying (pocketed the money) for our family storage unit after moving to another state. I rarely wrote out any of them down after the move.

The rarest dreams are ones where a story plays out with several people. I'm each person up to one certain point, then it restarts and I'm one of the others going through the same story. Get hit when someone dropped something from a glider above me. Hear them scream down but can't hear them. Wave sand yell back. Move on. Restarted, I was the person with the glider trying to grab a water pouch attached to the frame, it dropped, see the person below get hit, yell that I'm sorry, person waved and yelled back. That's when it dawned, that was me and what I did before. Each interaction was what I said and did for each person.


I wish my mental health wasn't all bleh. I get easily frustrated and overwhelmed (PTSD from family stuff.) I could write so many damn books and short stories. It's annoying.
Thanks for reading if ya did. Hope you have a great week, stranger-people.