The primitive instinct rehearsal and adaptive strategy theories of dreaming propose that we dream to better prepare ourselves to confront dangers in the real world. The dream as a social simulation function or threat simulation provides the dreamer a safe environment to practice important survival skills. While dreaming, we hone our fight-or-flight instincts and build mental capability for handling threatening scenarios.
This theory suggests that practicing or rehearsing these skills in our dreams gives us an evolutionary advantage in that we can better cope with or avoid threatening scenarios in the real world.
This helps explain why so many dreams contain scary, dramatic, or intense content. The emotional regulation dream theory says that the function of dreams is to help us process and cope with our emotions or trauma in the safe space of slumber. Research shows that the amygdala, which is involved in processing emotions, and the hippocampus, which plays a vital role in condensing information and moving it from short-term to long-term memory storage, are active during vivid, intense dreaming.
This illustrates a strong link between dreaming, memory storage, and emotional processing. This theory suggests that REM sleep plays a vital role in emotional brain regulation. It also helps explain why so many dreams are emotionally vivid and why emotional or traumatic experiences tend to show up on repeat. Research has shown a connection between the ability to process emotions and the amount of REM sleep a person gets. Content similarities and common dreams shared among dreamers may help promote connection.
Research also notes heightened empathy among people who share their dreams with others, pointing to another way dreams can help us cope by promoting community and interpersonal support. Many other theories have been suggested to account for why we dream. Lucid dreams are relatively rare dreams where the dreamer has awareness of being in their dream and often has some control over the dream content. It is unknown why certain people experience lucid dreams more frequently than others.
While experts are unclear as to why or how lucid dreaming occurs, preliminary research signals that the prefrontal and parietal regions of the brain play a significant role. Many people covet lucid dreaming and seek to experience it more often. Lucid dreaming has been compared to virtual reality and hyper-realistic video games, giving lucid dreamers the ultimate self-directed dreamscape experience. Potential training methods for inducing lucid dreaming include cognitive training, external stimulation during sleep, and medications.
While these methods may show some promise, none have been rigorously tested or shown to be effective. A strong link has been found between lucid dreaming and highly imaginative thinking and creative output.
Research has shown that lucid dreamers perform better on creative tasks than those who do not experience lucid dreaming. Stressful experiences tend to show up with great frequency in our dreams. Stress dreams may be described as sad, scary, and nightmarish. Experts do not fully understand how or why specific stressful content ends up in our dreams, but many point to a variety of theories, including the continuity hypothesis, adaptive strategy, and emotional regulation dream theories to explain these occurrences.
Stress dreams and mental health seem to go hand-in-hand. While there are many theories for why we dream, more research is needed to fully understand their purpose. Rather than assuming only one hypothesis is correct, dreams likely serve a variety of purposes. Knowing that so much is left uncertain about why we dream, we can feel free to view our own dreams in the light that resonates best with us.
Ever wonder what your personality type means? Sign up to find out more in our Healthy Mind newsletter. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Brain basics: Understanding sleep.
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Participants with higher white matter density reported higher dream recall. People who are under the age of 25 rarely report dreaming in black and white. This idea is supported by an older study, which found that people in the s rarely reported dreaming in color.
Researchers have found some differences between men and women when it comes to the content of their dreams. In several studies, men reported dreaming about weapons significantly more often than women did, while women dreamed about references to clothing more often than men.
Another study showed that men's dreams tend to have more aggressive content and physical activity, while women's dreams contain more rejection and exclusion, as well as more conversation than physical activity.
Women tend to have slightly longer dreams that feature more characters. When it comes to the characters that typically appear in dreams, men dream about other men twice as often as they do about women, while women tend to dream about both sexes equally. Many think that when a sleeping dog wags its tail or when a sleeping cat swats its paws, it is dreaming. While it's hard to say for sure whether this is truly the case, researchers believe that it's likely that most animals, including mammals, birds, reptiles, and fish, do go through sleep stages, including REM and non-REM, which means they do indeed dream.
Animals might not experience dreams in the same way as humans, however. In other words, they may not wake up, remember images, and attach a storyline to it. A lucid dream is one in which you are aware that you are dreaming even though you're still asleep.
Lucid dreaming is thought to be a combination state of both consciousness and REM sleep, during which you can often direct or control the dream content. Researchers say that people can use various techniques to learn how to lucid dream, including "mnemonic induction of lucid dreams" MILD and "senses initiated lucid dreams" SSILD , which involve waking up after five hours and repeating a phrase like "I will remember my dreaming," or focusing on the stimuli sights, sounds, sensations in your sleep environment, respectively.
Approximately half of all people can remember experiencing at least one instance of lucid dreaming, and some individuals are able to have lucid dreams quite frequently. Over a period of more than 40 years, researcher Calvin S.
Hall, PhD, collected over 50, dream accounts from college students. These reports were made available to the public during the s by Hall's student William Domhoff. The dream accounts revealed that many emotions are experienced during dreams.
There are several factors that can impact the emotional content of dreams, including anxiety, stress, and certain medications. One study found that external stimuli, including good and bad smells, can play a role in positive and negative dreams.
The most common emotion experienced in dreams is anxiety, and negative emotions, in general, are much more common than positive ones. In one study of people who have been blind since birth, researchers found that they still seemed to experience visual imagery in their dreams, and they also had eye movements that correlated to visual dream recall. Although their eye movements were fewer during REM than the sighted participants of the study, the blind participants reported the same dream sensations, including visual content.
REM sleep is characterized by paralysis of the voluntary muscles. The phenomenon is known as REM atonia and prevents you from acting out your dreams while you're asleep. Basically, because motor neurons are not stimulated, your body does not move.
In some cases, this paralysis can even carry over into the waking state for as long as 10 minutes, a condition known as sleep paralysis. While the experience can be frightening, experts advise that it is perfectly normal and should last only a few minutes before normal muscle control returns. While dreams are often heavily influenced by our personal experiences, researchers have found that certain dream themes are very common across different cultures.
For example, people from all over the world frequently dream about being chased, being attacked, or falling. Other common dream experiences include feeling frozen and unable to move, arriving late, flying, and being naked in public.
Ever wonder what your personality type means? Sign up to find out more in our Healthy Mind newsletter. In: Handbook of Clinical Neurology. Vol Elsevier; vii. National Institute of Neurological Disorders. Brain basics: Understanding sleep. Updated August 13, National Sleep Foundation. In the s, Freud introduced dream interpretation, but we have never been able to substantiate his claims.
We do know that people with post-traumatic stress syndrome PTSD are more likely to have nightmares. So dreaming can accompany psychiatric conditions. Yet normal people have nightmares, too, so opinions are divided. One study suggests that dreams stem more from your imagination the memories, abstract thoughts and wishes pumped up from deep within your brain than from perception the vivid sensory experiences you collect in your forebrain. But there is so much more to discover.
For example, we know that nightmares are a manifestation of tension for people with PTSD, because they recur around their traumatic experience. For others, are dreams related to good moods or bad moods? How often have you been amused by a weird dream? Learn more about vaccine availability. Advertising Policy.
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