What is a dream, exactly?
That’s a question human beings have been asking for a long, long time. And we still don’t really know.
Maybe the most famous answers are the ones that aren’t exactly scientific. For example, Sigmund Freud thought dreams were a window into what is happening in your unconscious mind, and that they represented your repressed desires. That theory has given birth to an elaborate pseudoscience of dream interpretation—you can find books that claim to tell you what your dreams really mean based on what different things symbolize. Others have understood dreams as premonitions or prophecies, as if dreams show you the future. Which only makes interpreting them even more important!
But these ideas may be more scientific than they look at first.“We have a capacity for forethought,” Kelly Bulkeley, author of Big Dreams: The Science of Dreaming and the Origins of Religion, told New York magazine. “It’s going to get cold in the winter, so we better store up food. All sorts of things we do depend on the capacity to predict the future. I see the mind and the brain as a twenty-four-hour system and that same kind of [preparatory] thinking is happening in sleep as well.”
Other scientists continue to search for answers to this question. David Billington, a researcher at the Dream Research Institute, said in an interview with WIRED magazine‘s UK edition that dreams may just be the “byproduct” of other brain activities taking place while you’re asleep, “such as the ‘cleansing’ of neurons.” But WIRED also claimed “there are other hypotheses—like Antti Revonsuo’s theory that explores whether dreams are a function to practice survival scenarios while sleeping.”
WIRED further reported that “Billington said [dreams] are almost universally seen as ‘giving hints about the body, soul and the world around us.'” So whatever the theory you have about dreams—whether they’re hidden desires, memories resurfacing in sleep, survival practice, or something else entirely—it’s worth the time to think about what your dreams mean.
Think about a dream you had recently, and tell us about it by dropping us a line through our submission page! What happened, and what do you think it means?