Have you ever woken up in the morning after the most perfect date night on top of the Eiffel Tower only to become disappointed to realize it was just another dream? Or perhaps you’ve experienced the reverse, waking up in the middle of the night with your heart thumping and sheets wet with sweat, only to feel a flood of relief that the three-headed dog chasing you through the forest was not coming for you after all and you are safe and sound in your bed? Dreams are perhaps the most complex human phenomena of the human psyche. It is something we all experience (even if you don’t remember them) and there exists a wide variety of interpretations and theories as to why we are transported to these crazy alternative realities in our sleep.

Perhaps the most widely distributed theory on dreams is that they are messages from your subconscious about your deepest fears, desires, thoughts, and even memories. This theory is rooted in Freudian psychology. Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, believed dreams had symbolic meanings. They represented conflicts which arose from unconscious childhood events. Dreams were a way for the unconscious mind to deal with these conflicts which could not be brought into direct consciousness. He believed that dreams were the symbolic manifestations of desires we wished to fulfil in our lives. The weird and obscure nature of dreams is because sometimes, our deepest desires are so socially unacceptable that our mind has to censor them into representations (thus, the nonsensical world of dreams).
Some people have tried to explain dreams from a neurobiological perspective through the Activation-Synthesis Hypothesis. In this theory, dreams have a physiological explanation. There are two broad phases to sleep: Non-rapid eye movement sleep (NREM) and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. Dreaming only occurs in REM sleep.

The stalk-like part of your brain which connects it to the spinal cord is called the brain stem. A part of the brain stem is the pons. During waking hours, the pons is responsible for conveying sensory information from the outside world to the relevant brain structures. Then the pre-frontal cortex, another part of your brain, organises the information and makes meaning of it for us. For example, the reason you can coherently be aware that you are reading this blog post right now is because the prefrontal cortex is organising your external reality to make sense.

During REM sleep, however, the pons sends out random signals of sensory information (which can’t be coming from the outside world because we are not experiencing anything!) But the pre-frontal cortex is shut down as we are not awake. Because of this, the brain has to try and make sense of this random sensory information the pons is sending to higher-order brain functions without the prefrontal cortex to arrange everything in a coherent manner. Thus, we end up with bizarre scenarios in the form of dreams which make no sense. More recent studies have suggested that this “random” firing of information from the pons is not so random and is based on experiences we have done in the previous day.

Another theory is that dreams are connections to the spiritual world. Dreams provide a way for us to access information and messages from religious spiritual figures, ancestors, or other important spiritual figures. Similar to the Freudian theory the beliefs here are that these dreams are representations. Different cultures have different beliefs about what individual dreams communicate to the waking world. For example, South African sangoma Gogo Moyo says that a person who dreams about snakes is spiritually gifted and that their ancestors are trying to reach out to them. However, in Native American culture, dreaming about snakes means you are attempting to gain wisdom or knowledge
Dreams are something we all experience each night – even those who say they don’t dream. What they really mean is that they cannot remember the dreams they experienced the night before.

We may never find a universal “truth” as to why we dream. For now, let us enjoy these weird scenarios of the human psyche and (hopefully) have more dreams of holidaying in a yacht in Greece than of being hunted by a monstrous creature!

Tell us: what do you believe about dreams – are they sending you a message, or are they just bits of nonsense from an unconscious brain?
Read about the importance of sleep here.