A Midsummer Discussion on Dreams

Dreams are messages from the deep

A Sardaukar, Dune (2021)

Oh solemn dream, oh sweet sorrowful night how could thou leave me so quickly, like lightning you appeared and brightened my world and now, woe you have left me, oh tragedy! Sleeping is one of my favorite past times for I spend 9 whole hours of my day sleeping hoping to dream but alas, I do not, not often anyway. Woe, woe. Truly woe.

That got me thinking, why do we dream? And why did I dream that last night? Ugghhhh… Still has me in a daze. There are many different guesses as to why we dream and most recent guesses are still inconclusive in terms of their correctness so don’t take these whys as absolute fact.

“Why do we dream?” asked the child

“We dream to gain knowledge about the world around us and about our bodies!” The ancients reply

Way back when, the ancient Greeks and Romans believed that dreams held knowledge of the past, the present and even the future (Pearcy, 2022). Dreams were seen not as one to one accounts of events, requiring interpretation. Much to the dismay of some, not all interpreted dreams were true, the interpreter had to tell what was true and what was not. In The Odyssey, Penelope distinguished true dreams from false ones by seeing the gate by which dreams entered. Penelope said that true dreams entered through gates of polished horn and false dreams through gates of ivory.

The ancients would eventually try to understand the nature of dreams. Some believed dreams were the act of spirits and Gods, the ancient Greek attributing several Gods to dreams, the Oneiroi they called them (Askitopoulou, 2015). Plato thought dreams were a kind of one-way communicator to tell man what they wanted yet also thought that dreams may also arise due to natural causes. Unlike their contemporaries, Aristotle and Epicurean Dogma believed that dreams had no ability to predict the future.

Medical writers in ancient cultures believed that dreams could give insight into certain bodily states and processes that, at the time, evaded direct observation. The author of, On Regimen, a piece of ancient medical literature, claimed that he had several cases of dreams foretelling physiological events. Unlike their peers, the author attempted to explain the causes of such dreams as well their interpretation of the dreams. The mechanism by which dreams could predict physical afflictions apparently was not a major point of curiosity for people back then.

“Dreams are a method to understand ourselves” retorts the psychologist

Sigmund Freud, a prominent Austrian neurologist, argued in his book, The Interpretation of Dreams, that dreams are, ‘the royal road to the unconscious.’ The unconscious was to Freud the place where all our motivations lay, many times influencing our actions without us even realising (Gray, n.d). It is the dominant part of our psyche that stores all the information we have ever received. He believed, similarly to people of ancient times, dreams were interperatable but, in addition to this, he also believed the reason why dreams had to be interpreted in the first place was because of the fact that all dreams, in Freud’s eyes, were wish fulfillment, the satisfaction of desires including darker, repressed or unfulfilled desires. These desires go against the morals of the dreamer and thus must be ‘censored’ through the use of representations, typically visual. He believed that the language of dream was similar to the language used in poetry, where thoughts and memory rhyme with one another through their distortion into representations or, more technically, manifest content. Through rhyming, a somewhat coherent plot is formed for the dream.

Differently, Carl Jung, a prominent psychiatrist and psychotherapist, observed that dreams typically were used to resolve emotional conflicts we have experienced (Khordarahimi, 2009). Thus, dreams were instead thought to be methods by which we attempt to reach self-actualisation, to complete ourselves.

“We dream to…huh,” Says the neuroscientist, a bit unsure of himself

Now in the 21st century, several theories based in neurobiology have been proposed as to why we dream. There are three theories we’ll discuss here: The first theory is that dreams are theorised to be the method by which our brain organizes information we receive throughout the day. When we’re sleeping, most of us close our eyes, meaning there’s practically no visual stimulus, a perfect time for our brain to begin looking over and organizing information. A recent study mentioned in a 2016 paper by Wamsley on the possibility of dreams being used to organize information mentions a study where participants were made to play tetris prior to dreaming, 64% of participants reporting Tetris images in their dreams. Another study mentioned in the paper attempted to understand the dreams of your average joe without any stimulus on the researcher’s part, asking them to identify the possible stimulus of their dreams, resulting in 51% of 299 dream reports claiming to contain at least one strong relation to waking events.

The second theory is that dreams are just the brain’s way of attempting to understand random electrical signals produced during (Rapid Eye Movement) REM Sleep. This is called the activation-synthesis theory and was first proposed in 1977 by Hobson and Mccarley. This theory was later extended into the AIM theory which provides a more comprehensive explanation of dream making, simply set in three stages: Activation, input-output gating and modulation. Activation, the activity of the brain during waking hours, non-rapid eye movement (NREM) and REM sleep measured by electroencephalography; input-output gating, information processing during each phase in the sleep wake cycle; and modulation, the identification of neurological modulatory systems most dominant during each phase (American Psychological Association, 2018).

The third and final theory discussed here will be the thought that maybe dreams were a way to prevent ourselves from going blind. This theory is called defense activation theory, DAT for short, and is by far the strangest biological explanation for why we dream. As REM takes place at the same time dreaming does, it is believed that we dream, see visual representations, to cause REM. When you close your eyes, you may notice that your other senses slowly but surely become more acute. This is because the brain actually remodels itself if you lose one of your senses (Tompa, 2016). Thus, it is believed REM and thus dreaming is done so our eyes will be in use, even as we sleep to prevent our brain from remodelling so much we lose the ability to see.

“As one who sees in dreams and wakes to find the emotional impression of his vision still powerful while its parts fade from his mind - Just such am I, having lost nearly the vision itself, while in my heart I feel the sweetness of it yet distill and fall.”

Dante Alighieri, Paradiso

Oh woe, oh woe no answer to know for sure the truth beyond me. Oh woe yet joy and wonder overwhelm me, the unknown and mysterious, it sings its sweet melody I hope it sings forever and yet I hope too it does not, all at the same time.

References:

Pearcy, L.T. (2022). Dreams in Ancient Medicine. London’s Global University. Medicine Antiqua. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucgajpd/medicina%20antiqua/sa_dreams.html#:~:text=Along%20with%20many%20people%20before

Askitopoulou, H. (2015). Sleep and Dreams: From Myth to Medicine in Ancient Greece. Journal of Anesthesia History. https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.janh.2015.03.001

Gray, R. (n.d.). Dreams. University of washington. http://courses.washington.edu/freudlit/Dreams.html

Khordarahimi, S. (2009). Dreams In Jungian Psychology: The use of Dreams as an Instrument For Research Diagnosis and Treatment of Social Phobia. The Malaysian Journal of Medical Sciences. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3216128/

Wamsley, E.J. (2016). Dreaming and Offline Memory Consolidation. Current Neurology and Neuroscience. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4704085/

American Psychological Association. (2018). AIM Model. American Psychological Association. https://dictionary.apa.org/aim-model

Tompa, R. (2016). The plastic fantastic brain: Why losing one sense rewires others. Fred Hutch Cancer Center. https://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-news/2016/01/losing-senses-rewires-others-study.html#:~:text=Blind%20people%20may%20hear%20better,senses%20when%20one%20is%20missing.