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Samantha Quiroz

Pre-AP English II

Mr. Sellek

28 April 2016

Why Do We Dream?

It’s midnight and you can feel yourself start to fall asleep as you type the words to your

long-overdue English paper. Your eyelids get heavier and heavier, and the next thing you know,

your head is on the keyboard and you are fast asleep. A few hours into your sleep, characters, a

story-line and a setting (familiar or not), are all rolled out by your brain. Crazy, random and

sometimes incoherent stories play out in our minds as we sleep, that the majority of us can’t

control. This is what it’s like to dream. We know we need sleep to rest our brains and bodies, but

if everything is supposed to be resting, how could it make sense that we dream at night? What is

the purpose of dreaming? Why do we do it? And is there any deeper meaning to our brain’s

bedtime stories? Sweet dreams, and welcome to this episode of Inception. (cute music)

Since the earliest of recorded history, people have theorized about the function and

meaning of dreams. Answers came largely from the spirit world until Aristotle and Plato

developed the drive related hypothesis that was later expanded on by the European

psychoanalysts of the 19th and 20th centuries. But even in the 21st century we still are not sure

why we dream. One thing we know for sure is that dreaming is something that the vast majority

of humans do every night of their lives and that the only way to truly study dreams is to ask the

dreamer.

The function of dreams is a topic that is often argued by psychologists from all over the

world. After years of disagreement and revisions it has been deduced that there are five major
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views on the function of dreams. The first is the Freudian hypothesis. Neo-Freudians today argue

that we dream to provide a sort of safety valve, with the manifest content (or story line) acting as

a censored version of the latent content of our dreams, the underlying meaning that gratifies our

unconscious wishes. The next dream theory is the information-processing perspective. This view

explains that we dream to sort out the day’s experiences and fix them in memory. The third

theory that explains the function of dreams is the theory of brain stimulation. This perspective

argues that we dream only as a way to preserve neural pathways in the brain as we sleep. The

next explanation, the theory of activation-synthesis says that to make sense of neural static, our

brain tries to weave passing information into a story line. The fifth and final explanation to why

we dream comes from the brain-maturation/cognitive-development perspective. This explanation

says that dreams represent the dreamer’s level of development, knowledge, and understanding.

Most sleep theorists agree that REM sleep and its associated dreams serve an important function,

as shown by the REM rebound that occurs following REM deprivation. (Myer’s Psychology for

AP 2010)

The dream function theories are all extremely contrasting, but the common theme among

them is that there is a physical and cognitive purpose to dreaming. The little that we actually

know about dreaming comes mostly from theories. As a basis, it must be understood that

dreaming occurs in the last stage of sleep called REM, or rapid eye movement sleep. A study

conducted at the university of Chicago found that people who were woken up during the time

when they were in REM sleep almost always remembered a dream of some sort, while people

who were not in REM sleep could not recall any sort of dream upon waking up.

After hearing about the study from the University of Chicago, I decided to conduct my

own, similar experiment. For five days, I woke up my younger brother while he was in REM
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sleep and asked him to describe his dream. All five nights, he remembered the dream while my

other brother, who I asked to describe his dreams in the morning, only remembered his dream

two of the five days. Most of my younger brother’s dreams supported the dream theory of

information-processing. All five nights my brother’s dreams included people or events from the

previous day.

But what about the crazy dreams? If you were asked, “What’s the weirdest dream you’ve

ever had?” what would you think of? Different crazy dreams that you might remember from your

childhood might come to mind. You might think of anything from a far-fetched nightmare or a

dream of fighting crime with a celebrity sidekick. Is there any sort of meaning behind these

seemingly random dreams, and how can we really know?

According to Freud, all dreams are just a way for people to find a release for actions

driven by their unconscious in a safe place, outside of the real world. Freud argued that every

dream was composed of a manifest and latent content. The manifest content was the actual

experience of the dreamer, and included everything they saw while they were dreaming. The

latent content, according to Freud, was the “deeper meaning,” to one’s dream. So, if you were

dreaming about a monkey chasing you down the highway, Freud might have said that the dream

was symbolic of a bad experience you had at the zoo in your childhood. (University of

California, Santa Cruz 2012)

Freud’s ideas and his book the Interpretation of Dreams, are highly controversial and are

debated among psychologists. Most psychologists today agree that there is no real meaning to

our dreams. Freud’s work, although somewhat inaccurate, was a huge building block towards the

psychology of today. (Myer’s Psychology for AP 2010)

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Some researchers believe dreaming might have evolved for physiological reasons. There

is a great deal of neuronal activity occurring while we sleep, especially in REM, and it has been

suggested that dreams may just be a meaningless byproduct of this biological function. (National

Sleep Foundation)

So whether you dreamt of an uneventful day at the office or an action packed story of

fighting off the bad guys, you can rest assured that your dreams actually do serve a purpose.

Even though your dreams might not have any sort of deeper meaning, they are a reflection of

your day and your thoughts before going to bed. Everyone dreams, and as long there are people

who sleep, there will always be dreamers.

Works Cited

Barušs, Imants. Alterations of Consciousness: An Empirical Analysis for Social Scientists.

. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2003. Print.

"In Your Dreams." Dreams: Why Do We Dream. National Sleep Foundation, 16 Aug. 2011.

. Web. 08 May 2016.

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Jay, Martin Evan. "Sigmund Freud." Encyclopedia Britannica Online. Encyclopedia Britannica,

. 10 Feb. 2015. Web. 08 May 2016.

Myers, David G. "States of Consciousness." Myers' Psychology for AP. New York, NY: Worth,

. 2011. 245-50. Print.

"Sigmund Freud." Bio.com. A&E Networks Television, 26 Oct. 2014. Web. 08 May 2016.

"Why Do We Dream?" Psychology Today. Psychology Today, 25 Jan 2011. Web. 08 May 2016.

Crashcourse. "To Sleep, Perchance to Dream - Crash Course Psychology #9." YouTube.

. YouTube, 31 Mar. 2014. Web. 08 May 2016.