ScienceBlog.ie

Dreams have played an instrumental role in our cultural landscape, and although scientists have come closer to understanding the underlying mechanisms of dreaming, there is still no definitive answer as to why we dream. For almost as long as man has dreamed, however, we’ve speculated. Here are the most popular explanations:
1. Dreams are religious or spiritual messages.
The ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, and Babylonians, among other early cultures, believed that dreams were messages from the gods. The Babylonians kept extensive records of dream interpretations dating back to 5000 BC. Good dreams were thought to be omens of good luck from the gods, while nightmares were seen as presaging negative events sent from demons. The Egyptians understood dreams to also be divine messages, and those who had frequent, vivid dreams were considered blessed by the gods.
2. Dreams are unconscious indicators of hopes and wishes.
In modern history, most people dismissed dreams as meaningless. That is, until Sigmund Freud came around. Freud was the first academic to suggest that far from being meaningless, dreams could access our deepest desires. Freud held that all dreams had both “latent” and “manifest” content. Manifest content was the superficial figures and events featured in the dream, while latent content was what these figures and events represented. Freud thus considered interpreting our dreams to be of the utmost importance in discovering ourselves. Though most of the details of Freud’s work on dreams have been discredited, the idea that dreams represent desires is still well-regarded in scientific communities.
3. Dreams are the result of activated brain circuits.
In 1977, two researchers postulated a radically different theory of dreams. Harvard University scientists, Drs. Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley, suggested that the origin of dreams was not psychological, but rather physiological. While in REM sleep, the stage during which our eyes move rapidly and dreaming occurs, certain parts of our brains become activated, generating random material. As our brain struggles to make sense of these random images, dreams are formed. Called the activation-synthesis model of dreaming, it drew considerable controversy since it suggested that dreams carried no psychological significance.
4. Dreams are guided by emotions and may help in recovering from trauma.
The most current dream theory was described in this 2006 Scientific American article by psychiatry professor Ernest Hartmann, who, while not discounting the randomness of brain signals that give rise to dreams, still holds that dreams are guided by emotional states. In his research on dreams, people who have undergone trauma experience very intense and unpleasant dreams that eventually lessen over time, suggesting that dreams may help regulate mood to fight future trauma.
By-line:

Mariana Ashley is a freelance writer who particularly enjoys writing about online colleges. She loves receiving reader feedback, which can be directed to mariana.ashley031 @gmail.com.