Why Do People Dream?

Breathing is shallow and irregular and blood pressure and heart rate both increase. In many respects, REM sleep is similar to being awake, but the body does not move.

About one-fifth of all sleep is REM sleep. During this time, scientists think one of the answers to the question of "why do people dream" is for processing. When people dream, the brain is stimulated in the learning and memory regions.

According to a National Institutes of Health, animal studies indicate REM sleep is a time when the brain sorts and processes information acquired during the day. During this processing, the brain picks up old images and information, too, and reorganizes itself, rather like a filing cabinet. This reorganization is believed to present itself as dreams.

When people dream, the body enters a state of paralysis that keeps the dreamer from "acting out" the dreams. Sometimes this mechanism malfunctions and people walk or talk in their sleep. These malfunctions, which are more common in children than in adults, are called parasomnias. They include sleep walking, sleep talking, confused arousals, sleep paralysis, acting out dreams, and night terrors.

Vivid dreams are sometimes a symptom of narcolepsy, a sleep disorder occurs when a person is overly sleepy during the day. The dreamer sometimes confuses these dreams with reality because they seem real.

Many dreams are strange and have no relation to anything that the dreamer understands. However, often components of dreams can be traced to daily routines or things the dreamer saw or did during waking hours.

Ancient histories refer to dreams and up until the time of Aristotle and Plato, dreams were thought to come from the spirit world. Those ancient thinkers determined that dreams might be a safe way to act out unconscious desires, and 19th and 20th century psychoanalysts expanded upon this hypothesis.

However, when scientists ask, "why do we dream," the only thing they can be sure of is that most people dream even if they do not recall the dream episodes.

Sources: National Institutes of Health and Sleep Foundation of America

Related Information

Share Your Comments