Psychology Facts

▼ Dreams ▼

》Dreams are a blend of images, memories, emotions, and other subconscious stimuli that humans and some animals experience during sleep. The subconscious mind draws from real-life experiences to create these surreal and sleep-induced phenomena. While dreams can sometimes form coherent narratives, they can also appear as a series of random impressions.

》Based on evidence and new research methodologies, researchers propose that dreaming serves the following functions:

- Offline memory reprocessing: the brain consolidates learning and memory tasks,
supporting and recording waking consciousness

- Preparation for potential future threats

- Cognitive simulation of real-life experiences, as dreaming is a subsystem of the waking default network, active during daydreaming

- Development of cognitive capabilities

- Reflection of unconscious mental function in a psychoanalytic manner

- A unique state of consciousness incorporating experiences of the present, processing of the past, and preparation for the future

- A psychological space where overwhelming, contradictory, or complex notions can be reconciled by the dreaming ego, notions that might be unsettling while awake, thus serving the need for psychological balance and equilibrium

Dream interpretation is not a science. Sigmund Freud made interpretation one of the main linchpins of his psychology of dreams. In the decades since Freud's death, however, it's become increasingly apparent that the content of dreams is harder to decipher than he thought. Some dream research seems to indicate dreams might, in fact, be completely random and nearly impossible to interpret. Still, you can keep a dream journal and come up with your own interpretations.

》Dreaming is most frequent in the morning. You may notice that you remember your dreams better just after waking up. This is because you spend more time in the REM stage of sleep right before waking, which results in vivid and longer dreams. While it's possible to dream during the deep sleep phases common throughout the night, these dreams are typically harder to recall after waking up hours later.

According to a 2017 study, around 50% of people report dreaming in color almost all of the time. However, they also suggested they dream in black and white around 10% of the time.8 An older 2008 study suggested that roughly 12% of people dream only in black-and-white.9
People younger than 25 rarely report dreaming in black and white. However, people older than 55 report black-and-white dreams about 25% of the time

》Two types of memory can underpin a dream:

- Autobiographical memories, which are enduring memories about oneself.

- Episodic memories, referring to memories of specific episodes or events.

A study investigating various memory types within dream content among 32 participants revealed the following:

- Only one dream (0.5 percent) featured an episodic memory.

- The majority of dreams in the study (80 percent) incorporated autobiographical memory features to a low to moderate extent.

Part of your brain shuts down while you dream. The prefrontal cortex—or the part of the brain that makes sense of the wide array of stimuli you encounter while awake—shuts down while you dream. This leads to dreams taking on their bizarre and sometimes nonsensical quality, as you lose out on the ability to sift through your brain activity rationally.