Dreams

Dreams have fascinated us for thousands of years. From ancient prophecies to Freud’s theories about hidden desires, people have long believed that dreams must contain some deeper symbolic meaning. But what if they don’t?

Transcript

Dreams 0:00

And hello to you, and welcome to the Friday bonus episode. Now, last month on the Patreon podcast, I was talking about dreams, why we have them, what the brain is doing during sleep, and whether dreams actually mean anything or if they're just the brain sorting through information from the day. And I wanted to add a little bit extra for you today because if dreams really are just the brain processing information, you might expect them to look a bit like normal life, a conversation here, a memory there, maybe replaying something that happened during the day. And although there is a lot of that, if you wake someone up during REM sleep and ask them about their dream, they often say I was just at work at my desk and you think, Ugh, you did the worst part of your day again. And actually, yeah, we do that a lot, but that's not what we remember about our dreams is it. Instead, you might be in your childhood home talking to someone you work with while your old school teacher walks past, holding a penguin for some reason. And nobody in the dream thinks that's strange, even you, until you wake up and realise how ridiculous it was. And the ridiculousness of it means you are more likely to remember it just like you would in the waking world. Now, part of the reason for this is the way the brain behaves during REM sleep. The emotional centres of the brain are highly active, particularly the amygdala, which deals with fear and emotional reactions. But the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for logic and reasoning is much quieter. So the emotional brain is switched on, but the logical editor is taking the night off. And when you remove the editor, the brain gets creative. It starts linking together memories and emotions in ways that don't really make sense in the waking world. But the brain doesn't mind that. 'cause its goal isn't storytelling, its goal is processing. It's like emptying out a box of photos on the floor. They're not arranged in chronological order anymore. And you've got pictures of your childhood with photos from last week. Well dreams are a bit like that? The brain pulling memories outta storage and moving them around while it decides where everything belongs. And sometimes those memories blend together. Faces will merge, locations will shift, and people appear that you haven't thought about in years, not because they symbolise something deep in you, necessarily. Just because they happen to be nearby in the filing cabinet. Another thing that people often notice is that dreams can feel incredibly real in the moment. You might wake up with your heart racing after a nightmare, or feeling genuinely upset about something that happened in a dream. And again, that comes down to how the brain works. The emotional brain doesn't care whether something is real or imagined. If the amygdala is triggered, the body is gonna respond. Your heart rate is gonna increase. Stress hormones will rise, and the experience feels real even if the situation itself was completely fictional. It's one of the reasons why people sometimes wake up feeling anxious or unsettled, even if they don't remember dreaming. Which might sound like a design flaw, but it probably isn't. If dreaming helps the brain rehearse emotional experiences, then feeling those emotions makes the rehearsal more effective. It's like a training simulation. The brain is practising responses to different situations whilst you're asleep. Most of the time though, the content itself probably isn't important. The brain is simply sorting through information from the day. Tidying up memories, processing emotions, deciding what to keep and what to bin off. Once that's done, the dream itself can disappear, which is why most people forget their dreams within seconds of waking up. The brain has already finished the job, the paperwork gets shredded, and all that's left is this vague feeling that something strange happened while you were asleep. So if you wake up tomorrow feeling anxious for no reason, the answer might be simpler than you think. Your brain was just doing a bit of overnight housekeeping and occasionally maybe getting a bit creative while it was at it. As always, I go a bit deeper into this on Patreon as a thank you for people who support the podcast and all the charitable stuff that I get involved in. I'm very cheap. Check me out, have a listen. Have a great weekend, and I'll speak to you again soon. See ya.