Why do we dream?

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Speaker 15 It's unexplainable.

Speaker 3 I'm No, I'm Hasenfeld.

Speaker 14 I'm Nora Flossenhas. What? Yeah.

Speaker 16 It sounds like.

Speaker 16 But it totally isn't.

Speaker 14 It can't just be.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but it's gotta be a little bit.

Speaker 14 I don't know how my brain works.

Speaker 14 Me too.

Speaker 3 Me too.

Speaker 14 If you like it. If you like it.

Speaker 16 For pretty much all of recorded human history, people have been trying to interpret dreams. They've been seen as sources of religious inspiration or prophecy or personal insight.

Speaker 16 But when it comes to science, interpreting dreams has been a bumpy road, to say the least.

Speaker 16 Researchers are still wondering whether dreams are telling us something meaningful about ourselves or whether they're just a jumbled bunch of randomness.

Speaker 16 So many of our listeners have written in asking us about dreams and what to make of them. So science editor Brian Resnick set out to find an answer.
Are dreams telling us anything important?

Speaker 14 And should we listen to them? So to start off, I talked to Bill Domhoff. He's this retired psych professor from UC Santa Cruz.
And oh, he's just such a professor through and through.

Speaker 3 Are you still there? I'm getting a beep beep.

Speaker 14 Just starting our call, he was just kind of anxious, wanting to know like what level of detail to get into.

Speaker 3 As a professor, I profess and I get too didactic.

Speaker 3 I will aim for the average person.

Speaker 14 Bill is such a great person to talk to because he kind of witnessed the birth of modern sleep and dream science.

Speaker 3 It was the late 1950s, and this was an era in which various kinds of Freudian and Freudian-derived theories were dreams were considered the royal road to the unconscious.

Speaker 14 So, royal road, that's just like a superhighway. And this was the world that Bill was walking into when he started to research dreams.

Speaker 14 It was Freud's world.

Speaker 3 Freud said dreams are a disguised attempt at wish fulfillment. And their function,

Speaker 3 their adaptive function is to preserve sleep. His famous statement, they are the guardians of sleep.

Speaker 14 So adaptive function here is really the key phrase and really why these scientists were so motivated to study dreams.

Speaker 3 We mean that it's been selected for an evolutionary processes.

Speaker 16 So that means that dreams are like essential to our survival in some way, right? That we evolve to have them.

Speaker 14 Yeah, yeah. Freud really thought dreams were this core part of our psychology.

Speaker 3 Our deeper motives, our deeper secrets.

Speaker 14 So, like, if you follow dreams, you're going to reveal a lot of our inner workings.

Speaker 3 But it wasn't just that. This stuff was all about psychosis, finding the secret to psychosis.

Speaker 3 They thought it was going to help with mental illness. They thought it was going to solve big questions.

Speaker 16 Yeah, a lot of Freud's specific theories have been. debunked at this point, right?

Speaker 14 Oh, yeah. Freud was not right about most things, but he was still really important he inspired a lot of researchers

Speaker 14 you know listening to freud they thought dreams could be this this is not a scientific term but like kind of like a highway to the soul they wanted to find out what makes us human but they needed a way in and really critically in the 1950s they found their on-ramp

Speaker 14 A pair of researchers were studying sleep and noticed that there was this period during the night where it looked like people's eyes were like darting around underneath their eyelids.

Speaker 14 So they were like, it's like looking at a tennis match. Quickly look at one thing and then another thing and another thing.

Speaker 3 These eye movements would happen in bursts.

Speaker 14 And this was the discovery of REM sleep. So that's rapid eye movement sleep.

Speaker 14 And this started a lot of work into just like sleep science, but it was also a huge breakthrough when it comes to understanding dreams.

Speaker 3 And so they did a famous study in which they awakened people during eye movements or when they weren't having eye movements.

Speaker 14 And just ask, like,

Speaker 14 what's going on, buddy? What's happening? Like, why?

Speaker 14 And these are the periods that people were most likely to report they had been dreaming.

Speaker 14 This connection, this connection between REM, sleep, and dreams, this was a big deal.

Speaker 3 This was the first one-to-one relationship between a physiological event and dreaming.

Speaker 14 Now we could study dreams more objectively. You could just like wake people up during REM sleep and ask them what they had been dreaming.

Speaker 14 Like Bill made his dissertation about this, waking people up during REM sleep, asking people what they're dreaming about and like taking very detailed notes.

Speaker 3 Very rigorous quantitative content analysis.

Speaker 14 How many characters are in the dream? Like what is the content? Is it of a sexual nature? Is it a friendly nature?

Speaker 3 Are you talking? Are you walking?

Speaker 14 You know, just like any category you can think of to try to like quantify the content of dreams, they would.

Speaker 16 What were the content of dreams? Were they meaning?

Speaker 14 Yeah, so Bill calls his dissertation like a real downer.

Speaker 14 Okay.

Speaker 3 So dreams turned out to be far more everyday from the expectations that people had.

Speaker 14 It wasn't this great road to the unconscious. It seemed like a kind kind of fractured and honestly quite banal one.

Speaker 14 Like people were just mainly dreaming about what was happening to them during the day. Like, for instance, like

Speaker 14 as a journalist, I've had a lot of deadline dreams. I think a lot of journalists have them.

Speaker 14 It's sometimes these deadline dreams can be like really funny.

Speaker 14 But I don't need to dream about the deadlines to tell you that I'm anxious about.

Speaker 16 Yeah, it's not exactly breaking news.

Speaker 14 Yeah. The dreams just didn't reveal huge secrets.
Bill said that basically you could get the same information out of people by just talking to them while they're awake.

Speaker 16 So if Freud is saying that dreams are giving us this like unique lens to analyze who we are as people, Bill is basically saying there's nothing special about dreams.

Speaker 16 We could actually just do this a lot more easily if we just talk to people.

Speaker 14 Yeah. And this was...
kind of a disappointment for Bill and other scientists. It blasted a lot of hopes that dreams are really important, something we're evolved to do.

Speaker 14 And these sorts of findings from Bill and others just deflated that.

Speaker 16 So, if dreams are not this like superhighway, this royal road to who we are at an unconscious level,

Speaker 16 what are they?

Speaker 14 Yeah,

Speaker 14 there's a bunch of ideas here, and I'll tell you about them after the break.

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Speaker 14 The world of sleep and imagination.

Speaker 16 Unexplainable, we're back here with Brian.

Speaker 14 Hey.

Speaker 16 So before the break, Brian, you were telling me about dreams. Dreams.
How dreams went from being the holy grail highway to our unconscious

Speaker 16 to something that we are very much unsure about. Sorry, Dr.

Speaker 14 Freud.

Speaker 16 So where do we go from here? Are we just totally totally unsure? Are dreams just

Speaker 16 is this just a debate that cannot be resolved?

Speaker 14 Yeah, so talking to dream researchers, I found,

Speaker 14 I definitely found a spectrum of answers here. On one end, we have Bill, who really does downplay the importance of dreams.

Speaker 3 My claim is it's a byproduct of imagination.

Speaker 14 To Bill, the thing that is like central to human psychology is our creativity and like our kind of wandering mind. Like during the day, you have your kind of creative thoughts that exist in your head.

Speaker 14 You can manipulate ideas in your head. And this is like a very core part of being human.

Speaker 14 And he says the best theory right now that makes sense is that dreams are like just an accidental byproduct of the fact that we have this very creative thinking mind.

Speaker 14 It's kind of like music, where like we

Speaker 14 probably are not evolved to make music, but we have a brain that likes patterns and we have a a brain that likes looks out for them and we have like this kind of social brain that likes sharing patterns.

Speaker 16 Yeah, there's this idea that we're not evolved for music or it might just be this kind of like, I think the term is auditory cheesecake that, you know, it's not central to who we are, but it's just sort of lucky and really nice that we get to have it.

Speaker 14 Yeah. So, so dreams are like this, like, yeah, happy cheesecake

Speaker 14 of evolution. And to Bill, that's all that dreams are.

Speaker 14 Like in Bill's explanation, it's just like there are periods during the night where our brain just like heats up and you have some conscious awareness of, you know, your creative mind turning on because your brain needs to conduct a process to make you ready for the next day.

Speaker 16 So that's one side of the dream spectrum that, you know,

Speaker 16 they're sort of an accident of who we are. We're not evolved to have them.

Speaker 16 What do other scientists think?

Speaker 14 I talked to Deirdre Barrett. She studies dreams at Harvard.
And yeah, she agrees with Bill that a lot of dreams are just cognitive fluff.

Speaker 17 I think dreams have just an awful lot of silly, repetitive content, but also sometimes get us somewhere.

Speaker 14 Unlike Bill, she still believes that dreams could be adaptive. They could serve some sort of evolutionary purpose, maybe not like a huge superhighway, but not nothing either.

Speaker 14 So at the very least, she thinks it's an important question to ask.

Speaker 17 I think it's like asking the question, what is waking thought for? It's for everything.

Speaker 17 And I think, I think dreams are similar.

Speaker 16 What does that mean? Is she saying she doesn't really even like the question when people ask, what are dreams for?

Speaker 14 I think her perspective is that we're just thinking all the time, even when we're asleep.

Speaker 14 And like all thoughts are important and we should understand, you know, why we have certain creative thoughts at night.

Speaker 16 Interesting. So why does she think that dreams might have a specifically evolutionary purpose?

Speaker 14 One category of potential purpose of dreams is that they help us like think through creative problems.

Speaker 17 It's evolved to something where humans get some interesting creative outside-the-box thinking done.

Speaker 14 Creative breakthroughs can come through dreams sometimes.

Speaker 17 Paul McCartney dreamed the song yesterday.

Speaker 18 And I had a piano by the bed, and I just woke up one morning with this tune in my head.

Speaker 18 It's like a good little tune, you know, and I couldn't have written it because I just dreamed it, you know.

Speaker 14 And she's done some studies where she tries to like

Speaker 14 kind of prime people to dream about problems.

Speaker 17 I've done formal research on getting students to specifically try to have problem-solving dreams.

Speaker 14 So she'll ask them to like really think about like homework problems, look at it at bedtime and tell themselves they want to dream about it as they drop off to sleep.

Speaker 14 And then like have them like chart, you know, write down their dreams every night and see to what degree like the homework problem ends up in the dream with like kind of focused attention and if the solution kind of comes to them through that

Speaker 14 deirdre also thinks that dreams serve this really important function of kind of telling us what our emotions and our anxieties are in ways that aren't so obvious so like yes a lot of dreams are just things that bubble up from, you know, what we're anxious about or thinking about during the day, but dreams add this additional vivid layer to them and kind of make you confront them whether you want to or not.

Speaker 14 And you can see like in 2020, a lot of people's dreams changed because of the pandemic.

Speaker 16 How did they change?

Speaker 14 So for a lot of people, dreams in the pandemic got really stressful and weird. And Deirdre has now collected thousands of these dreams.

Speaker 17 Dreams just from all around the world. I have dreams from, I think, 89 countries when I last looked.

Speaker 14 She was telling me some funny examples of like a woman who was homeschooling her 10-year-old.

Speaker 17 She dreamed that she got a text from the school that they were sending the entire class of 30 10 year olds to her condominium and she was going to have to homeschool the entire class for the pandemic.

Speaker 14 Oh, no.

Speaker 14 And she had to deal with them and teach them. And like, yes,

Speaker 14 on one hand, like, you could probably ask that woman, like, oh, what are you worried about? And she would say, like, oh, managing my kid.

Speaker 14 But, you know, perhaps, you know, dreams kind of force us to confront these

Speaker 14 very intense emotions and deal with them in some way.

Speaker 16 I find that really interesting because it's not saying that dreams are telling us some new information about ourselves. It's just presenting information that maybe we already know about ourselves

Speaker 16 in a way that just forces us to not ignore it.

Speaker 14 Yeah, it's, it's much harder to ignore your anxieties if it manifests as an actual monster chasing you through your dream.

Speaker 16 Yeah, so we have Bill on the one hand saying that dreams are a happy accident, but then we have Deirdre saying that they force us to confront important issues in our lives, that they

Speaker 16 may serve as inspiration for creative difficulties and problem solving. Yeah.
That to me doesn't sound like a complete happy cheesecake accident.

Speaker 14 Yeah, there aren't clear answers here. These theories are really hard to prove and they lead to some spicy debates.

Speaker 17 There are probably as many answers as there are dream psychologists.

Speaker 3 Here's the thing. I am not at all sure that I am right, but I know

Speaker 3 as much as I know anything, they are wrong. And I've listened to them for 60 years now.

Speaker 15 So

Speaker 14 I talked to another psychologist, Michael Schradel. He's been saying dreams for 30 years, and he's the head of a sleep lab in Germany.
And he really helped me thread the needle here.

Speaker 14 We don't know what dreams are doing for us just on their own, like the act of dreaming. But what can be really helpful is what we do with them when we're awake.

Speaker 15 The only thing we know that is when we work with dreams, when we try to remember them and think about them in waking life then the persons can learn a lot from their dreams

Speaker 14 but we don't know whether the dreamt dream has already served a function yeah just talking to you i'm kind of thinking about a recurring dream i have like i'll have to go to the airport and i'll just never make it there like i'll try to go to the airport and i'll get into a cab and the cab will turn out to be a boat okay and that's just not how you get to the airport and i don't know like a part of me is like oh this this dream is so on the nose like i'm just anxious about like being left behind in life yeah of course that the dream is just reflecting your anxiety but these dreams are very interesting you can work with these dreams because you can imagine what would i what would happen when i'm really too late is is is the world is the world at an end no can i say okay i didn't make it the taxi turned to a boat and i can come in two hours but i just didn't want to go on a boat ride i want to go on a plane okay I guess I have to accept the boat ride.

Speaker 15 But that's okay. The dreams are just reflecting what you're doing.
And if life is stressful,

Speaker 15 what's the problem that the dreams also are stressful? So

Speaker 15 you can say, okay, what can I do?

Speaker 15 That's the basic idea of the dreams. So they say, do something about it.

Speaker 14 But are they more helpful than just asking people about their anxieties in waking life? Like, is it more useful to ask about the dream anxiety than the waking anxiety?

Speaker 15 That's That's a very good question.

Speaker 15 So I think it's really a benefit, not during the dream, but after you're waking up and working with the dream, to have an intensified version of your waking life anxiety.

Speaker 15 It's a clear and creative picture of what's going on in your mind or in your soul or

Speaker 15 how you name it.

Speaker 15 It's clearer because it's intensified and so the dreams can help to get a new viewpoint.

Speaker 14 But is there something like kind of like not scientific here?

Speaker 14 And then it's more like a creative space, like opening up a notebook and like writing down a fictional story to kind of observe some truth.

Speaker 14 Like what makes the study of this different from that or like puts it in the realm of science?

Speaker 15 I think

Speaker 15 it's not excluding each other.

Speaker 15 The scientific part is that, for example, I take 100 persons and look how stressed they are in their waking life.

Speaker 15 And I look whether the highly stressed person have more negative dream content than the lowly stressed person. This is the scientific part.

Speaker 15 But on a personal level, on an individual level, when you have a dream, there's a lot of people who are interested. What does this dream mean?

Speaker 15 And the basic idea is that dreams are reflecting how you deal with the world.

Speaker 16 What he's basically saying, and I like this, it feels like this sort of Jedi sidestepping of this debate a little bit, but he's saying it doesn't matter what they actually are.

Speaker 16 The fact is that they're there and they can be very interesting and useful to us if we approach them from the right mindset.

Speaker 14 Yeah, using your waking mind, your creative brain, which generates these dreams, but also like to work through them as like, hmm, like, is this really something that does bother me?

Speaker 14 I think that's kind of worthy of reflection. And like, you know, a lot of these researchers suggest like keeping a dream journal.
And

Speaker 14 it's not like you're missing out on anything important if you don't do this, if you don't investigate your dreams. But it seems like you can use dreams as this kind of creative space.

Speaker 14 And in that sense, I think

Speaker 14 I really like this idea, like we don't need to know what dreams are for to know they are important in our lives, or they can be important in our lives if we, you know, just choose to listen to them.

Speaker 16 It's almost like we've been thinking this whole time that the real important thing is what's happening when we're dreaming, when in reality, maybe the important thing or the most useful thing was remembering them when we're awake and working through them with our conscious mind and being like, what does this mean?

Speaker 16 What does that mean? Just like the process of interpreting a dream is more important or more useful than the dream itself.

Speaker 14 I think that's where we're landing here.

Speaker 16 And that's like, that's really, really powerful, your waking interpretive lens.

Speaker 14 Yeah. If you feel like your dream has meaning, then of course it has meaning to you.

Speaker 16 This episode was produced and reported by Meredith Hodenot and Brian Resnick. Catherine Wells edited the episode with help from Manding Wen and me, Noam Hasenfeld.
I also wrote the music.

Speaker 16 Richard Seema checked the facts. Christian Ayala did our mixing and sound design.
And Bird Pinkerton is buzzing around somewhere. If you have thoughts, email them to us, unexplainable at vox.com.

Speaker 16 Or if you want to send us some love, leave a nice review or a rating wherever you listen. We'd really appreciate it.

Speaker 16 Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll be back next week.

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