• Question: Why do we dream if we forget most of them anyway when we wake up?

    Asked by Livvy to K, Jacque, Fiona, Daniel, Hazel, Matthew on 5 Mar 2018. This question was also asked by 582curm25.
    • Photo: Fiona Macfarlane

      Fiona Macfarlane answered on 5 Mar 2018:

      Good question, I am not really sure. I don’t think there has ever been a definite answer to why we dream. When we sleep our brain sorts through all the information we learned that day, and stores anything it thinks will be important. Some people think dreams are not important and others believe they are a way for us to deal with all the emotions and problems we faced during the day. Some scientists even think that dreams are important for storing memories.

    • Photo: K Sasitharan

      K Sasitharan answered on 7 Mar 2018:

      Dreams just prove that our brain is active even while we sleep. It is just an indication that biological functions are ongoing even during sleep. Dreaming in itself is not to serve any purpose, hence it’s alright that we forget most of it when we wake up.

    • Photo: Hazel Gibson

      Hazel Gibson answered on 7 Mar 2018:

      That is a brilliant question. There is an interesting theory in psychology that dreams have absolutely no meaning or purpose whatsoever – they are just our brains firing random images and sounds off while we sleep. This would suggest that the reason we only remember some dreams is because there are only some dreams that we can make into a sensible(ish) story. It’s the same way that we see shapes of recognizable things in clouds, a phenomenon called pareidolia – we all -know- that cloud isn’t a rabbit, but humans are so good at finding patterns that sometimes we find them where they don’t exist. This is possibly what happens with dreams; our brain wakes up, remembers some random combination of images and sounds from when we were asleep and -then- builds a story around it that we can make sense of. This allows us to remember our dream. In other circumstances our brain can’t make ANY sense of the images and sounds, so forgets them.

      Of course this is only one idea about dreams and if they have any purpose or meaning and there are lots and lots of others!

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