Dreams: the firing of random neurons or a portal to your innermost thoughts and feelings? We asked the experts
I have a recurring dream. I’m driving a car when I suddenly remember I don’t know how. The realisation comes the moment my dad asks me to find somewhere to park. Like many dreams, it makes little sense. Surely, my dad would never let me get behind the wheel in the first place. And I would certainly not be so bold as to operate a vehicle with zero experience. Yet, research suggests that it could relate to my reality.
Dreams are far from random. Looking at multiple dreams and when they occur in a person’s life, you can see how the dreams embody their ongoing concerns, how they view themselves and their relationship with the world, says Antonio Zadra, professor of psychology at the University of Montreal and co-author of When Brains Dream. One recent example: during lockdown in 2020, people dreamed about social distancing, PPE and other pandemic themes, according to research in Frontiers In Psychology. While unsurprising, it shows that our dreaming and waking minds are closely linked.
But if dreams imitate life, why do some of them defy common sense, such as my driving dream? The answer to that is found in neuroscience. Most recalled dreams happen during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. During this phase, your secondary visual cortex, which forms images from memory and imagination, is way more active than it is when you’re awake. The prefrontal cortex, where logic and censorship lie, is significantly tamped down, as are the language areas of your brain, says Deirdre Barrett, author of The Committee Of Sleep and lecturer of psychology at Harvard. The result? ‘We have our usual thoughts and concerns and hopes and fears, but they’re expressed in a visual story way rather than a logical, verbal reasoning way,’ she says.
Your brain strings together the plot by going through memories loosely related to your worries. Then, it presents them to you in a dream one after another to see how you’d respond. (Yes, your mind is actively testing you.) ‘The brain creates these unusual dream narratives so that you have an experience that you react to,’ adds Professor Zadra. ‘Then, it uses these feelings to make sense of the world around you.’ Using my recurring dream as a case study, I go from feeling happy and free to scared and resentful when I’m given an impossible task. But I never argue – Ialways do what’s expected of me, which is my norm.
Dreams can be a fountain of ideas, and artists throughout history have derived inspiration for their masterpieces this way. Mary Shelley dreamed of two key sce
