Onyrology is a science that studies dreams. This discipline combines the features of psychology, neurology and much more, but even it does not provide an answer to the main question - why do people dream. Although there is no convincing solution, a number of interesting hypotheses have appeared.
Hidden desires
Sigmund Freud is the founder of psychoanalysis, a man who, among other things, was one of the first to study dreams. After analyzing the dreams of hundreds of patients, he was able to develop a theory that some people still adhere to. She says that dreams are hidden aspirations and suppressed desires of people.
According to Freud, people see in a dream those things that they want to achieve, symbolically or literally. The founder of psychoanalysis, through the study of dreams, helped clients get deeply hidden aspirations and fears that surprised patients. They did not even suspect that such things could be in their subconscious.
Side effect of electrical brain activity
Psychiatrist Alan Hobson explains dreaming in a completely different way. He believes that dreams have no meaning. According to him, these are simply the results of random electrical impulses in those parts of the brain that are responsible for memories, perceptions and emotions.
Hobson called his theory an "action-synthetic model." According to it, the brain interprets random signals, which causes colorful and not very plots. This “model” also explains why some people can create literary works, which are essentially a “waking dream”. They are created by the authors due to the interpretation of the signals received by the limbic system of the brain.
Sending short-term memories for long-term storage
The psychiatrist Zhang Jie put forward the idea that the brain passes a chain of memories through itself, regardless of whether the body is awake or asleep. She called this idea "the theory of constant activation." Dreams arise at the moment when short-term memories fall into the long-term memory departments for long-term storage.
Rid of trash
According to the “back-learning theory, ” dreams help get rid of a certain amount of unnecessary connections and associations that form in the brain all day. In other words, dreams can serve as a mechanism for getting rid of "garbage" - from useless and unwanted thoughts. Which in turn helps to avoid overloading from a large amount of information entering the head every day.
Systematization of information received per day
This hypothesis is completely opposite to the "theory of backward education." She says that dreams help to remember and organize information.
A few more studies support this hypothesis. Their results show that a person is better able to remember the information that is received right before bedtime. Apologists for this theory believe that dreams help a person systematize and comprehend information acquired during the day.
Recently, studies have been carried out that have revealed that if a person falls asleep immediately after some unpleasant incident, when he wakes up he will remember all the events as if they had happened a few minutes ago. Therefore, if a person has a psychosomatic injury, it is better not to let him sleep as long as possible. Lack of dreams will erase unpleasant moments from memory.
Protective mutated instinct inherited from animals
Some scientists have done studies that point to similarities in behavior between people in a state of sleep and the behavior of animals pretending to be "dead."
The brain works at the moment of watching dreams in the same way as during body wrestling, but with differences in the physical activity of the body. The same is observed in animals depicting a corpse, so that the predator does not touch them. This leads to the conclusion that dreams could be inherited by a person from distant animal ancestors, having changed in the process of evolution.
Threat simulation
There is a “theory of protective instinct” that fits well with the idea of Finnish neurologist and philosopher Antti Revonusuo. He suggests that the dream function is needed to “rehearse” and practice the body’s response to various dangerous situations. A person who often encountered a threat in a dream will perform actions in reality much more confidently, because the situation is now “familiar” to him. Such training is able to favorably affect the survival of not only the human individual but also the species as a whole.
True hypothesis has a drawback. She cannot explain why a person dreams of non-threatening threats or warnings, positive dreams.
Solution to the problem
This hypothesis was created by Deirdre Barrett, a professor at Harvard University. In some ways, it is similar to the idea of the Finnish scientist Antti Revonsuo.
Professor Barrett believes that dreams for a person play the role of a kind of theater, on the stage of which you can find many questions and solutions to some difficulties. In this case, the brain works much faster in a dream, because it is able to quickly form associative connections.
Deidra Barrett draws such conclusions, based on her research, which turned out to find out that if a person is confronted with a specific task, having awakened, he will solve it much better than other "experimental" ones.
Natural selection of thoughts
The theory of solving problems through sleep is close to the idea of natural selection of thoughts, which was developed by psychologist Mark Blencher. He describes dreams as follows: “A dream is a stream of random images, some of which the brain selects and saves in order to use later. Dreams consist of many thoughts, emotions, feelings and other higher mental functions. Some of these functions undergo a kind of natural selection and fall into in storage."
Psychologist Richard Coates thinks that the brain in a dream simulates a variety of situations to select the most appropriate emotional reactions. Therefore, people do not worry in the morning because of the terrible and disturbing stories that they saw in a dream - the brain seems to be reporting that this is just a “rehearsal”.