Nathan's Blog: Dreams: Night School

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Posted: Thursday, January 03, 2008

Dreams: Night School

This is a great article about why we dream.

Here are a few good lines from the article:
(They are best read in the context and flow of the entire article)

"Dreams, he contends, are a training ground in which animals and people alike go over the behaviors that are key to their survival."

"Revonsuo believes that by providing rehearsal, dreaming helps us recognize dangers more quickly and respond more efficiently. We don't need to be aware of this rehearsal, just as you don't have to recall exactly where you practiced your tennis serve in order to reap the rewards.

"The single most pervasive theme in dreaming is that of being chased or attacked. Just as athletes in training repeat parts of their performance, we may, in our nightmares, be attacked and chased over and over again, not to solve a particular problem but to actually practice efficient escape behavior."

"The dreaming brain, explains Revonsuo, scans emotional memories. When it detects a memory trace with a strong negative emotion, it constructs a nightmare around that theme. The more traumatic the event, the more intense the nightmare. The brain's system for detecting threats is sensitive and flexible: Anything the brain tags with a strong negative charge gets thrown into the threat bin and dredged up at night."

"If dreams evolved to simulate the threats in our environment, then being exposed to more dangers in real life should activate the nightmare function, overstuffing our dreams with threats. This is precisely what happens. Even a single exposure to a life-threatening situation can plunge a person into an inferno of post-traumatic nightmares, dreams in which the threatening event—the attack, the rape, the war—is repeated over and over in every possible variation."

Read the entire article here: http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php?term=pto-20071029-000003&print=1

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