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Asked by Leila to Harriet, Jess on 10 Mar 2016. This question was also asked by Owen:-).
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Harriet Reid answered on 10 Mar 2016:
Hi Leila,
I’m not really sure, great question though! Most neuroscientists think that dreaming helps us to get our memories from short term to long term storage. So I guess that night terrors and nightmares are side effects from that.
Harriet
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Jessica Groppi answered on 13 Mar 2016:
Hi!
Dreams and nightmares are still quite a mystery.
As Harriet said some scientists believe that dreaming it’s a way for our brain to organise important memories, like copying data from your computer desktop to the external hard drive to make sure you don’t lose the important files.
Psycologists say that dreams are a way for us to process our feelings and experiences. It may be that you are really worried for a math test the next day, so while you sleep you have this awful nightmare where a huge number monster chases you around. Sometimes there are small things that upset you during the day, but you ignore them because you’re too busy thinking about the important things, but then you end up having a nightmare at night.
Once I read an interesting article about dreams, I can’t find the link now.
It said that, while we sleep, our brain can only access memories. If we dream of meeting someone we’ve never seen before, their face was not made up by the brain, but it’s the face of someone we saw during the day walking on the street or in the queue at the shop: we might not remember it when we’re not sleeping, but the memory is there stored inside our brain. That’s fascinating!Jess.
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