• Question: What do your dreams mean?

    Asked by to Aimee, Chris, Dave, Greig, Laurence on 16 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Aimee Hopper

      Aimee Hopper answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      I think a dream is a way of the brain converting short term memory to long term memory, and so has to “fire up” the neurons (brain cells) to do this.
      Because these cells fire, they make us perceive that we are actually part of that event, whether as an onlooker or actually involved.
      In terms of what they mean, there are a lot of ideas out there. If you are worried or anxious, these neurons will probably be more likely to fire when being converted to long term as this is what is “on your mind”.

      Besides that, I’m not sure I’m afraid

    • Photo: Dave Jones

      Dave Jones answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      Dreams are the by-product of what your brain has to do while you sleep. Your brain needs to process all of the information you throw at it, processing your memories, all kinds of things. During that process the brain is working and certain regions get stimulated and we perceive those processes as dreams. What they actually mean could vary from person to person, or they could even mean nothing, but lots of people have theories about what they mean. Sigmund Freud wrote a really popular book about dreams and their interpretation, where he said that dreams are the brain’s way of working through problems or ideas that we hadn’t fully dealt with while we were awake.

    • Photo: Laurence Perreault Levasseur

      Laurence Perreault Levasseur answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      Sleep is general in not very well understood. There are many researchers that devote their lives to understand questions like yours!
      I think at the present there are three main theories.
      – the first is, like Aimee explained, is that sleep is tied to how memories form. So the meaning of a dream is that your brain is sorting out experiences, information, and converts short-term memories into long-term memories. That’s why we often dream (many times through symbols and metaphors) about what happened the day before, and then again after between 4 to 7 days. This repetition allows to consolidate the memories, so that they are long-lasting!
      – another possibility is that we use dreams to deal with emotions we didn’t have time to deal with while we were awake, because the brain was too busy doing something else, like driving a car or building something, and responding to external stimulants. At night, we aren’t doing anything and there are no stimulants, so the brain can focus on them. Therefore, dreams would reflect our emotional state.
      – the third, and I think most boring, is that dreams don’t serve any specific function, they are just our brain firing random and meaningless things in the background.

      Probably not a single one of those theory is valid, and somehow the truth is a mixture of the three, but at the moment I don’t think scientists know for sure.

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