Thread: your take on dream purpose

Hmm. Well, its all just thoughts you have that run free. I dont know why dreams form or how REM forms etc but they dont specifically 'mean' anything, but because of dreams (non lucid) you can observe your subconcious thoughts and associations which can be cryptic, and you can learn things from there.

By simple observations, clearly there are biological reasons for sleeping and dreaming. Without sleep you will likely die (I only know of tests performed with mice on this issue though). Would you die without dreams? That is harder to speculate, since most of the time you dream while sleeping, and we have established that it is reasonable to assume you need to sleep. So how do you sleep without dreaming (just because you cannot remember dreaming does not mean it did not occur)? It is sometimes asserted that people in a coma do not dream; but even that is not clear, as there are different types of comas some of which evidence points to it being likely that dreams do occur; not to mention some people remember having dreams while in a coma.

So what have we gathered? Not much really…

Oh, one more piece of evidence for dreaming serving, at least in part, some biological function, is that evidence shows that most (if not all) warm-blooded animals dream.

I think they're how your brain handles random signals. It interprets them based on what you know/have seen/can imagine. In that case, I'd argue that sleep paralysis is evolved .

To be honest, I would like to think that they are and can be all of the above. Sometimes they are there to warn us, others to teach us something about life or about ourselves. Others can be used to access different planes or worlds and when this doesn't occur they are indeed figments or our mind that can be broken down into our unconsious thoughts and desires. And all of them possible due to "random firings of bundles of neurons" which place us in a state where all of this can happen, where we are subject to connect ourselves into a vast collective knowledge. That is why I think dreams are as important as they are, altough we don't always treat them that way...

I read a recent theory about dreams, taken from the observations of a woman who suffered a stroke.
After her stroke she claimed to have lost the ability to dream, they scanned her brain activities against a ‘normal’ dreamer and the parts of her brain believed to be ‘the source of dreams’ were indeed damaged and not functioning.
Anyway the woman had no harmful side effects (from not dreaming), the only difference being she would wake up at the slightest noise.
The conclusion they came to from that was that dreaming serves the purpose of protecting your sleep, ensuring that you stay asleep in other words. If say an alarm clock was going off, a dreamer would incorporate that into their dream and ignore it, whereas a non-dreamer would hear it without the delusion.

I doubt your mind evolved to create fantasies for yourself but I do believe that the animals that had ‘random firings of bundles of neurons’ and were able to sleep probably had a better chance of survival. So whether dreams being an evolved ability or just a side effect of an advanced brain, I believe they serve a purpose however nothing special.

opps. I didn't see this one. I accidentally made another one right near this topic. Well, I"m thinking dreams gotta do something. like I said in my thread, God wouldn't have just thrown us these dream abilities if there weren't any special non-scientific reason. (That's why I'm in a dilemma of whether Lucid Dreaming is worth learning). I'm thinking that they are made to entertain us or give us inspirations.

Some observations about dreams:

1) They're definitely a product of biology, they aren't learned.

Just about everything biological seems to have some purpose related to survival (yes there are exceptions but it's true in general). Animals seem to have dreams. This again suggests there's some survival element to dreams.

2) We tend to dream about stuff that's relevant to us.

Characters in dreams, dream settings, and dream situations come predominantly from our waking lives. Yes, there are exceptions but again, this is generally true. To me, this suggests their purpose is related to our daily lives in some way.

3) We tend to forget our dreams very easily unless we make an effort to remember them.

This has always struck me as strange. Why do we forget them so easily and quickly? My current theory is that we forget them because the details aren't important. What's important is the experience that we gain from them.

Did you ever learn to hit a baseball? If you have I doubt with any seriousness you could "remember" all of the individual swings you made when you were trying to learn how to do it. The mind is smart enough to realize, "Hey, we're learning something here. We don't have to remember every swing in conscious memory, let's just strengthen the right neuro-pathways in the brain so that we get better at it".

Maybe dreams are a way for us to gain more "experience" in life, thus improving our chances of survival.

That's not to say dreams can't be used for spiritual development, I think they can. I just think that their original purpose was purely biological and they probably served as a "life simulator" so that we could get better at living and surviving.

I like that

4. Dreams open up infinite new universes where everything is possible and learnable. At first sight dreams have theyr own laws and logic for each and every individual. But people have came back from the dream state with suprising things to tell. They have seen the future/past, met with dead people and learnt thing they could impossibly learnt by themself, had OBEs and observed real case scenarios. etc. So it apears that at a deeper level of consciousness we can tap into everything. Thats unique with dreams.

well, you know... scientifically, dreams are everything that happened in your PAST life stored into your brain that forms dreams in your mind or something.

Originally posted by tryagain
well, you know... scientifically, dreams are everything that happened in your PAST life stored into your brain that forms dreams in your mind or something.

scientifically dreams are just energy waves stimulating bundles of neurons... it has nothing to do with a past life because scientifically the idea of past lives can't be proven.

Well, I'd say that most everybody here is right on some level. Perhaps another reason dreams exist is to keep us sane. I know that when I go on periods where I don't remember dreams, I tend to feel a little stressed out and have a hard time focusing. Maybe they're just there to help us forget this world for a while? 'Course, this is kinda out there and probably isn't the reason, but I think it's worth pondering...

I think the problem here is that what you believe there purpose is will likely reflect in your dreams anyway so the answer will be different for everyone.

Personally I like to think dreams are there for my own amusement and to keep me entertained while I’m sleeping, cooked up from what I have been thinking of latley :-)

Just the other day a friend told me that his psychology teacher said that dreaming was masturbation for the brain. In a way that makes sense if you really think about it, without me going into detail as to why.

I think Turkeh's right, you can use dreams any number of different ways, but they're not "for" anything. Nature never provides instruction manuals--stuff just happens, and you roll with it.

What if dreams are a bit like the appendix? We used to use it but now we don't really.

The appendix was used when we used to eat plants, not meat (ie: caveman sorta stuff).
Maybe dreams were used to rehearse things such as, being chased by a wild animal, so that the little stone age dudes got used to it and knew what were good ideas, etc. ie: Dreams were there for our survival.

From an evolutionary standpoint, I'd have to agree that dreams probably served the purpose of experience. That is, assuming the ability to dream is actually something we evolved. It could be that dreams are just the side effect of having a brain. Electrical signals are always flying around our brains, and we just happen to interpret them as dreams.

In modern life, I think that dreams don't serve any specific purpose, other than what we want the to. They can entertain, provide experience, enlighten, or just give us time to think. Dreams are pretty much whatever we make of them.

The "random firings" explanation only goes so far. Sure, one part of your brain is firing off random noise, but the rest of your brain is interpreting it into the dream manifold. There is interesting information in how our minds put the noise together into a dream.

I don't really have an idea on why we dream. Maybe the REM bit is just a way of glueing the sleep cycles together... maybe it's not healthy to have one huge sleep cycle, without the dreams spacing it out a bit.

I definitely don't think dreams are useless. They remind us that there's more to the mind than that voice in our heads we habitually call "I." They remind us that our perceptions are not reality. They let us know when something's wrong in our lives and needs attention. Often enough, they bring us visions, solutions to problems, and artistic masterpeices.

I'd say the more conscious we get (if we move in that direction), the more use we'll have for dreams.

EDIT: The same might be true of the appendix: "Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances of survival for life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet." --Albert Einstein

I think dreams must have some function. They must do something important for our brains, that's why REM sleep deprivation (i.e. dream deprivation) has quite undesirable effects.

I would have to coin my belief of the "purpose" in dreaming to be inclined towards the great Jungian perspective.

To quote Carl Jung from "Man and His Symbols" ( pg. 88 ):

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Essentially a matter of subconscious thoughts projected into the conscious utilising modern associations developed through memory to emphasise on empathy and emotion in order to create a comprehensive emotional and sentimental attachment to the symbol's used within the subconscious mind without integral interruption of the ego.