"Purpose" of dreams

[wasup]

What are your guys' theories on the purposes of dreams? I mean like are they supposed to help us survive or something (like the apposable thumb helps us grip thing, and the calluses on our feet help us from hurting our feet really bad)?

[gameover]

THey help us deal with the crap that goes on in the day. A way to work through things. I rememebr hearing about a study where they took X number of people and and half of them they let them sleep and the other half they gave thier brains smal electrical charges when the reached REM, just enough to stop the REM part of the cycle, but not enough to wake them or anything. And the people who didnt dream would wake up quite grumpy, tired, and in a bad mood...like the sleep was almsot pointless without the dreams.

[wasup]

What do you mean help us deal with stuff? That's not necessarily a survival technique. People don't die of stress (unless they are really, really, stressed but people aren't usually like that).

[bradybaker]

I think that dreams are mostly just random collections of things that happen to you and around you throughout your daily life. Dreams are just the product of your brain trying to organize all the information it is bombarded with everyday. As for sleep itself, experts are still unsure of its purpose. All we know is that it is necessary for the human body to function. After about 30 days and nights of sleeplessness, death normally occurs (this is a form of torture sometimes used). Recommend Reading: Sleep Theives by Stanley Coren

[AcidBasick]

From the Phenomena of Sleep Dreaming Many of the theories about the function of sleep concentrate on REM sleep, and many people believe that we only go to sleep for the purpose of dreaming or having REM sleep. Dreams are usually pleasant and entertaining. We tend to dream in the same style as we think during wakefulness. As most dreams are made up of an amalgam of the previous days thoughts and events, the \"interpretation\" of dreams can only be accomplished by knowing about these idiosyncratic phenomena. Much of what isclaimed about dream interpetation is nonsense, and the fantasy exists not only within the dream but also within the mind of those people who \"interpret\" dreams. Dreams total around 100 minutes a night, but we can seldom recollect more than a few minutes worth. Dreams cannot be remembered unless one wakes up out of one and immediately thinks about it, when it can then be stored into one's memory. Dreams are probably meant to be forgotten and have little more than entertainment value, simply being the nightly \"cinema of the mind\". The underlying REM sleep may well stimulate and tone up the sleeping brain, thus preparing it for wakefulness. People can be deprived of REM sleep for several nights either by being woken up whilst in the laboratory, or for months at a time through the use of drugs such as the tricyclic antidepressants which are typically used to treat depression. Most (not all) of these tricyclics very effectively suppress REM sleep. If REM sleep had some vital role with regard to memory, as is often believed, then this loss of REM sleep for such a long period of time would be expected to have a major impact on memory. But, for example, depressed patients treated with tricyclics show no memory impairment. Whatever roles REM sleep may have, these may centre on the developing brain, as for most mammals REM sleep is at its most prolific in the developing foetus. One of the most plusible theories as to why this should be; is that REM sleep helps with brain development by providing some sort of substitute stimulation for the brain, owing to the relative lack of external stimulation from within the uterus. Side views of the brains of a shrew and human. Apart from having a very much smaller brain in proportion to its body size, the shrew has a poorly developed cortex, but well developed olfactory bulb and lobe. Humans have a relatively huge cortex, massive frontal lobe, but only rudimenary olfactory region. The frontal lobe is almost non-existent in the shrew. If sleep offers a special form of recovery for the cerebral cortex, particularly for the frontal lobe, then in these respectsit is likely that sleep function will differ radically between these two mammals. Whilst REM sleep has traditionally been seen to offer benefit to the brain, non-REM sleep, particularly SWA, has been viewed to facilitate repair for the rest of the body. \"Dualism\", the body versus mind controversy in biology has strongly, but erroneously influenced perspectives on sleep. However, apart from anything else, one must not to fall into the trap of thinking about each type of sleep in isolation, each having its own distinct function, separate from whatever the other types of sleep are doing. Sleep is a complex process and it is likely that different types of sleep interact with one another to promote a variety of functions. Other Sleep Theories Apart from viewing sleep as some sort of recovery process, most of the early theories about sleep function only looked at the the \"how\" of sleep and mechanisms that produce sleep, rather than whatsleep does. For example, believing sleep to be the result of a build up of some substance in the brain during wakefulness, that is dissipated during sleep. Even Aristotle thought along these lines two thousand years ago, and considered that sleep resulted from warm vapours rising from within the stomach. In the last century, with more advancements in the understanding of the brain, heart and vascular system, one school of thought considered sleep to be caused by the \"congestion of the brain\" by blood. This contrasted with another popular theory at the time, of \"cerebral anaemia\", due to blood being drawn away from the brain and diverted elsewhere in the body, especially to the gut. Such ideas even led to opposing beliefs about how to induce \"better\" sleep. Some propounded sleeping without pillows to encourage blood flow to the head, and others encouraged the opposite - use plenty of pillows to drain the blood away. \"Behavioural\" theories were also common in the 19th century, particularly that sleep was due to an absence of external stimulation, with wakefulness only being possible if the organism was constantly stimulated. Take the stimulation away and the animal will fall asleep. To some extent this notion is true, as we can all testify, but it is not the answer. At the turn of this century a popular view was that sleep was not so much a passive response, but an active process like an instinct, to avoid fatigue occurring. At this time there were also many \"humoral\" theories, whereby various sleep inducing substances were proposed to accumulated in the brain. These ranged from known chemicals like lactic acid, carbon dioxide and cholesterol, to the vaguely described \"leucomaines\" and \"urotoxins\". Nevertheless, by 1907 some headway began to be made when two French researchers, Drs Rene Legendre and Henri Pieron, claimed to have obtained a substance they called \"hypnotoxin\" from sleep deprived animals. This gave a large boost to the humoral theories for the next twenty years or so, with much activity by several groups of researchers. However, success was hard to come by and interest dwindled. That is, until the 1960s, when great headway has since been made into \"sleep substances\" (see contribution by Krueger). In those interim years there were advances in neurophysiology that could be related to sleep, and a spate of different neural \"inhibition\" theories for sleep appeared. Many had had their early impetus from Pavlov's views on \"cortical inhibition\" - that sleep originated from a form of blocking within the cerebral hemispheres. Although Pavlov dismissed the alternative, of sleep inducing \"centres\" in more basic parts of the brain below the cortex, these have since been found to exist, and have become the centre of one of the prominent fields of sleep research, especially, after the discovery in the late 1940s, of arousal centres in the reticular formation. Neverthe-less, sleep centres and humoral theories still do not tell us much about the purpose of sleep, in the same way that knowing about centres in the brain that regulate eating behaviour explain little about the purpose of eating. [/b] It was an interesting read. I've actually heard of sleep eliminating drugs being developed. Or perhaps it's mostly theory. Military Research Being Conducted

[wasup]

Yeah..... Well, how about in a religion point of view thing, why did god give us dreams? Are they supposed to be a type of "escape" from reality? Or are they there to be "unlocked" and interpreted to discover more about your self or something? What do you think dreams are "meant" to do?

[Joseph_Stalin]

From a logical standpoint, they're just "around". From a philosophical standpoint they're anything you make them out to be. Your brain processed the dreams based on what you want to take them as. By way, if we didn't dream, would it feel like you slept for 5 minutes? I mean, would your perception go totally haywire?

[Ev]

IMO dreams are very closely connected to memory. Have you ever noticed how events of a day trickle in dreams? sometimes connections are obvious...

[Human]

Originally posted by wasup What are your guys' theories on the purposes of dreams? I mean like are they supposed to help us survive or something (like the apposable thumb helps us grip thing, and the calluses on our feet help us from hurting our feet really bad)? To maintain the brain. I think serotonin need to be released in the brain for some reason. People who are suffering from extremely lack of sleep usually have hallucinations. Hence it's propably serotonin build up who need's to be released, since the person hasn't got REM sleep.