Jack Hardcastle

There’s a really thought-provoking article I found on Reddit today, called ”Dreams: Night School”.

The theory suggests that the reason we dream is to prepare ourselves for adverse situations. You’re being chased by wild animals in your dreams because your brain is trying to train you how to best perform in that situation, should it ever actually occur.

Faced with actual life-or-death situations—traffic accidents, terrorist attacks, street assaults—some people report entering a mode of calm, rapid response, reacting automatically, almost without thinking. Afterward, they often say the episode felt unreal, as if it were all a dream. Threat simulation, Revonsuo believes, is why.

I’ve read a few articles about dreams and déjà vu, and I wonder how these theories dovetail. Just yesterday I had what seems like a semi-annual period of intense déjà vu, one of those episodes where you can literally predict what will happen a millisecond before it actually does. If the brain is rehearsing likely scenarios using information you already have, then doesn’t it make sense that the brain can sometimes pre-determine your reactions to particular stimuli? As soon as you experience those stimuli, the brain triggers that path it had already calculated and you can literally experience yourself acting in the third person.

Throughout all of this, I’m still pissed off at my dreams. I get to remember my dreams maybe once or twice a year, and the only time this happened recently, my brain didn’t prepare me at all for the following day! Which just goes to show, I guess, that you can’t prepare yourself for the unexpected.

Stickgold holds that dreaming is much more complex than rehearsal. He points, for example, to the ability of sleep to allow us to integrate and consolidate knowledge. During sleep, our brains are making sense of the world, discovering new associations among existing memories, looking for patterns, formulating rules. “That’s how we create meaning,” says Stickgold. “Our brain puts things together.”

If that’s true, then, as a lover of patterns and knowledge reformulation, I need to start appreciating sleep more!