The physiology of dreams, explained by 2 scientists

In the modern age, we've lost our reverence for the dream state

But more and more evidence is accumulating, which suggests that REM sleep was absolutely critical

to the evolution of the special cognitive capacities that human beings evidence and our special creativity

There are some people who believe that dreams really are just kind of a throwaway thing

There are other people that think that dreams actually do serve a purpose. Human REM sleep has a lot of very peculiar characteristics

Every 90 minutes we go into REM sleep and our bodies become paralyzed

Yet our brains are more activated than they are during waking consciousness

And we're forced to watch these things we call dreams. So why would Mother Nature do something like that

The older models when you look at Freud and you look at more Jungian thought and there are still people who really use the Jungian thought of dream ysis It really that you yze the dreams The dreams are there for a purpose For some people they say it about wish fulfillment

It's about the things that you're never able to do in your day. You're actually fulfilling at night

There are other people who will say that it's actually telling you something. If there's a lot of fear that's going on, if there's a lot of anxiety, it's manifesting itself in your nocturnal world

so that yzing it can help to open up thoughts about what you need to do during the day

So a lot of people who subscribe to the psychoysis, the onion thought

will really focus a lot on dreams, the meaning, and how it can be used to help you during the day

Now, if you go to more modern thought, there are some people who believe that dreams really are just kind of a throwaway thing

They're just a way of your brain processing what's happened during the day, but there's really no meaning to them

A lot of imagery, just flashes of what happened. There are other people that think that dreams actually do serve a purpose, but what that purpose

is, we're not really sure. So some people will believe that it actually does have some psychological

representation of what's going on in the day, but there's no need to sit and really yze it

Other people like myself think that dreams are almost a reenactment of what happened during the day but it a way of you figure out in your brain processing to figure out what does it need to hold on to and remember and what can it just throw away So it like your brain has a large filing cabinet and it opening up each drawer and it taking in various images and memories from the day consolidating what it needs to and puts it in whatever file

And then if there's something that doesn't fit in any of the files and doesn't really belong, you'll forget about it

So it's a way of really getting a succinct way of storing things in your brain. We see glimpses of these other possible worlds in our dreams

What REM sleep normally does is it creates all kinds of bizarre ideas

but all kinds of creative ideas as well. When our ancestors in the Upper Paleolithic acquired greater access to the REM sleep state

both during sleep and during waking consciousness, it helped to fuel the onset of cumulative cultural evolutionary processes

We know that REM sleep is especially important for human beings because it creates these dissociative experiences and associative experiences

Dissociative experiences are something that lots of us experience It just dreamy states where you feel like you not quite yourself and you in like a deja vu experience or a fluid mental state

a flow state, but you're not sure what's real, what's unreal because you're immersed in all this

imagery. But as you go through those kinds of dissociative states, it starts to relax or resolve

into an associative state so that things that were previously unrelated get combined

And when unrelated ideas combine, creative, innovative things happen. And REM sleep promotes that associative state big time

Our culture has lost its reverence for the dream state, whereas traditional cultures absolutely reverenced dreams

and I think some due references would help the culture because it would create more openness to creativity and disparate ideas

This can help us solve the unknown unknowns and help us get creative solutions to the problems people are facing