Now playing at an inner theater near you: the premiere showing of a sleeping person’s vivid dream. This never-before-seen mental movie features captivating characters wrapped in a plot so original and unlikely, yet so intricate and so seemingly real, that the viewer later marvels at its creation.

Waking from a troubling dream (you were late to something and your legs weren’t working), who among us has not wondered about this weird state of consciousness? How can our brain so creatively, colorfully, and completely construct this alternative world? In the shadowland between our dreaming and waking consciousness, we may even wonder for a moment which is real.

Discovering the link between REM sleep and dreaming opened a new era in dream research. Instead of relying on someone’s hazy recall hours or days after having a dream, researchers could catch dreams as they happened. They could awaken people during or within 3 minutes after a REM sleep period and hear a vivid account.

9-7 What do we dream?

Daydreams tend to involve the familiar details of our life—perhaps picturing ourselves explaining to an instructor why a paper will be late, or replaying in our minds personal encounters we relish or regret. REM dreams are vivid, emotional, and often bizarre— so vivid we may confuse them with reality. Awakening from a nightmare, a 4-year-old may be sure there is a bear in the house.

We spend six years of our life in dreams, many of which are anything but sweet. For both women and men, 8 in 10 dreams are marked by at least one negative event or emotion (Domhoff, 2007). Common themes are repeatedly failing in an attempt to do something; being attacked, pursued, or rejected; or experiencing misfortune (Hall et al., 1982). Dreams with sexual imagery occur less often than you might think. In one study, only 1 in 10 dreams among young men and 1 in 30 among young women had sexual content (Domhoff, 1996).

More commonly, a dream’s story line incorporates traces of previous days’ nonsexual experiences and preoccupations (De Koninck, 2000):

Our two-track mind continues to monitor our environment while we sleep. Sensory stimuli—a particular odor or a phone’s ringing—may be instantly and ingeniously woven into the dream story. In a classic experiment, researchers lightly sprayed cold water on dreamers’ faces (Dement & Wolpert, 1958). Compared with sleepers who did not get the cold-water treatment, these people were more likely to dream about a waterfall, a leaky roof, or even about being sprayed by someone.

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So, could we learn a foreign language by hearing it played while we sleep? If only. While sleeping we can learn to associate a sound with a mild electric shock (and to react to the sound accordingly). We can also learn to associate a particular sound with a pleasant or unpleasant odor (Arzi et al., 2012). But we do not remember recorded information played while we are soundly asleep (Eich, 1990; Wyatt & Bootzin, 1994). In fact, anything that happens during the 5 minutes just before we fall asleep is typically lost from memory (Roth et al., 1988). This explains why sleep apnea patients, who repeatedly awaken with a gasp and then immediately fall back to sleep, do not recall the episodes. Ditto someone who awakens momentarily, sends a text message, but the next day can’t remembering doing so. It also explains why dreams that momentarily awaken us are mostly forgotten by morning. To remember a dream, get up and stay awake for a few minutes.

9-8 What functions have theorists proposed for dreams?

Dream theorists have proposed several explanations of why we dream, including these:

To satisfy our own wishes. In 1900, in his landmark book The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud offered what he thought was “the most valuable of all the discoveries it has been my good fortune to make.” He proposed that dreams provide a psychic safety valve that discharges otherwise unacceptable feelings. He viewed a dream’s manifest content (the apparent and remembered story line) as a censored, symbolic version of its latent content, the unconscious drives and wishes that would be threatening if expressed directly. Although most dreams have no overt sexual imagery, Freud nevertheless believed that most adult dreams could be “traced back by analysis to erotic wishes.” Thus, a gun might be a disguised representation of a penis.

Freud considered dreams the key to understanding our inner conflicts. However, his critics say it is time to wake up from Freud’s dream theory, which is a scientific nightmare. Based on the accumulated science, “there is no reason to believe any of Freud’s specific claims about dreams and their purposes,” observed dream researcher William Domhoff (2003). Some contend that even if dreams are symbolic, they could be interpreted any way one wished. Others maintain that dreams hide nothing. A dream about a gun is a dream about a gun. Legend has it that even Freud, who loved to smoke cigars, acknowledged that “sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar.” Freud’s wish-fulfillment theory of dreams has in large part given way to other theories.

To file away memories. The information-processing perspective proposes that dreams may help sift, sort, and fix the day’s experiences in our memory. Some studies support this view. When tested the day after learning a task, those who had been deprived of both slow-wave and REM sleep did not do as well as those who had slept undisturbed (Stickgold, 2012). In other studies, people who heard unusual phrases or learned to find hidden visual images before bedtime remembered less the next morning if they had been awakened every time they began REM sleep than if awakened during other sleep stages (Empson & Clarke, 1970; Karni & Sagi, 1994).

Brain scans confirm the link between REM sleep and memory. The brain regions that buzzed as rats learned to navigate a maze, or as people learned to perform a visual-discrimination task, buzzed again during later REM sleep (Louie & Wilson, 2001; Maquet, 2001). So precise were these activity patterns that scientists could tell where in the maze the rat would be if awake. Some researchers dispute the dreaming-strengthens-memory idea, noting that REM sleep may support memory for reasons unrelated to dreaming. Also, memory consolidation may occur during non-REM sleep (Diekelmann & Born, 2010). This much seems true: A night of solid sleep (and dreaming) has an important place in our lives. To sleep, perchance to remember.

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This is important news for students, many of whom, observed researcher Robert Stickgold (2000), suffer from a kind of sleep bulimia—binge sleeping on the weekend. “If you don’t get good sleep and enough sleep after you learn new stuff, you won’t integrate it effectively into your memories,” he warned. That helps explain why high school students with high grades have averaged 25 minutes more sleep a night than their lower-achieving classmates (Wolfson & Carskadon, 1998; see FIGURE 9.9). Sacrificing sleep time to study actually worsens academic performance, by making it harder the next day to understand class material or do well on a test (Gillen-O’Neel et al., 2013).

To develop and preserve neural pathways. Perhaps dreams, or the brain activity associated with REM sleep, serve a physiological function, providing the sleeping brain with periodic stimulation. This theory makes sense from a developmental point of view. Stimulating experiences preserve and expand the brain’s neural pathways. Infants, whose neural networks are fast developing, spend much of their abundant sleep time in REM sleep (FIGURE 9.10).

To make sense of neural static. Other theories propose that dreams erupt from neural activation spreading upward from the brainstem (Antrobus, 1991; Hobson, 2003, 2004, 2009). According to “activation–synthesis theory,” dreams are the brain’s attempt to synthesize random neural activity. Much as a neurosurgeon can produce hallucinations by stimulating different parts of a patient’s cortex, so can stimulation originating within the brain. These internal stimuli activate brain areas that process visual images, but not the visual cortex area, which receives raw input from the eyes. As Freud might have expected, PET scans of sleeping people also reveal increased activity in the emotion-related limbic system (in the amygdala) during emotional dreams (Schwartz, 2012). In contrast, frontal lobe regions responsible for inhibition and logical thinking seem to idle, which may explain why our dreams are less inhibited than we are when awake (Maquet et al., 1996). Add the limbic system’s emotional tone to the brain’s visual bursts and—Voila!—we dream. Damage either the limbic system or the visual centers active during dreaming, and dreaming itself may be impaired (Domhoff, 2003).

To reflect cognitive development. Some dream researchers dispute both the Freudian and neural activation theories, preferring instead to see dreams as part of brain maturation and cognitive development (Domhoff, 2010, 2011; Foulkes, 1999). For example, prior to age 9, children’s dreams seem more like a slide show and less like an active story in which the dreamer is an actor. Dreams overlap with waking cognition and feature coherent speech. They simulate reality by drawing on our concepts and knowledge. They engage brain networks that also are active during day-dreaming—and so may be viewed as intensified mind wandering, enhanced by visual imagery (Fox et al., 2013).

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Unlike the idea that dreams arise from bottom-up brain activation, the cognitive perspective emphasizes our mind’s top-down control of our dream content (Nir & Tononi, 2010). Dreams, says G. William Domhoff (2014), “dramatize our wishes, fears, concerns, and interests in striking scenarios that we experience as real events.” Given a healthy, mature brain, such mental simulations happen whenever there is (1) a loss of conscious attention, (2) an absence of external stimuli, and (3) sufficient brain activation, such as during REM sleep.

TABLE 9.2 compares these major dream theories. Although today’s sleep researchers debate dreams’ function—and some are skeptical that dreams serve any function—there is one thing they agree on: We need REM sleep. Deprived of it by repeatedly being awakened, people return more and more quickly to the REM stage after falling back to sleep. When finally allowed to sleep undisturbed, they literally sleep like babies—with increased REM sleep, a phenomenon called REM rebound. Withdrawing REM-suppressing sleeping medications also increases REM sleep, but with accompanying nightmares. Most other mammals also experience REM rebound, suggesting that the causes and functions of REM sleep are deeply biological. (That REM sleep occurs in mammals—and not in animals such as fish, whose behavior is less influenced by learning—fits the information-processing theory of dreams.)

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So does this mean that because dreams serve physiological functions and extend normal cognition, they are psychologically meaningless? Not necessarily. Every psychologically meaningful experience involves an active brain. We are once again reminded of a basic principle: Biological and psychological explanations of behavior are partners, not competitors.

Dreams are a fascinating altered state of consciousness. But they are not the only altered states. As we will see next, drugs also alter conscious awareness.