Veronique Greenwood in Time Magazine:
No one really knows why people dream. There have been psychoanalytical theories, of course. Sigmund Freud wrote that dreams were a kind of acting-out of repressed impulses. And since long before Freud, dreams have been regarded as prophetic. They can feel important, like they ought to mean something.
However, when scientists imagine what evolutionary purpose dreams might have—how they might be helping us survive this crazy whirlwind called life—definitive answers have been hard to come by. Whatever insight we might get from thinking about our own dreams is unlikely to be the whole story. Studies suggest we dream multiple times per night, and we forget almost all of them, so whatever purpose dreams might serve probably doesn’t depend only on our remembering them. Does dreaming help us make memories? Learn from our experiences? Or is it just keeping us entertained while important business is attended to by the brain?
More here.
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