• Question: Why do we dream?

    Asked by brooket__ to Franco, Koi, Mark on 23 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Mark Booth

      Mark Booth answered on 23 Jun 2016:

      Hi Brooket

      that is a good question and I suspect you ask it here because you can’t find the answer anywhere. nobody really knows why we dream but there are a number of theories to do with e.g. facilitating social interactions, through to just being artifacts of chemical interactions during sleep.

    • Photo: Franco Falcone

      Franco Falcone answered on 23 Jun 2016:

      Brooket
      dreaming is linked with sleep. Your brain needs time to recover and regenerate regularly and all animals need to sleep on a regular basis. Even dolphins, who need to keep swimming and go to the surface to breathe, sleep, but in them, only one half of the brain sleeps while the other remains active.
      During your sleep, there is a lot going on in your brain. Apparently the cavities of your brain become larger, in order to allow waste products such as lactic acid, generated by the activity of your brain cells during the day, to get detoxified. Large accumulations of lactic acid in your brain would be toxic to your brain, and that’s why prolonged sleep deprivation over several days will eventually kill you. While all of this is happening, your brain is still active and generates impulses, which your brain intreprets as dreams. You also need to sleep to consolidate your memory, e.g. when you learn for exams, it is impportant to sleep well otherwise you will forget what you tried to learn.

      Sleep is a complex process with different stages, and dreams occur only in certain stages of your sleep, the so-called REM phase. But this is not something I am very familar with.

      If you ask a psychiatrist, or people from othe rprofessions, they may give you a very differentinterpretation of why we sleep or dream. And then there is lucid dreaming… but that’s anothe question…

    • Photo: Arporn Wangwiwatsin

      Arporn Wangwiwatsin answered on 23 Jun 2016:

      Hi brooket__

      Our brain still work while we are sleeping and they still process information (it might be consolidating memory of things that happen in a day, or restructure environment in the brain). But how that processing came out as a dream – I think it is still unclear.

      A neurologist Sigmund Freud was quite interested in dream. It might be a good point to start exploring the topics of dream.

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