Unexplainable - Why do we dream?

Episode Date: June 21, 2023

Dreams are weird, but can they be a scientific tool? Can they teach us anything about humanity? About ourselves? This episode originally ran on April 12, 2022. For more, go to http://vox.com/unexplainable It’s a great place to view show transcripts and read more about the topics on our show. Also, email us! [e-mail] We read every email. Support Unexplainable by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. It's unexplainable. No, I'm Hassanfeld. I'm Nora Flosson-Hass? What? Yeah. It sounds like... But it totally isn't, huh?

It can't just be... Yeah, but it's got to be a little bit. I don't know how my brain works. Me too. I too, nice. Hope you like it. I hope you like it. Yes.

It's not an important. Pardon. It's not explained. For pretty much all of human history, people have been trying to interpret dreams. They've been seen as sources of religious inspiration or prophecy or personal insight, but scientists still have a ton of unanswered questions here. They're still wondering whether dreams are telling us something meaningful about ourselves

or whether they're just this random jumble. We've had so many listeners write in asking us about dreams and what to make of them. So last year, science editor Brian Resnick set out to find an answer, and we wanted to share that episode with you again this week. Brian had a pretty basic question. Are dreams telling us anything important? And should we listen to them? So to start off, I talked to Bill Domhoff.

He's this retired psych professor from UC Santa Cruz, and oh, he's just such a professor through and through. Are you still there? I'm getting a beep beep. Just starting our call. He was just kind of anxious, wanting to know what level of detail to get into. As a professor, I profess and I get too didactic, I will aim for the average person.

Bill is such a great person to talk to because he kind of witnessed the birth of modern sleep and dream science. It was the late 1950s, and this was an era in which various kinds of Freudian and Freudian-derived theories where dreams were considered the Royal Road to the Unconscious. So Royal Road, that's just like a super highway. And this was the world that Bill was walking into when he started to research dreams. It was Freud's world. Freud said dreams are a disguised attempt at wish fulfillment. And their function, their adaptive function is to preserve sleep. His famous statement, they are the guardians of sleep.

So adaptive function here is really the key phrase and really why these scientists were so motivated. to study dreams. We mean that it's been selected for and evolutionary processes. So that means that dreams are like essential to our survival in some way, right? That we evolved to have them? Yeah, yeah. Freud really thought dreams

were this core part of our psychology. Our deeper motives, our deeper secrets. So like if you follow dreams, you're going to reveal a lot of our inner workings. But it wasn't just that. This stuff was all about psychosis. finding the secret to psychosis, they thought it was going to help with mental illness.

They thought it was going to solve big questions. Yeah, a lot of Freud's specific theories have been debunked at this point, right? Oh, yeah, Freud was not right about most things, but he was still really important. He inspired a lot of researchers, you know, listening to Freud. They thought dreams could be this, this is not a scientific term, but kind of like a highway to the soul. They wanted to find out what makes us.

human, but they needed a way in. And really critically, in the 1950s, they found their on-ramp. A pair of researchers were staying sleep and noticed that there was this period during the night where it looked like people's eyes were like darting around underneath their eyelids. So they were like, it's like looking at a tennis match. Quickly look at one thing and then another thing and another thing. These eye movements would happen in bursts. And this was the discovery of REM sleep. So that's rapid eye movement sleep.

And this started a lot of work into just like sleep science. But it was also a huge breakthrough when it comes to understanding dreams. And so they did a famous study in which they awakened people during eye movements or when they weren't having eye movements. And just asked like, what's going on, buddy? What's happening? Like, why? And these are the periods of people who are most likely to report they had been. dreaming. This connection, this connection between REM, sleep, and dreams, this was a big deal.

This was the first one-to-one relationship between a physiological event and dreaming. Now we could study dreams more objectively. You could just like wake people up during REM sleep and ask them what they had been dreaming. Like Bill made his dissertation about this, waking people up during ramp sleep, asking people what they're dreaming about, and, like, taking very detailed notes. Very rigorous quantitative content analysis. How many characters are in the dream? Like, what is the content?

Is it of a sexual nature? Is it a friendly nature? Are you talking? Are you walking? You know, just, like, any category you can think of to try to, like, quantify the content of dreams, they would. What were the content of dreams? Were they meaning?

Yeah. So Bill calls his dissertation, like, a real. downer. Okay. So dreams turned out to be far more every day from the expectations that people had. It wasn't this great road to the unconscious. It seemed like a kind of fractured and honestly quite banal one. Like people were just mainly dreaming about what was happening to them during the day.

Like for instance, like as a journalist, I've had a lot of deadline dreams. I think a lot of journalists have them. Sometimes these deadline dreams can be really funny. But I don't need to dream about the deadlines to tell you that I'm anxious about. Yeah, it's not exactly breaking news. Yeah. The dreams just didn't reveal huge secrets. Bill said that basically you could get the same information out of people but just talking to them while they're awake.

So if Freud is saying that dreams are giving us this unique lens to analyze who we are as people, Bill is basically saying there's nothing special about dreams. We could actually just do this a lot more easily if we just talk to people. Yeah, and this was kind of a disappointment for Bill and other scientists. It blasted a lot of hopes that dreams are really important, something were evolved to do. And these sorts of findings from Bill and others just deflated that. So if dreams are not this super highway, this royal road to who we are at an unconscious level, What are they?

Yeah, there's a bunch of ideas here, and I'll tell you about them after the break. It's all about you. And when you fly with Virgin Atlantic in their upper class cabin, they take the VIP treatment to the next level. With a private wing to check in and your own security channel at London Heathrow, you can glide from your car to their clubhouse, a destination in its own right in 10 minutes or less. On board, you can treat yourself to your own point. private suite to stretch out in, with lots of storage space, a lie flat bed, and delicious dining from beginning to end. Just be sure to leave room for dessert. Their mile high tea with all

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So before the break, Brian, you were telling me about dreams, how dreams went from being the Holy Grail Highway to our unconscious to something that we are very much unsure about. Sorry, Dr. Freud. So where do we go from here? Are we just totally unsure? Our dreams just, is this just a debate that cannot be resolved? Yeah, so talking to dream researchers, I found, I definitely found a spectrum of answers here.

On one end, we have Bill, who really does downplay the importance of dreams. My claim is, it's a byproduct of imagination. To Bill, the thing that is, like, central to human psychology is our creativity and, like, our kind of wandering mind, like, during the day, you have your kind of creative thoughts that exist in your head. You can manipulate ideas in your head. And this is like a very core part of being human. And he says the best theory right now that makes sense is that dreams are like just an accidental byproduct of the fact that we have this very creative thinking mind.

It's kind of like music where like we probably are not evolved to make music, but we have a brain that likes patterns. and we have a brain that looks out for them. And we have like this kind of social brain that like sharing patterns. Yeah, there's this idea that we're not evolved for music. Or it might just be this kind of like, I think the term is auditory cheesecake that, you know, it's not central to who we are, but it's just sort of lucky and really nice that we get to have it. Yeah.

So dreams are like this like a happy cheesecake of evolution. And to Bill, that's all that dreams are. And Bill's explanation is just like there are periods during the night where our brain just like heats up. And you have some conscious awareness of, you know, your creative mind turning on because your brain needs to conduct a process to make you ready for the next day. So that's one side of the dream spectrum that, you know, they're sort of an accident of who we are. We're not evolved to have them. What do other scientists think?

I talked to Deirdre Barrett. She studies dreams at Harvard. and yeah, she agrees with Bill that a lot of dreams are just cognitive fluff. I think dreams have just an awful lot of silly repetitive content, but also sometimes get us somewhere. Unlike Bill, she still believes that dreams could be adaptive. They could serve some sort of evolutionary purpose,

maybe not like a huge super highway, but not nothing either. So at the very least, she thinks it's an important question to ask. I think it's like asking, the question, what is waking thought for? It's for everything. And I think, I think dreams are similar. What does that mean? Is she saying she doesn't really even like the question when people ask what are dreams for? I think her perspective is that we're just thinking all the time, even when we're asleep. And like all thoughts are important. And we should understand, you know, why we have certain creative thoughts at night. Interesting. So why does she think that dreams might have a specifically

evolutionary purpose? One category of potential purpose of dreams is that they help us think through creative problems. It's evolved to something where humans get some interesting, creative outside the box thinking done. Creative breakthroughs can come through dreams sometimes. Paul McCartney dreamed the song yesterday. And I had a piano by the bed, and I just woke up one morning with this tune in my head. It's like a good little tune, you know, and I couldn't have. Because I just dreamed it, you know.

And she's done some studies where she tries to, like, kind of prime people to dream about problems. I've done formal research on getting students to specifically try to have problem-solving dreams. So she'll ask them to, like, really think about, like, homework problems. Look at it at bedtime and tell themselves they want to dream about it as they drop off to sleep. And then, like, have them, like, chart, you know, write down their dreams every night and see to what degree, like, the homework problem. ends up in the dream with a kind of focused attention, and if the solution kind of comes to them through that. Deirdre also thinks that dreams serve this really important function

of kind of telling us what our emotions and our anxieties are in ways that aren't so obvious. So, like, yes, a lot of dreams are just things that bubble up from, you know, what we're anxious about or thinking about during the day. But dreams add this additional vivid layer to them and kind of make you confront them, whether you want to or not. And you can see, like, in 2020,

a lot of people's dreams changed because of the pandemic. How did it change? So for a lot of people, dreams in the pandemic got really stressful and weird. And Deirdre has now collected thousands of these dreams. Dreams just from all around the world. I have dreams from, I think, 89 countries when I last looked. She was telling me some funny examples of, like,

a woman who was home. homeschooling her 10-year-old. She dreamed that she got a text from the school that they were sending the entire class of 30-10-year-olds to her condominium, and she was going to have to homeschool the entire class for the pandemic. Oh, no. And she had to deal with them and teach them. And, like, yes, on one hand, like, you could probably ask that woman, like,

oh, what are you worried about? And she would say, like, oh, managing my kid. but, you know, perhaps, you know, dreams kind of force us to confront these very intense emotions and deal with them in some way. I find that really interesting because it's not saying that dreams are telling us some new information about ourselves. It's just presenting information that maybe we already know about ourselves in a way that just forces us to not ignore it. Yeah, it's much harder to ignore your anxieties if it manifests as an actual. monster chasing you through your dream. Yeah, so we have Bill on the one hand saying that dreams are a happy accident, but then we

have Deirdris saying that they force us to confront important issues in our lives, that they may serve as inspiration for creative difficulties and problem solving. Yeah. That, to me, doesn't sound like a complete, happy cheesecake accident. Yeah, there aren't clear answers here. These theories are really hard to prove, and they lead to some spicy debates. There are probably as many answers as there are dream psychologists. Here's the thing.

I am not at all sure that I am right, but I know as much as I know anything, they are wrong, and I've listened to them for 60 years now. So I talked to another psychologist, Mikhail Schradle, he's been saying dreams for 30 years, and he's the head of a sleep lab in Germany. And he really helped me thread the needle here. Okay. We don't know what dreams are doing for us just on their own, like the act of dreaming. But what can be really helpful is what we do with them when we're awake.

The only thing we know that is when we work with dreams, when we try to really, remember them and think about them in waking life, then the persons can learn a lot from their dreams. But we don't know whether the dreamt dream has already served the function. Yeah, just talking to you, I'm kind of thinking about a recurring dream I have. Like, I'll have to go to the airport and I'll just never make it there. Like, I'll try to go to the airport and I'll get into a cab, and the cab will turn out to be a boat. Okay. And that's just not how you get to the airport.

And I don't know, like, a part of me is like, oh, this dream is so on the nose. Like, I'm just anxious about, like, being left behind in life. Yeah, of course. The dream is just reflecting your anxiety. But these dreams are very interesting. You can't work with these dreams because you can imagine what would I, what would happen when I'm really too late? Is the world at an end? No.

Can I say, okay, I didn't make it a taxi turn to a boat and I can come in two hours? But I just didn't want to go on a boat ride. I want to go on a plane. I guess I have to accept the boat ride. But that's okay. The dreams are just reflecting what you're doing. And if life is stressful, what's the problem that the dreams also are stressful? So you can say, okay, what can I do?

That's the basic idea of the dreams. So they say, do something about it. But are they more helpful than just asking people about their anxieties and waking life? like, is it more useful to ask about the dream anxiety than the, you know, waking anxiety? That's a very good question. So I think it's really a benefit, not during the dream, but after you're waking up and working with the dream, to have an intensified version of your waking life anxiety. It's a clear and creative picture of what's going on in your mind or in your soul or how you name it.

It's clearer because it's intensified. and so the dreams can help to get a new viewpoint. But is there something like kind of like not scientific here? And it's more like a creative space, like opening up a notebook and like writing down a fictional story to kind of observe some truth. Like what makes the study of this different from that or like puts it in the realm of science?

I think it's not excluding each other. The scientific part is that, for example, I take 100 persons and look how, stress they are in their waking life. And I look whether the highly stressed person have more negative dream content than the lowly stress person. This is the scientific part. But on a personal level, on an individual level, when you have a dream, there's a lot of people who are interested, what does this dream mean? And the basic idea is that dreams are reflecting how you deal with the world. What he's basically saying, and I like this, it feels like this sort of Jedi side-stepping

of this debate a little bit, but he's saying it doesn't matter what they actually are. The fact is that they're there, and they can be very interesting and useful to us if we approach them from the right mindset. Yeah. Using your waking mind, your creative brain, which generates these dreams, but also like to work through them as like, hmm, like, is this really something that does bother me? I think that's kind of worthy of reflection. And like, you know, a lot of these researchers suggest like keeping a dream journal. And it's not like you're missing out on anything important if you don't do this, if you don't investigate your dreams.

But it seems like you can use dreams as this kind of creative space. And in that sense, I think I really like this idea. Like we don't need to know what dreams are for to know they are important in our lives or they can be important in our lives if we just choose to listen to them. It's almost like we've been thinking this whole time that the real important thing is what's happening when we're dreaming, when in reality maybe the important thing or the most useful thing was remembering them when we're awake and working through them with our conscious mind

and being like, what does this mean? What does that mean? Just like the process of interpreting a dream is more important or more useful than the dream itself. I think that's where we're landing here. And that's like, that's really, really powerful. You're waking interpretive lens. Yeah. If you feel like your dream, has meaning, then of course it has meaning to you. This episode was produced and reported by Meredith Hadnott and Brian Resnick. Catherine Wells edited the episode with help from Mandingwen and me, Noam Hassanfeld.

I also wrote the music. Richard Seema checked the facts. Christian Ayala did our mixing and sound design. And Bird Pinkerton is buzzing around somewhere. If you have thoughts, email them to us. Unexplanable at Vox.com. Or if you want to send us some love, leave a nice review or a rating wherever you listen. We'd really appreciate it.

Unexplanable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll be back next week.