A lot of people invest much value in dreams. Many claims that dreaming is some kind of mystical doorway from which we view our inner-most feelings and memories. Some claim dreams predict the future or are Nature’s way of forcing us to explore what we would prefer to remain hidden. Others, like Dr. J. Allan Hobson, pours cold water on those theories and makes the bold claim that dreams are nothing more than a nightly tune-up session for the day ahead.

From the NY Times:

In a paper published last month in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Dr. J. Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist and longtime sleep researcher at Harvard, argues that the main function of rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM, when most dreaming occurs, is physiological. The brain is warming its circuits, anticipating the sights and sounds and emotions of waking.

“It helps explain a lot of things, like why people forget so many dreams,” Dr. Hobson said in an interview. “It’s like jogging; the body doesn’t remember every step, but it knows it has exercised. It has been tuned up. It’s the same idea here: dreams are tuning the mind for conscious awareness.”

Drawing on work of his own and others, Dr. Hobson argues that dreaming is a parallel state of consciousness that is continually running but normally suppressed during waking. The idea is a prominent example of how neuroscience is altering assumptions about everyday (or every-night) brain functions.

“Most people who have studied dreams start out with some predetermined psychological ideas and try to make dreaming fit those,” said Dr. Mark Mahowald, a neurologist who is director of the sleep disorders program at Hennepin County Medical Center, in Minneapolis. “What I like about this new paper is that he doesn’t make any assumptions about what dreaming is doing.”

Recurrent dreams happen to a huge number of people, but why? Is it a glitch in our brain or is there some deeper meaning? I can’t say as I’ve had many recurrent dreams in my life, though I do have recurrent themes, but that’s something else entirely. Psychology Today reveals some new research into the seldom explored area of human consciousness.

Psychology Today:

Originally proposed by Finnish neuroscientist Antti Revonsuo, the Threat Simulation Theory, or “TST”, holds that dreaming serves a biologically adaptive function because it allowed our evolutionary ancestors to simulate problem-solving strategies for genuine, waking life threats. Antonio Zadra, Sophie Desjardins, and Eric Marcotte of the University of Montreal, neatly summarise the central argument of TST this way: “By giving rise to a full-scale hallucinatory world of subjective experience during sleep, the dream production mechanism provides an ideal and safe environment for such sustained practice by selecting threatening waking events and simulating them repeatedly in various combinations.” Although Revonsuo’s theory was initially postulated for dreams in general, it has special relevance for recurrent dreams, argue Zadra and his colleagues, because these should capture the most salient threat themes jeopardising reproductive success.