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Why do we dream? A new theory on how it protects our brains
- dwighttk 6y agoWell. I don’t (or very rarely) remember my dreams. Hope I get the protection anyway.
- neom 6y agoOut of curiosity, are you a frequent cannabis user? I found I didn't remember my dreams when I smoked cannabis, however after a long break I started to remember dreams vividly.
- keerthiko 6y agoI personally hardly ever use cannabis, and often oscillate between periods of distinctly remembering all my dreams to having weeks of seemingly dreamless sleep. The oscillations have gotten especially wild in post-lockdown pandemic life.
- Taylor_OD 6y agoYup. I smoked pretty heavily for two years and didnt really dream at all during that time. Outside of those two years I've always had pretty vivid dreams. A dream journal really does help though. The last thing most people want to do when sleepy is write though.
- handmodel 6y agoInteresting - I pretty much never remember my dreams. I only started smoking/edibles fairly recently in life and one side effect was if I take an edible in the evening I almost always remember them.
- dwighttk 6y agoNope. The only time I seem to remember dreams is when my sleep is disturbed. Most nights I go to sleep and wake up in the morning, no (remembered)dream. If something wakes me up like indigestion or needing to pee I’ll often remember a dream.
- tylorr 6y agoThis is the exact same for me. Only a disturbance in my sleep allows me to even remember that I had a dream at all.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- majkinetor 6y agoI can confirm dreamless nights on cannabis and vice-versa.
- hutzlibu 6y agoProbably. But if you want to remember your dreams again, this is something you can work/train with. Basically, every morning before getting up, not jump up with the alarm out of bed, but rather ly still, in the same position as before and try to remember. If you want to, have a dream diary. Doing so a few days, should bring your memory of your dreams back. I used to do so to train my ability for active/lucid dreaming. Can be fun ... (but now with a toddler and a baby I lack the time and focus)
- dwighttk 6y agoI’d say about once a month I’m dreaming as I wake up and the dream quickly fades... but if I had a dream journal there’d be something to write down. Every other morning there’s nothing.
- brianjunyinchan 6y agoI often remember the dream right when I wake up, but if I don't immediately focus on remembering it (e.g. while writing it down), later in the day I almost magically won't remember even what the general topic was.
- dtauzell 6y agoYou can also write down your dreams if you wake after a dream in the middle of the night. The downside is you might start waking up frequently to write down your dreams.
- pixelbash 6y agoAnecdotally some b6/b12 supplements have given both me and my partner very intense dreams and vivid recall. No idea what the mechanism might be (Or if it's a preservative/etc) but potentially an interesting data point?
- dwighttk 6y agoI’ve heard Stilton cheese has a similar effect. (Haven’t tried) Also whatever malaria drug I took was supposed to have intense dreams as a side effect. (Don’t remember any)
- esperent 6y agoIIRC the cheese thing is basically a myth, any heavy food in your stomach when you sleep will cause you to sleep less deeply, wake more often, and consequently, remember more of your dreams.
- dwighttk 6y agoMakes sense... I usually only remember dreams when my sleep is disturbed so this matches up.
- rmilk 6y agoFunny that some medications have these dream effects. An uncommon side effect of Montelukast is vivid nightmares and sleep paralysis. It’s a relativity common asthma control medication, but was recently moved to a not-recommended status for younger people because of this side effect. My personal experience was pretty intense nightmares 1-2 times a week if I took it before bed. Taking early in the day stopped this side effect.
- kirykl 6y agoParticularly the P5P form of vitamin b6 will cause pretty crazy and vivid dreams
- davrosthedalek 6y agoTry changing your room temperature by a degree or two. This makes a big impact for me.
- hndudette 6y agoChanging it up or down?
- davrosthedalek 6y agoTry both.
- sci_prog 6y agoI used to dream a lot and then it all stopped, especially when the pandemic started and I became less physically active. Long story short, It turns out I have a severe sleep apnea and it became more pronounced when my physical activity went down significantly (aka I was less tired). Few days later after i started using my CPAP machine my dreams came back. Make sure you don't have sleep apnea, about 7-8% of people have it.
- tgv 6y agoOf course. Articles such as the "OP" are simplistic bollocks. For starters, you'd be completely blind by now if the article had any merit. And deaf. And lost all memory. Oh no, wait: we open our eyes every morning, so even if there was any effect, it would be the opposite: visual taking over everything else. Which also doesn't happen. So take it with a grain of salt: yet another unprovable "theory" about the brain.
- silverpepsi 6y agoHave you stopped to think for a second where science would be if every possible hypothesis was thrown out as soon as its inventor realized he couldn't conclusively prove it in a day? Also exactly the fact that it hasn't been fully proved out yet is why the nuance is missing. But now all the sudden you want them to be able to give you an explanation of the nuanced mechanism that prevents visual from taking over everything else? (Plus why on earth would it? What are you even talking about? I'm seeing all day long, but I'm also smelling hearing touching and tasting) Make up your mind!
- tgv 6y ago1. If it's just a hypothesis, write it up in a journal, don't put it in Time magazine. 2. The hypothesis is as unprovable as they come: not only do we not have any idea on how this process of taking over other brain areas would work, if you knew how it worked, you couldn't build brains that lack this mechanism but are identical for the rest, and set up an experiment in which half of the brains (modified and original) would dream and the rest wouldn't. Because that seems to be about the only experiment that could truly falsify this idea. 3. It doesn't explain why only the visual cortex is susceptible to this, when we know that other brain areas also can adapt. The argument "it's dark" doesn't cut the mustard, because the effect should go away as soon as we open our eyes, which is around 2/3rds of the day. BTW, babies can't see, so it's odd that so many of them manage to develop a normally functioning visual cortex. 4. Sleep inhibits the senses, so how can the areas they input to take over, and why don't their areas get taken over? 5. They don't even attempt to prove that REM sleep and REM sleep alone activates the visual cortex and only that. > Make up your mind! That was under the assumption that the hypothesis was true. It seems to lead to rather unintuitive predictions. And I do like a theory to not be in apparent contradiction with simple observations. So no, I have no reason to take it seriously, and people that (think they) don't dream shouldn't worry.
- noncoml 6y agoDreaming is practicing our survival skills in a safe environment. Nature's "VR", if you want. Reference: Why else am I running naked in the supermarket?
- Daub 6y ago"Dreaming is practicing our survival skills in a safe environment. Nature's "VR", if you want" This also sounds like a rationale for play. A safe practice zone... a sand box.
- syrrim 6y agoThis doesn't explain why consistently interrupting REM sleep will lead to death. Also, the exposition suggests that this is somehow particularly necessary for visual information because we can't see while sleeping. They originally suggest that this is because it's dark at night, but later modify it to be because one's eyes are closed while sleeping. However, to my knowledge, very little hearing is done while one is sleeping, certainly not enough to protect the auditory portions of the brain from being taken over. Furthermore, if other senses like hearing or smelling are in fact unused while sleeping, it seems like there wouldn't be much need to protect certain regions of the brain from takeover, since there would be no other sense to take them over. Finally, it seems like there are multiple situations where senses are required in a periodic way, such as an animal active during dusk, where its senses transition from being more to less sight focused. Being able to cycle the role of brain regions in response to these changes would be widely beneficial, and we would expect the capacity for this to be deeply ingrained. Insofar as we need non-sight senses while we are sleeping, it seems like the circuitry to deal with cyclic use of senses would be able to protect the visual cortex from total reuse. Stronger than all this, it seems like REM is fairly fundamental to sleep, in that understanding it ought to offer deep insight into why we sleep in the first place. The proposed explanation offers no such insight, and generally answers no other questions besides the one regarding dreams. It seems like answers to deep questions usually provide insight into questions we didn't even know we had, whereas this answer provides no such insight. I saw an answer to the dreams question to the effect that the brain cools down while we are sleeping, and REM sleep heats up the brain to prevent it from becoming too cold. This answer potentially provides insight into why we sleep, in that it proposes the cooling of the brain to be important to sleep, rather than incidental. It also explains why interrupting REM would kill a person. It doesn't obviously preference visual portions of the brain, suggesting that visual information is the focus of the brain simply because it is what the brain focuses on while awake. It potentially explains the data of these researchers, if the brain cools down more during sleep whenever the brain is more flexible. I am not suggesting that I think this answer is definitely true, but merely trying to demonstrate that the standard I am measuring this new theory against is not impossible to reach. I think the explanation of why we dream will look more like the brain cooling answer, rather than the brain reuse answer.
- 6y ago
- nerfhammer 6y agomaybe firing random neurons keeps the connections alive
- vyrotek 6y agoA sort of "Chaos Monkey" for the brain.
- drevil-v2 6y agoHmmm this is interesting. I wonder if people that cannot sleep more than 4-5 hours per night also have very vivid dreams? And therefore the brain cleaning REM cycle is just more intense and prolonged so the mind-body decides it does not need to sleep any longer?
- axaxs 6y agoData point, unsure if helpful. I sleep plenty but wake up at least once per night. My most vivid dreams always occur in my last sleep, usually after 6am. I can literally live a lifetime in my dreams between 6 and 9am. I haven't quite figured it out yet, but because my dreams are less than stellar, I usually dread going back to bed.
- JKCalhoun 6y agoI often feel these waves of ... something ... flush and course through my head when I drift off and am still semi-conscious. I know it happens when I begin to nap, I think too it may happen early in the morning, just before waking. It feels almost chemical.
- drevil-v2 6y agoI have had the same feeling too during a power nap. It feels like a reboot to me. Perceptually when I wake up I panic thinking it must have been hours then I look at the watch and only 10 minutes have passed.
- axaxs 6y agoYes, that. I can wake up at 8, accidentally fall asleep, and feel like hours or days have passed and panic, but it's just 8:15. Dreams are so mysterious it's weird, in our age of science.
- joubert 6y agoAren’t those the ripples of theta waves that start to emerge as alpha waves drop while you transition through hypnagogia? On the other end, as you transition out of sleep to wakefulness, you pass through hypnopompia. I experience the feeling of these waves also when I meditate.
- User23 6y agoI’ve always suspected dreaming plays a role in fixing short term memories into long term ones.
- ratww 6y agoInteresting. Recently my cat's vet (who's also a researcher) told me that the best guess they have is that animals dream about the things they did in the day so they can create long term memories. Wonder if it's the same for humans.
- EugeneOZ 6y agoSo by their theory blind people don't need to sleep? Total bullshit.
- nhumrich 6y agodont need to _dream_. The article is about why we dream, not why we sleep.
- EugeneOZ 6y agoand? Still total bullshit.
- sa1 6y agoTheir theory says nothing about sleep, except that your visual cortex isn't receiving any input. You're making a mistake in conflating dreams and sleep.
- EugeneOZ 6y agoYou and they making a mistake saying that blind people should not see dreams. I wonder how such an idiotic idea reached the HN at all. It's Daily Mail level. People see dreams not every time they sleep, not every night, sometimes we can have multiple nights without dreams. By this moronic theory our “visual cortex” should be modified to “blind mode” just in the first night of sleep without dreams. Articles containing words “Mother Nature” are only good for religious organizations, homeopathy lovers and other imbeciles.
- silverpepsi 6y agoI would recommend rereading the article, your reading comprehension wasn't up to par to tackle it in one pass. Also you're assuming a TON of things that were never suggested. Jumping to conclusions won't help you read what was written I'd say
- yogrish 6y agoIn this article, there is a mention of "constant battle going on inside our brains between different sets of neurons, fighting over who gets control of certain parts of the brain." Because of which visual cortex always gets activated (even in sleep)so that it's neurons are not repurposed for other activities. Hence we dream. http://m.nautil.us/issue/91/the-amazing-brain/your-brain-makes-you-a-different-person-every-day http://m.nautil.us/issue/91/the-amazing-brain/your-brain-mak...
- majkinetor 6y agoThis! Predatory neuron phenomena goes along with this theory.
- starpilot 6y agoSo does melatonin give enhanced brain benefits since it leads to vivid dreams?
- spicyramen 6y agoOne of the few serious books about dream meaning is from Freud https://g.co/kgs/LdLZs8 https://g.co/kgs/LdLZs8 this field is seen as pseudo-science but I believe we still have a lot to discover
- baxtr 6y agoHmmm somehow I’m a bit skeptical. The article itself includes an example that is not easily reconcilable with their theory: What about the people like the boy who became blind they mention in the beginning? Shouldn’t they have extreme visual dreams even at day to protect their visual area, at least if this theory was true? But instead the brain area was rewired.
- arbol 6y agoIt explained this with the example of the blindfolded braille readers. Over 5 days their sense of touch was enhanced, presumably at the expense of their visual senses. Over time, the visual cortex would be completely taken over if the brain was not receiving signal from the eyes.
- kolinko 6y agoBut if the theory were true, they would begin to see hallucinations while awake as a way of protecting the brain from changes.
- subaquamille 6y agoAnd that's exactly what's described at the end of the article: > If dreams are visual hallucinations triggered by a lack of visual input, we might expect to find similar visual hallucinations in people who are slowly deprived of visual input while awake. In fact, this is precisely what happens in people with eye degeneration, patients confined to a tank-respirator, and prisoners in solitary confinement. In all of these cases, people see things that are not there.
- baxtr 6y agoAnd that's exactly my point :) Shouldn't this have happened to those blind people, too?
- goodthenandnow 6y ago
- scatters 6y agoThe article says that "dreams are primarily visual". That might be true for most people (and for the researchers), but I'm aphantasic and I don't think I've ever had a visual dream. My visual cortex seems to work perfectly fine on waking (though I do find a sunrise alarm clock useful in winter). If this is typical among aphantasics then I don't see how the theory can possibly be correct.
- brianpan 6y agoThe theory could be correct in general (dreams are a result of a evolutionary trait that keeps visual circuits active at night) while not apply to you specifically, especially if you are different than most people when it comes to vision/visualizing.
- kolinko 6y agoBut the prediction of the their theory is that without visual dreams his visual cortex would be overtaken by other senses. Since this doesn’t happen, it’s an important datapoint towards a falsehood of the theory.
- chrisdbanks 6y agoAnother prediction of this theory would be that naturally blind animals such as some moles would not need REM sleep or would have substantially less REM sleep. I couldn't find any research in completely blind mammals, but in a mammal that has very poor eyesight "Cape mole rats sleep substantially less than other similarly sized terrestrial rodents but have a similar percentage of total sleep time occupied by REM sleep." https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301482322_Sleep_in_the_Cape_Mole_Rat_A_Short-Sleeping_Subterranean_Rodent https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301482322_Sleep_in_... Seems like there is still a lot of scope for research on REM sleep in non-human species.
- pmontra 6y agoI think that this part of the article answers that > those who are born blind (or who become blind early in life) don’t experience visual imagery in their dreams; instead, they have other sensory experiences, such as feeling their way around a rearranged living room or hearing strange dogs barking. This is because other senses have taken over their visual cortex. The prediction would be that moles experience sounds in sleep, or smell, or touch, whatever their primary sense is.
- irrational 6y agoTo the best of my knowledge, I’ve never dreamed (I’m almost 50 years old). I’ve always wondered what that means about my brain. Is there a medical or psychological label for people who don’t dream?
- tamrix 6y agoEverybody dreams unless you're brain dead during sleep. It's more about if you can recall your dreams. Some medications and /or weed can prevent dream recall.
- irrational 6y agoI’m pretty sure I haven’t been on medication (other than the occasional aspirin) or weed for the past 50 years. Something natural has prevented dream recall my entire life.
- easytiger 6y agoPresumably you do enter REM sleep though, in which case you likely have no dream recall, which is not unheard of
- noja 6y agowho don't dream, or don't remember their dreams?
- irrational 6y agoI don’t recall dreaming. So if I do dream, something is blocking my ability to recall dreaming.
- matthewfcarlson 6y agoI dream fairly frequently but I'm very rarely myself or in a place I've been before or with people I know. Dreams are weird and I wouldn't worry about it too much.
- air7 6y agoHealthy people dream several times a night and don't remember most of their dreams upon waking. Have someone monitor your sleep and wake you up when observing REM. There's a good chance you'll remember the dream you're currently in, and feel the disappointment of not knowing how it ends...
- yalcinbar 6y agoI have always woken up feeling rejuvenated if I could remember what I had dreamt vividly. I asked some of my friends if it's the same with them also, but they said it's the opposite.
- Roritharr 6y agoMy wife is having really bad sleep problems which she attributes to dreaming too much too intensely. She just doesn't seem to get rested doing this. This article sadly does not give a clue what could be her problem.
- Kathula 6y agoWhat do you mean by "too intensely"? Is she having nightmares? Does she often wake up, only to later fall asleep and having nightmares again?
- jbotz 6y agoShe's probably putting the cart before the horse... light or troubled sleep leads to more dreaming because REM sleep phase comes just before a waking or almost waking phase. Also, you most vividly remember those dreams that happen just as you are waking up, so the more often you wake the more intense your dreaming seems.
- nerdponx 6y agoConsider that maybe the intense dreams are a reflection of physical processes in the body that cause sleep to not be restful. That is, both intense dreams and not feeling rested are maybe caused by the same underlying thing.
- raducu 6y agoMy wife is exactly like this. She says she feels tired because she feels she lives paralel lifes in her sleep. But objectively she has NONE of the symptoms of bad sleep I get when I can't actually sleep. So she maybe just feels emotionally tired for the first 5 minutes after she wakes up. I once gave her my fitbit and checked her sleep -- she had almost no restless sleep like I do, she had a lot of REM and a lot of deep sleep, I'd love to have her sleep pattern.
- FailMore 6y agoYou/she might enjoy: https://psyarxiv.com/k6trz https://psyarxiv.com/k6trz, discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590 [written by me]
- dariosalvi78 6y agoI see a lot of correlation here and very little causation, what if the visual dreaming is an effect of some other, more fundamental, mechanism?
- vbezhenar 6y agoMy pet theory is that brain uses its power at night to process data from different organs and to fine-tune their settings (especially guts which is extremely complex organ with millions of sensors). That’s why sleep deprived creature dies from misbehaving organs. Some neurons are not required for this task, because they are too specialized. Namely neurons responsible for vision, conscience, movement. They receive random signals which don’t really mean anything and more like white noise. But brain is brain, so those neurons are trying to make sense from that noise and that’s how dreams are created.
- FailMore 6y agoThis idea ignores a fascinating aspect of REM sleep. During REM, the brain shuts down the executive functions, while the brain goes into extreme 'story generation mode'. A story in which you are a character. I think this is one of the most overlooked and interesting parts of dreaming. We are able to observe ourselves in our dreams acting without the constraints of our 'executive functioning' brain. This means we get to learn about our purely emotional behaviour, and perhaps spot where it is maladaptive. (I am very bias on this subject, as I have written a paper on this topic - https://psyarxiv.com/k6trz https://psyarxiv.com/k6trz, which was discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590)
- majkinetor 6y agoYou sound like its a fact, while its just one interpretation. The idea also doesn't ignore REM sleep like you claim. > This means we get to learn about our purely emotional behaviour, and perhaps spot where it is maladaptive. How did you get this ? Its another interpretation of available data. Extreme story generation mode may not be end goal but artifact.
- vinay_ys 6y agoIt may not even be a 'mode' as such.
- agumonkey 6y agoMakes me wonder when did animals started to dream, even prototypcally. Mammals ? Reptiles ?
- sundarurfriend 6y agoI think the article describes one good reason for why we dream, one of the benefits of dreaming, but it doesn't have to be the only or even main reason. I think it's most likely that dreaming provides multiple benefits, and what the article claims is one of the minor ones.
- bonoboTP 6y agoI definitely feel like I have "executive function" even in many non-lucid dreams. It's just that I assume it's reality but I'm still solving problems, fighting, running away, talking to people to achieve things. Yes the world changes in weird ways and the distinctive thing about dreams is not noticing that this level of weirdness is implausible. But I'm distinctly not "purely emotional" or animalistic in my dreams.
- nmstoker 6y agoIs the suggestion meant to be that this only applies in certain kinds of brain function areas (eg for continuous senses, ie sight, sounds, etc) The reason I ask is that I don't need to repeatedly dream of bicycling actions to be able to keep bicycling - I might not use that skill for a long period and yet I can still do it with accomplished ease when I resume it after a gap. This suggests that the bicycling neural area (and likely those for other similar skills, assuming there is indeed an "area") does not suffer the kind of neural take over they hypothesise.
- sundarurfriend 6y ago> dreams are primarily visual precisely because ... This is a central claim in the article that's just stated and taken for granted. In my experience, at least, dreams are not primarily visual. They have a visual component, but also a vague auditory component, a motor-experience (feeling of movement) component, etc., and all of those feel equally important. And most of all, there is a "felt experience" component that actually feels like the primary element of it; emotion is the core element of that, but a better description is "the lizard brain's interpretation" of what's happening in the dream, that feels like the central element of the dream. The visual part is also not in full colour generally, in my case, it's like early movies during the transition from black-and-white, with slight colour tints generally towards the bluish colour regions. I'm curious what others' dream experiences are like, and in particular whether it's the case that most people do experience them as primarily visual.
- agumonkey 6y agoTo me the most peculiar aspect of dreams is how vivid the universe you're in is. It feels as emotionally impactful as the best moments of your life. Super weird
- krapp 6y agoThe same brain that simulates your entire perception of reality from external inputs is using all of its resources to simulate its own, with itself as an input. What's really weird is how dream-reality always makes sense to you in context, regardless of how absurd or random it is, because your self awareness and identity are being simulated the same way, both in dreams and in reality. It's like a virtual machine inside a virtual machine.
- alexpetralia 6y agoI've thought of dreams as unique in suspending self-doubt. For some reason, while in a dream, we are incapable of doubting what is going on. Everything feels incredibly vivid and real. Then we wake up, and we go back to doubting: "Ah, must've been a dream!" Edit: Perhaps immersive psychedelics (LSD, ketamine) are similar actually. Speculatively, one could define "real" as our ability to doubt, "fantasy" as the suspension of doubt.
- seesawtron 6y agoLink to original paper which is still a non-peer reviewed biorxiv article [0]. The crux of the paper is based on expressions of plasticity correlating with the percentage of sleep time spent in REM (fig.2). Apart from the high-level questions raised already in the comments there are several caveats in the data: Data points are sparse i.e. the number of samples included are too few to strongly believe in correlations. Taking out extreme data points would make the correlations look independent. The data values across 25 primate species are based on averages across previous studies and using proxies where some data was not available. I do not know how justifiable such approaches are but I am skeptical about them. [0] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.24.219089v1.full.pdf https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.24.219089v1....
- bjornsing 6y agoI don’t buy it. Dreaming is computationally/metabolically expensive. If the sole purpose was to prevent plasticity then there would be far cheaper ways to accomplish the same result.
- zoomablemind 6y agoI understand that current theories link dreaming to REM phase of the sleep. That is when we are in REM phase, we dream. Yet, remembering of the dreaming is not always guaranteed. So it's very much possible to have the REM phase, but no recollection of having dreamt at all. The data on dreams is likely based on self-reports, unlike the REM data which can be measured. So there's a lot of room for speculation on any possible connection and purpose of the dreaming. On thing is for sure, if we can say to remember of the dreaming, we indeed did wake up. In personal experience, I noticed a direct connection between physiological discomfort while sleeping and the related dreaming. That is a discomfort, say in my body positioning would generate dreams around the effect of it, not always literal but often it would either trigger a brief awakening or a change of the positioning. One very stark experience was related to a case when previously frozen (and likely swollen at night) toes were constantly triggering a dream of sleeping next to a campfire and leading invariably to waking up with my knees bent and feet tucked underneath me. Toes healed, the dream was gone. Another very much reliable trigger is airsupply. Say, by odd positioning the breathing is affected, sometimes an external factor can affect the air quality. Sure enough, there will be some dream leading to waking up just to be annoyed at dry/stuffy nose or some random smoke from an open window finding its way in. That I should feel probably grateful about, as it's like an internal smoke alarm... (though no substitute for proper detectors!!) The point is, the dreaming might still be an extension of our survival mechanism. Kind of internal dashboard to check while asleep, no matter how oddly scripted.
- time0ut 6y agoMy personal experience has been that dreams seem to play a critical role in learning. Often when learning something new, the new experience will manifest in my dreams. The more immersive the new experience, the more rapidly the dreams come and the more vivid they are. Most dreams that I remember are almost like mashups of previous experiences. Very often, my dreams have elements of places and experiences from my childhood. I could see this being a manifestation of the brain managing placticity. Perhaps the brain grounds itself in old experiences and mixes in new ones so that things are not forgotten.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kenjackson 6y agoI don’t buy the theory. If you lose your vision, like the boy in the story then I’d expect that you’d eventually stop dreaming. It doesn’t make sense that other senses would start then fighting for protection of their neural circuitry. Why didn’t they earlier then? What feels more likely to me is that your brain is trying to optimize something in it, which is why it is correlated with plasticity. The brain has evolved to turn off most of the body (since there’s probably strong selection against moving limbs while sleeping), but little selection against moving eyes while closed. REM is just what is left of our bodies movements.
- GordonS 6y agoI really love when I have strange dreams, especially when you go back into the same dream if you wafe briefly, giving you a moment to consider before it continues. I imagine it's unlikely there is any real meaning behind dreams, but I can't help but feel there must be sometimes, especially with some of the odder dreams. The most disappointing thing about a good dream though, is how quickly memories of it fade away upon wakening - it's like trying to grab tendrils of smoke rising away. Usually at best I manage to recall one or two small snippets, or something about the general theme, but every now and then - very rarely - more vivid details stick with me for a little longer.
- newdude116 6y agoSince even my dog dreams, it must be something very fundamental.
- joveian 6y agoThe evidence doesn't support as close a relationship between dreaming and REM sleep as the authors suggest. See: Solms. 2000. Dreaming and REM sleep are controlled by different brain mechanisms. BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2000) 23, 793–1121. https://neuro.bstu.by/ai/To-dom/My_research/Papers-2.1-done/Cognitive-S/Consciousness/For-icnnai-2010/2/Ref/download.pdf https://neuro.bstu.by/ai/To-dom/My_research/Papers-2.1-done/... »It is generally accepted that NREM mentation that is indistiguishable from REM dreaming does indeed occur. Monroe et al.’s (1965) widely cited study suggests that approximately 10–30% of NREM dreams are indistinguishable from REM dreams (Recht-schaffen 1973). Even Hobson accepts that 5–10% of NREM dream reports are “indistinguishable by any criterion from those obtained from post-REM awakenings” (Hobson 1988b, p. 143). If we adjust this conservative fig- ure to account for the fact that NREM sleep occupies ap- proximately 75% of total sleep time, this implies that roughly one quarter of all REM-like dreams occur outside of REM sleep.« A recent reference that discusses this is: Nicholas and Ruby. 2020. Dreams, Sleep, and Psychotropic Drugs. Front Neurol. 2020; 11: 507495. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7674595/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7674595/ »Regarding the link between dreaming and neurophysiology, 60 years of debates has been necessary to get rid of the rapid eye movement (REM) sleep hypothesis of dreaming, and it is now acknowledged by a majority of dream researchers, be they neuroscientist or not, that REM sleep is neither necessary nor sufficient to get a dream report and that dream reports can be obtained at the awakening of any sleep stage (2, 7, 9–12). It is also now clear that the complexity and story-like characteristics of dream reports are related to sleep stages but also, and even more so, to circadian rhythms leading to more vivid and complex dreams in the morning than in the early night [e.g., (13–15)].«