Anthony Bloxham: People have wondered whether dreams have a purpose throughout human history. Modern scientists are also fascinated by this question.
For a long time, dream science has hovered between marginal and mainstream research. However, original research projects and novel technologies are transforming it into an electrifying and solemn research niche.
Here are four recent discoveries that could pave the way to a better understanding of dreams.
Lucid Dreams
In 2021, an international study found that two-way communication is possible between a lucid dreamer and a researcher in a lab. In 2024, another study built on this by teaching lucid dreamers to control a virtual car from their dreams.
The 12 dreamers in the experiment made slight muscle twitches that sent signals to the computer to make the virtual car move forward or turn. The signals were sent back to the dreamer to inform him of obstacles to avoid. Some could move the car well, but others, no matter how challenging they tried, could not.
While fascinating, it’s still unclear how such technology might be used in everyday life. And the petite sample size of this study, in part because of the rarity of gifted lucid dreamers, limits the conclusions we can draw from it.
However, research suggests that it is possible for some people (at least with a little practice) to make decisions in their dreams and communicate them to the outside world.
Why do we dream?
Mark Blagrove, a sleep and dream researcher at Swansea University, believes that dreams were originally intended to be shared socially and in humans evolved to enhance emotional intelligence and empathy.
Since 2016, Blagrove has collaborated with artist Julia Lockheart in a dream discussion and illustration group. An audience member is invited to share a recent dream.
Blagrove leads the discussion while Lockheart sketches the interpretation of a dream in the pages of Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams.
His 2019 research found that discussing a dream in this way can lead to increased empathy between the person sharing the dream and the listeners. Blagrove argues that this may have been valuable for ancestral survival in creating meaningful connections with others.
In recent years, other theories about why we dream have begun to emerge, some of which were discussed during a panel at the June 2024 annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD).
For example, the embodied cognition theory of dreams, which posits that dreams prepare us for cognitive activities typical of everyday waking life.
Adequate research has not yet been conducted, but these studies indicate a growing demand from scientists for the adaptive function of dreams.
Conclusions from long series of dreams
Michael Schredl of the University of Mannheim in Germany is probably the most prolific dream researcher, having published hundreds of articles and books since he began his career in the 1990s. He has kept a dream diary since the early 1980s. He gave the opening keynote address at the IASD conference, in which he analyzed more than 12,000 of his dreams.
Overall, these patterns seem to support the dream continuity hypothesis—that our dreams are influenced by events and concerns that occur in our waking lives.
Schredl believes he is one of the first people to study weather patterns in dreams. He has noticed a steady decrease in ice, snow and hail over the years in his dreams.
Interestingly, this phenomenon was similar to the documented decline in the number of “ice days” (days where the temperature drops below 0°C for 24 hours) in Germany since he started keeping a dream diary.
He joked that perhaps the effects of global warming are also manifesting themselves in dreams, but they could also be the result of fears about such things appearing in waking life.
Another fascinating pattern was the references to money in his dreams. When the dominant currency was the Deutsche Mark, it appeared occasionally in his dreams over the years, but when the German currency was changed to the Euro in 2002, the number of references to the Deutsche Mark was replaced by references to the Euro.
Long dream sequences like this are infrequent, but they can remind us how closely the content of our dreams is connected to our waking lives.
Dream Reminder
Some people remember their dreams better than others, recalling them more often and in greater detail. For a long time, researchers have tried to determine the causes and mechanisms of this difference.
The researchers took into account factors such as personality and attitude towards dreams, general ability to remember, as well as subtle physiological signals that appear during specific stages of sleep.
By far, one of the most effective factors in increasing dream recall is a positive attitude toward dreams. If you believe that dreams are vital, you are likely to be more motivated to remember them more often.
In 2022, French researcher Salomé Blain and her colleagues investigated the role of attention in dream recall, a cognitive skill closely linked to memory.
Although participants' ability to recall dreams did not appear to be related to working memory, which temporarily stores information for immediate apply, participants with needy dream recall were better at ignoring distracting stimuli, and vice versa.
They compared people recalling low- and high-frequency dreams to assess their ability to discriminate between whether two melodies (both played in the same ear) were different and a distracting melody was played in the other ear.
This suggests that people who have good dream memory may have more difficulty filtering out irrelevant and distracting information and may therefore pay more attention to what is going on in their minds while they sleep.
However, dream recall is a skill that can be learned. For example, keeping a dream journal can greatly improve dream recall, especially for people who already have a fairly needy dream memory.
Anthony Bloxham, Lecturer in Psychology, Nottingham Trent University
This article was reprinted from Conversation under the Creative Commons license. Read original article.
Image Source: Pixabay.com
