• Question: why do we dream?

    Asked by anon-296906 to John on 16 Jul 2021.
    • Photo: John J Shaw

      John J Shaw answered on 21 Jun 2021:

      Really nice question! One of the most common ones and there’s no definitive answer, but the theory I think explains it best as of right now is called the NEXTUP model which stands for Network EXploration To Understand Possibilities.

      The idea behind this is during sleep when we are consolidating information from the day we are using dreams to try and find connections with what we have already experienced/consolidated and when we dream also affects this. When we dream during Stage 2/Slow Wave sleep, the dreams are more logical and you can pick out the relevance. When we dream during REM it’s entirely random as it’s trying to find any connection.

      If we use google images as an analogy: Imagine this morning you saw a beautiful blue/grey Staffordshire bull terrier.

      During Stage 2/Slow wave sleep your brain googles ‘blue/grey dog’, and it finds images (memories) relevant to any dog that is blue/grey.

      During REM, your brain googles ‘Dog’ and sees what is linked to that. It also googles ‘grey animal’, or even just ‘animal’. These random links are where the bizareness comes from! 😀

      So Dreams are a way of consolidating information and trying to make links to what we already know.

Comments