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7
AskMatrix - - (+6|-0)
Why do we dream?(self)
4 commentsbyx0x7

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[-]RickSanchez2(+1|0)

Dreams or rather nightmares are your mind's version of facing your fears.

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[-]newJiminy4(+3|0)

I think the brain has to keep neurons going at all times or else it'd die. Just like the heart must keep beating till you die. And your blood must keep flowing. It can slow down to save energy while you sleep but not all the way to zero. So dreams are our normal conscious at a lower energy. If you go on a vision quest, don't drink or eat for a long time, you'll hallucinate, just like a dream, as your consciousness struggles with low energy.

Why do we have consciousness in general? I think it developed around the same time language developed, because we talk to ourselves in our head with language.

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[-]Neol3(+2|0)

I like this theory:

Dreaming is Like Defragmenting Your Hard Drive

Francis Crick (who co-discovered the structure of DNA) and Graeme Mitchison put forth a famously controversial theory about dreams in 1983 when they wrote that "we dream in order to forget." They meant that the brain is like a machine that gets in the groove of connecting its data in certain ways (obsessing or defending or retaining), and that those thinking pathways might not be the most useful for us. But, when we sleep, the brain fires much more randomly. And it is this random scouring for new connections that allows us to loosen certain pathways and create new, potentially useful, ones. Dreaming is a shuffling of old connections that allows us to keep the important connections and erase the inefficient links. A good analogy here is the defragmentation of a computer's hard drive: Dreams are a reordering of connections to streamline the system.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-literary-mind/200911/what-do-dreams-do-us

Google AI overview version:

The defragmentation theory of dreaming proposes that dreams are a side effect of the brain organizing, consolidating, and cleaning up information processed during the day. Much like a computer running a defragmentation utility to reorganize scattered data on a hard drive, the brain uses sleep to streamline memory storage and optimize cognitive performance.

...

  • Data scattered: Throughout the day, your brain takes in massive amounts of sensory information, creating temporary, unorganized memory traces.
  • The "Defrag" process: During sleep—particularly REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep—the brain activates to sort through these traces. It discards useless information and integrates important data into long-term memory.
  • The "Dream" output: As these files are opened, moved, and spliced together, your conscious mind catches glimpses of the background processing. This random mashup of data is what we perceive as a dream.

...

Because the defragmentation process involves moving fragments of memories, emotions, and thoughts simultaneously, the narrative of a dream rarely makes logical sense. Your brain is simply trying to weave a cohesive story out of completely unrelated data blocks that happen to be processing at the exact same time.

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[-]Gr3vi3(+2|0)

Our brain bored.

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