What Do Weird Dreams Really Mean?

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Have you ever woken up from a particularly vivid dream, wondering exactly why all of the brilliant, illogical, and confusing imagery was generated by your brain, for you and you alone? Much has been written about the benefits of sleep over the past few years, and research has suggested that dreaming constitutes the healing component — the active ingredient, so to speak — of sleep, but relatively little is known for certain about the actual purpose of our dreams. Theories of dreaming have been popular for over a hundred years, and many of these theories have been put to the test with scientific research, but to date, no one theory has been fully accepted.

Take Freud’s original wish-fulfillment theory of dreams, in which they were believed to reflect the repressed desires of the unconscious mind (Freud, 1997). Freud suggested that dreams made it possible for us to act out our deepest, least understood wishes in a safe, consequence-free context — and in so doing, to work on resolving conflicts about wanting things we don’t believe we should have. In Freud’s view, dreams may be difficult to understand because their manifest content — the images and stories we perceive while dreaming — can mask their presumed true meaning, or latent content.

If this seems too esoteric, perhaps the continuity theory of dreams might hold more appeal. In this, more practical theory, dreams do not represent a mysterious conflict between unconscious desires and repressive forces, but something more like an “instant reply” of your waking life. Bits and pieces of the memories of your days — people you’ve spoken to, events you’ve experienced, problems you’ve had — turn up in a fragmented, miscellaneous form, throughout REM sleep. Evidence for this theory has been found in a 2018 study by Eichenlaub and colleagues, in which experimental participants reported their dreams and then compared them with recent life experiences. The study concluded that “wakefulness-related” dream content was associated with REM activity in ways that could be clearly measured by electroencephalography.

And if dreams constitute a tool that we use to process our daily lives, perhaps they’re also intended to help us consolidate our memories. The activation-synthesis hypothesis suggests that the seeming randomness of dreams actually represents the activity of the mind, in its efforts to process the signals from the limbic system. This theory was popular in the 1970s when it was assumed that activation in the “reticular, oculomotor, and vestibular neurons” in the brain stem could generate some aspects of dream imagery (Hobson and colleagues, 1977). In other words, neurological “noise” coming from the hindbrain is re-interpreted into the content of your dreams.

Could our dreams also aid in daily neurological processes, like forming memories? Canadian psychologist Jie Zhang thinks so; the continual-activation theory of dreaming, with which Zhang is associated, holds that our brains are working to store and consolidate memories while we sleep. Perhaps dreams, Zhang says, assist in transferring information into long-term memory; random memories retrieved by the brain while enacting this process may be presented to dreamers while they sleep. Dreams, according to Zhang, may be a place for our thoughts and recollections to be held while making the transition from short-term storage to long-term memory.

Alternately, the creativity theory holds that dreams might help us get through our lives by stimulating greater creativity in problem-solving. A 2002 experiment by Walker and colleagues found that taking naps helped study participants navigate mazes, and specifically, that the participants who had dreams about the mazes woke up with a much greater maze-solving ability than those who didn’t have such dreams. Another theory proposes that the various challenges experienced throughout the day might be managed during sleep as a kind of threat simulation, meaning that dreams could direct our attention toward preparation for future problems. Perhaps, this theory holds, dreams exist to help us better fortify ourselves — cognitively and emotionally — to confront genuine risks in our waking lives. In a 2000 article in Behavioral Brain Science, French cognitive scientist Anti Revonsuo suggested that many dreams may contain threatening or scary imagery for exactly this reason.

Another form of problem-solving is entailed in one final, fairly popular theory of dreaming: that of emotion regulation theory, which is also known as self-organization theory. Wei Zhang, of the China University of Geosciences, suggested in 2016 that dreams may allow recent emotional experiences to be modulated, neurologically, overnight, which helps the nervous system generate an appropriate internal response. In other words, dreams exist to help us process our emotional experiences by allowing us to review the ups and downs of our days while we sleep. Perhaps in the dream state, helpful ideas or impressions are emphasized while unhelpful memories may fade or be overwritten. When we awaken, the human limbic system (the neurological equipment that regulates arousal in the face of excitation or threat) may be able to generate a better response to the problem.

Even with all of these plausible theories, going back more than a hundred years, no one has yet established a full or incontrovertible understanding of the utility of dreams. It seems a shame to have to leave this theoretical exploration on an ambiguous note, but to date, not much can be said about dreams with full certainty. Perhaps a 2013 article in Science by Horikawa and colleagues holds the most promise for the future: in that study, researchers at Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratory created something called a “rudimentary dream content map,” which used an MRI device to track the actual subject matter of a study participant’s dream. When they woke up, these participants verified that the MRI-generated map had, with some accuracy, correctly identified what they had dreamed about. With this kind of technology becoming available in dream research and experimentation, finding fuller and clearer answers is looking less like a dream itself and more like reality.