Question: As you study human behaviour, do you know what influences dreams, and why we have them?

Lowri Evans answered on 15 Mar 2016:

Hello,

That’s a really interesting question, and scientists have been performing sleep and dream studies for decades, and we’re still not 100% sure how and why we dream. The question of whether dreams actually serve a purpose still hasn’t been answered, although there are a lot of different theories about it.

One of the theories is that our dreams work together with the sleep cycle to help the brain sort through all of the information that it takes in during the day, from all of the stuff you learn at school, to the messages from your friends, to how nice the pizza was you had for your dinner. Your brain receives hundreds of thousands, if not millions of inputs every day. This is my favourite theory of sleep, as it explains how the brain works to plough through all of this information to decide what to remember and what to forget. This ties in really well with psychology, as you’ll often find that the things you remember most are the things that you had really strong emotions about, meaning your brain worked much harder to store that information.

Personally, I think this helps to explain really strange dreams too. Have you ever had a dream that had so many random and strange things in it that it didn’t make any sense? I think that our brains try to make sense of what happens to us through what’s known as “schemas”, which are organised patterns of thought or behaviour, and when the information the brain has doesn’t fit in to a schema, it ends up creating a strange story that doesn’t make sense.

There are so many interesting (and some boring!) theories on sleep, but that’s my favourite one 🙂