Why do we dream? What do our dreams mean? Due to the scientific gap in knowledge about dreams, people for centuries have come up with their own theories about what their dreams mean.
Dr. Katie Croft, Upper School Science teacher, said the nature of dreams makes them challenging to study.
“They’re inherently hard to study, because you are in that dream state, and then the second that a researcher interrupts you to ask about it, you’re no longer in that state,” Croft said.
Some research shows that remembering dreams after you wake up is a practiced skill, and keeping a dream journal could promote this ability.
There are several scientific theories about why we dream, but one prominent theory is that dreaming helps us make sense of events that happened during the day.
“From a memory perspective, it’s really how we consolidate all the information that we’ve learned during that day,” Croft said. “So, we know from a large body of research that when you learn something during the course of the day, and then you sleep, that’s when all of those short-term memories are converted into long-term memories.”
The amygdala, the part of the brain that controls emotion processing, is very active during dreaming, whereas the prefrontal cortex, where higher order critical thinking and decision making happen, is very inactive. This explains why dreams tend to be emotional and nonsensical.
Junior Avika Guttigoli had a particularly nonsensical recurring dream on her birthday every year from when she was six until she was 10.
“My father, sister and I were getting ready for a party, so the three of us were downstairs, and my mom was still getting ready upstairs, so we were like ‘Mom, we’re ready to go, come downstairs!’” Guttigoli said. “And then my mom would come downstairs, and this banana—it was a different fruit every year—would bust through the foyer and demolish the front of my house.”
Guttigoli, her father and her sister would then hide under the table as her mom came downstairs wearing a dress with the same fruit on it that broke into her house, which signified that the fruit wanted to eat her mother.
Guttigoli thinks that this dream reflects one of her biggest fears.
“I think it’s because I’m scared of getting kidnapped or getting my house robbed,” Guttigoli said.
Junior Victoria Zavala also finds meaning in her dreams, especially her recurring dream where she is receiving her senior ring on Ring Day. She first dreamed about this in August of her junior year, and she has dreamed about it twice since then.
“I think that it symbolizes how much I cannot wait for my senior year and how hard junior year is,” Zavala said.
Dreams can reflect some aspects of a person’s life at the current moment, but they can also bring light to conclusions about their lives in a more encrypted way.
“The brain is almost like a puzzle, sorting the pieces where they need to go while your brain is offline in this more creative state while you’re dreaming, where more things are possible,” Croft said.
