Why Do We Dream?

Since the beginning of recorded history, humans have theorized about the nature, reasons, functions, and meanings of the dreams they experienced. Until Aristotle and Plato laid the philosophical foundations of what would later be called 'desire' by European psychologists in the 19th and 20th centuries, human dreams were attributed to spirits. New hypotheses define dreams as a way to express and manifest the unconscious desires of humans in a safe and 'unreal' space, perhaps because fulfilling these desires in the real world is impossible, unacceptable, or even prosecutable and illegal. However, what we know is that even in the 21st century, scientists are still not sure 'why do we dream?'. In 1953, two students from the University of Chicago discovered the phenomenon of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. They found that most dreams occur during this stage of sleep, characterized by rapid eye movements, where the body is in deep sleep, but the brain is active as if awake. Before this discovery, most scientists believed that the brain had no activity during sleep. However, this discovery proved that the brain continues its activities even when the body is asleep. This discovery laid the groundwork for early research into sleep and related disorders, which has since led to the identification and treatment of over eighty types of sleep-related diseases. A few years after this discovery, Dr. Michel Jouvet from the University of Lyon, France, found that brain activity during REM is similar to that during wakefulness. He termed REM as 'paradoxical sleep' because such brain activities are always accompanied by muscle movements. He called non-REM sleep 'quiet sleep' because bodily activities decrease during this time. In the 1960s, extensive research was conducted on the vital role of sleep in individual health, but none of these studies answered the main question researchers had: what causes us to dream? Some scientists believe that dreaming has evolved for psychological reasons in humans. Another group believes that since there is a lot of neural activity in the brain during sleep, especially during REM, dreaming could be a meaningless product of these brain interactions. Another theory considers sleep a mechanism for integrating memories, solving problems, and grappling with emotions, deeming dreaming essential for maintaining mental and emotional health. Hugo Spears, an experimental psychologist from the University of London, told National Geographic that while it is not clear whether animals dream, the likelihood is high. Spears and his research team found that when laboratory mice are shown food before sleep, their brains map out how to reach the food during sleep; 'we can say that their brains are dreaming about how to reach the food.' Human dreaming occurs during REM, and almost all mammals experience this sleep stage. An experiment conducted on cats during sleep showed that they see images and react to them. However, despite all the efforts made to answer this astonishing phenomenon, we still do not know why we dream. The only way to study sleep remains to ask someone who dreams, making it impossible to apply this method to animals. What all sleep researchers agree on is that almost all humans dream every night, whether they remember it or not. According to Dr. Jim Pagel, director of the Sleep Research Center in Colorado, if we understand the benefits of dreaming for our bodies, we might understand why we need to spend one-third of our lives sleeping.