Imagine this. It’s winter 1862 and you’re
a chemistry professor in Belgium You’re working on one of the most pressing
problems in chemistry: the structure of Benzene. Benzene is a smelly and highly flammable
hydrocarbon molecule. All hydrocarbons are made of… you guessed it, hydrogen and carbon.
But in benzene the ratio of these elements is a little weird.
Instead of having more hydrogen atoms than carbon atoms, like most hydrocarbons, benzene
has the same number of hydrogen and carbon atoms: 6 and 6.
What strange molecular structure could let these atoms fit together?
Frustrated, you turn your chair towards the warm fire and take a nap. As you sleep,
visions of atoms and molecules dance in your mind’s eye. They turn into a series of snakes.
Then, suddenly, one of the snakes coils around and bites its tail like the ancient symbol
of the ouroboros. You’ve solved the chemical structure
of benzene… in a dream! Precisely as German chemist August Kekulé did in 1862, completely
changing the future of organic chemistry in the process, a contribution to science that
earned him a statue that people love to dress up.
And it all happened while he was asleep. Thanks to… a dream?
It makes you wonder: Why DO we dream? Hi Smart People, Joe here.
August Kekule’s dream discovery of benzene’s molecular shape is one of history’s most
famous dreams. But for most of us, dreaming is about more
than making chemistry discoveries. Humans have been trying to figure out why we dream
for thousands of years, probably as far back as we’ve been asking questions. And since
it’s an experience we only have while we’re asleep, it’s a particularly tough question
to answer. Going back to the Greek philosopher Plato
and the Confucian scholar Zhu Xi, great minds have speculated about the function and meaning
of dreams. But it’s only been in the last few decades that scientific experiments have
started to show us what benefits our nocturnal narratives could have.
That’s right: benefits, with an S. Scientists think dreams might have many functions that
influence our success, our smarts and even our survival.
We each spend about two hours dreaming every night. Over an 80-year lifetime, that’s
almost 60,000 hours, or the same as ten years of waking life!
Dreaming clearly must have some benefit – otherwise we wouldn’t spend so much darn time doin’
it. And everyone dreams…. Even if we don’t
always remember them. You are more likely to remember your strangest ones… like I
had this one dream where Tom Hiddleston and I were rowing a boat across the ocean, and
then we got hit by a storm, and we were eating sandwiches. That was weird. (that really happened)
Almost half of us remember at least one dream a week, and women are more likely to remember
their dreams daily compared to men. There are a number of phases the brain goes through
during sleep; these phases are repeated in cycles throughout the night. In the first
phase we transition from wakefulness into sleep, as you begin to relax and your breathing
slows. As your body temperature drops and your breathing slows down even more, you enter
light sleep. After that, you enter the deep sleep phase characterized by a particular
pattern in your brain called delta waves. After that, you start the REM or “rapid
eye movement” sleep stage. Your breathing gets faster, and your eyes move all over.
During REM is when dreaming happens. And throughout this phase, your brain is very active -- almost
as active as when you are awake. Almost all other animals-- whales, wombats,
wildebeest…. Sleep. And many also experience REM sleep. So scientists think that many of
these animals also dream -- including your cat or dog.
Probably about chasing that delicious, juicy, red ball.
The way we think about dreams has changed a lot throughout history. In most cultures
around the world, dreaming has held spiritual significance. There are even dream interpretations
in the Bible. But there was nowhere where decoding dreams
was more popular than in ancient Egypt. The Egyptians created volumes of books full of
common dreams and their supposed meanings. Professional dream interpreters used these
books to help people figure out what their dreams meant.
Dreamer: I had a dream my leg came off! Interpreter: Oooof, that means dead people
are judging you. Dreamer: Yikes!
— Dreamer: I dreamed I died violently!
Interpreter: Oh that’s a great! Dreamer: Really?
Interpreter: Really! It means you’ll live a long life.
Dreamer: Okay? —
Dreamer (beaming): I had a dream I poured a jug of my pee into the Nile.
Interpreter (confused): Really? Dreamer: Really!
Interpreter: Well actually that’s a great omen too! It means your harvest is going to
be bountiful. Oh right… obviously.
The belief that dreams held hidden messages to be interpreted or decoded remained the
dominant way to look at dreams through the first part of the 20th century.
In 1900, Sigmund Freud published the influential book “Interpretation of Dreams.” In
it, he claimed that dream interpretation could be used to understand unconscious desires.
It all started when he had a dream, a dream so famous it has a name… and a Wikipedia
page. It’s called Irma’s Injection.
“A large hall - numerous guests, whom we were receiving. - Among them was Irma.”
It was about a former patient of Freud’s that he felt he wasn’t able to completely
heal because she refused his treatment. “I at once took her to one side, as though
to answer her letter and to reproach her for not having accepted my 'solution' yet.”
This dream sparked Freud’s theory that our wishes that aren’t fulfilled while we’re
awake are expressed in our dreams. Because some of those wishes might be kinda embarrassing,
Freud thought our minds deliberately confused the dreams to hide their true meaning.
Carl Jung expanded Freud’s theories. Jung considered archetypal symbols that often appeared
in dreams, like a wise old sage, or a trickster, to be universal among humans. Jung thought
that dreams were interpretable… if we could crack the code of these universal symbols,
the “language” of dreams. According to Jung, dreams had two functions: they compensated
for things that the dreamer ignored or repressed, and they looked forward to give the dreamer
hints about what might happen in the future. Lots of people still look for meaning in their
dreams, especially to do with the future. In one study, people were more likely to say
having a dream about a plane crash the day before a flight would make them cancel their
trip than if they were given a government warning about a “high risk of a terrorist
attack. But modern science has moved away from Freud
and Jung and viewing dreams as buried messages to decode or interpret. Today researchers
are asking what functions and benefits our brains themselves might get from dreaming.
At first, scientists believed that the strange mish-mash of pictures, stories, and events
we experience while dreaming were just side effects of basic biological processes in our
brains, a sort of neurological noise that we experience as we sleep.
Scientists thought that other parts of the brain tried to make sense of the noise by
threading this random slideshow into a story… often a very weird story. This is called the
Activation-Synthesis Theory of dreaming. But experiments showed that dreams are not
actually random. Some things are more likely to appear in our dreams than others. And scientists
began to wonder: Maybe dreams aren’t random noise… maybe our brains NEED to dream to
be healthy. . What we dream about often has to do with what
we do while we’re awake…especially if we’re learning something new.
In one study, about a third of participants who played Alpine Racer II, an arcade downhill
skiing simulator, had dreams about the game. Consider this: The things that happen to you
every day only happen once. In our short-term memory, these experiences are fragile, and
can easily disappear. Our daily experiences might only make it into our long-term memory
if they’re RE-played several times - you guessed it - in our dreams. Patterns of brain
activity just after dreaming look a lot like when our brains store and retrieve episodic
memories – memories of things that actually happen to us. So, dreams may be a sort of
memory replay of our experiences … with an extra layer of weird on top just to make
it fun I guess. In one study to test this, scientists asked
people to play 7 hours of Tetris across 3 days. Hang on, I have a question… Where
do I go to sign up for these studies? Anyone? I’m busy right now. I’m doing some science!
Woo! Serious brain science here. Anyway. After some serious Tetris time, participants
reported seeing images of tetraminos when falling asleep. They seemed to be replaying
the game to store their new skills in long-term memory.
It’s not all fun and games, though. Dreams can turn into nightmares. There’s no universally
accepted definition of what a “nightmare” is, but they’re commonly considered a “distressing
or terrifying dream,” one that goes so far as to wake you up. About one in 40 dreams
is a nightmare. So why do our brains replay our worst fears and memories?
The Threat-Simulation Theory suggests that dreams let us “practice” dangerous events
and situations. That’s why some people relive traumatic experiences in dreams. The brain
is trying to condition us to survive threatening experiences by “practicing” in a safe
environment -- inside our sleeping brain. Back when life-threatening situations were
a part of our species’ everyday life, simulating threats could’ve helped us survive. But
in the modern world, reliving awful situations in chronic nightmares can be debilitating.
But we also practice social situations in dreaming. That’s the Social Simulation Theory
of dreams. Scientists noticed our dreams are heavy on social situations: a fight with a
close friend, a date with a crush, a clash with a coworker, or not wearing pants to school.
Since being social is so important to our species, practicing these situations would
have been an evolutionary advantage. The strange experience of dreaming can be
used for problem solving too. Novelist John Steinbeck once said: "It is
a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after
the committee of sleep has worked on it.” When college students were given a homework
problem to focus on each night before bed, a quarter dreamed the answer within a week.
Because dreams aren’t limited by...um… logic… or physics … they’re a great
place to problem solve and come up with creative —and sometimes weird—solutions. Which
is especially helpful when solutions to problems need a very different approach compared to
conventional wisdom. And this may be why we owe many pieces of great art to dreams: The
Beatles’ iconic song Yesterday, Salvador Dali’s melting clocks, Mary Shelley’s
novel Frankenstein, and countless others. So, can you dream your way to a Nobel Prize?
Or a Grammy? Well… maybe. Scientists are experimenting with “Dream Incubation”
as a way to prime the brain before sleep to be more creative.
So… because dreaming is so common, and because we spend so much of our lives doing it, it’s
almost certainly useful, for one or many reasons. But why did dreaming evolve to begin with?
Maybe thanks to the… rotation of our planet? That’s right. Scientists think the origin
of dreaming just might have to do with the sheer amount of time that humans – and all
animals – spend in the dark. Our ability to use our peepers and see the
world around us is an extremely important evolutionary advantage. And because it’s
so important, the part of the brain responsible for sight, called the visual cortex, takes
up a big chunk of our brains. But there’s the thing. Our brains can also
be rewired pretty easily. If you were blindfolded, your brain would begin to change within an
hour of not using your sight. The neurons of the visual cortex start being taken over
for other tasks. The lengthy darkness of nighttime, would have
meant that the visual cortex of our human ancestors was at a high risk of being taken
over by other functions while we slept. If we didn’t use it, we could lose it. Dreams,
and their highly visual nature, may have evolved in mammals to keep these vulnerable brain
areas active at night… And keep the brain from rewiring itself in unfortunate ways.
So… which is it? Is it problem-solving, or practicing, or seeing, or is it problem
solving or not about seeing, or a bit about practicing and a pinch of problems solving?
Scientists don’t know if one or many of these ideas will prove to be correct, and
so research continues. Ah, science. Always figuring stuff out. But never quite figuring
stuff out all the way. It’s even possible that dreams may have
evolved for one function, but stayed around so long because dreaming ended up helping
us in a bunch of other different ways. Trying to peer into the workings of the sleeping
brain is one of the most challenging problems in psychology and neuroscience, but we’re
building a fuller and fuller picture of the science of dreaming, one dream …at a time.
You wouldn’t believe the dream I just had.
