A friend sent me this article from Psychology Today about dreams and their function. This is obviously just one of many theories about dreams, but I found the evolutionary context of this theory interesting. So much seems to make sense when put into the context of evolutionary pressures.

Dreams may do the same thing. A dream researcher at the University of Turku, in Finland, Revonsuo believes that dreams are a sort of nighttime theater in which our brains screen realistic scenarios. This virtual reality simulates emergency situations and provides an arena for safe training. As Revonsuo puts it, “The primary function of negative dreams is rehearsal for similar real events, so that threat recognition and avoidance happens faster and more automatically in comparable real situations.”
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When Revonsuo began studying dreams, he asked his students to start keeping logs of their own nocturnal escapades. He noticed something striking. The dreams were filled with dangerous events, negative emotions, monsters, chases, escapes, fights, and near-death experiences. The dream world was a hellscape of danger, teeming with threatening events far more sinister than in waking life.
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In the ancestral environment, Revonsuo reasoned, our dreams served to protect us, teaching us how to respond when a wild animal was chasing us or when we got lost in the forest.

This fits somewhat with the theory that dreams occur while the brain is sorting through short-term memory to determine what to keep in long-term memory. Anyway, read the article if you get a chance. I find the mechanisms of the brain extremely interesting, though I doubt we’ll ever have a full understanding of the brain. Having the human brain try to understand the human brain is obviously a circular maze.

And this is as good a time as ever for me to tell you to go to sleep. You probably need more and it’s important for your health.


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