• Question: How and why do we have dreams?

    Asked by Ola to Sam, Rose, Maggi, Kirsty, Ben on 15 Jun 2017.
    • Photo: Kirsty Miller

      Kirsty Miller answered on 15 Jun 2017:

      Hi Ola! 🙂 Good question! Dreams tend to be our brains processing and trying to make sense of what has happened to us during the day. They can also show and concerns, worries or events that our playing on our minds. The main thing is that they help our brains organise and sort out all of the information that we’re bombarded with when we’re awake!

    • Photo: Rose Turner

      Rose Turner answered on 16 Jun 2017:

      Hi Ola! I agree with Kirsty – I definitely feel like problems can get sorted out overnight, as if my brain has done some serious processing when I’ve been sleeping (I think that’s where the phrase ‘sleep on it’ comes from!)

      An old view is that dreams can be ‘wish-fulfilment’ (a Freudian idea) – so you dream about something you wish would happen. I have definitely experienced dreams where I got my exam results and did amazingly well, only to wake up and realise I haven’t had the exam yet! 😉

      There is a general view that dreams are simply caused by random activity in the brain, that we consciously make sense of. Either way, it’s how we interpret them that counts!

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