I have been fascinated by dreams ever since I read Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams when I was 13. Of course, in Freud’s time, psychiatrists had to rely on case histories and abstract discussions. Today, dreams, sleep, and memory are the subject of scientific research and evidence-based inquiry. These studies tend to relegate dreams to be byproducts of neurological processes underlying sleep or relate dreams to daily events. Most academics reject dreams as what I would call messengers from the unconscious and generally dismiss the very existence of the unconscious.

Neuroscientists who have focused on studying the physiological origin and function of dreams all agree that dreaming is strongly linked to rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. REM sleep plays a crucial role in the consolidation of emotional memories and the regulation of emotions. Memory consolidation during sleep involves integrating new information into existing information, allowing the essence of experiences to be distilled.

While dream elements often seem to stem from memories of waking experiences, one study of 364 dream elements from 299 dream reports identified only 1 to 2 percent of dream elements reflected aspects of the waking experience.

Three main theories dominate the field of the neuroscientific view:

The activation-synthesis model proposed by Allan Hobson, professor of psychiatry at Harvard, hypothesized that during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, neural activity in the pons (brainstem) activates the brain, particularly the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) and visual cortex, to generate information.

Hobson claimed that the dream narrative is haphazard and based on a design error and functional imbalance. In the REM state, without external........

© Psychology Today