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Throughout human history, people have wondered whether dreams have a purpose. Modern scientists are also fascinated by this question.
For a long time, dream science has oscillated between fringe research and mainstream. But creative research designs and new technology are transforming it into an exciting and serious research niche.
Here are four recent breakthroughs that could pave the way to a better understanding of dreams.
Lucid dreaming
In 2021, an international study showed that two-way communication between a lucid dreamer and a researcher in the lab was possible. In 2024, another study built on this by training lucid dreamers to drive a virtual car from their dreams.
The 12 dreamers in the experiment made slight muscle twitches, which sent a signal to a computer to make the virtual vehicle move forward or turn. Signals were sent back to the dreamer to tell them about obstacles they should try to avoid. Some were able to move the car well, but others, no matter how hard they tried, could not.
While intriguing, it's still unknown how such technology might be used in everyday life. And the small sample size of this study, due in part to the rarity of skilled lucid dreamers, limits the conclusions we can draw from it. But the findings suggest that it may be possible (at least with practice) for some people to make decisions from a dream and communicate them to the outside world.
Why do we dream?
Mark Blagrove, a sleep and dream researcher at Swansea University, believes dreams are meant for social sharing and have evolved in humans to increase emotional intelligence and empathy.
Since 2016, Blagrove has been working with artist Julia Lockheart in a dream discussion and illustration group. An audience member is invited to share a recent dream. Blagrove leads the discussion, while Lockheart sketches an interpretation of the dream from the pages of Sigmund Freud's book The Interpretation of Dreams.
His 2019 research paper showed that discussing a dream in this way can lead to greater empathy between the dream sharer and listeners. Blagrove argues that this could have been valuable for the survival of ancestors in forming meaningful connections with others.
Other theories about why we dream have also emerged in recent years, and some were discussed during a panel in June 2024 at the annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD). For example, the embodied cognition theory of dreaming, which proposes that dreams prepare us for the cognitive actions of ordinary waking life.
It has not yet been tested, but there is growing scientific interest in the adaptive purpose of dreams.
Insights from the Long Dream series
Michael Schredl of the University of Mannheim in Germany is perhaps the most prolific dream researcher working today, having published hundreds of articles and books since his career began in the 1990s. He has kept a dream diary since the early 1980s. At the IASD conference, he gave a keynote address in which he analyzed more than 12,000 of his dreams.
Overall, the patterns appear to support the continuity hypothesis of dreams: our dreams are influenced by events and concerns that occur in our waking lives.
Schredl believes he is one of the first to look at weather patterns in dreams. He noticed a steady decrease over the years of ice, snow and hail in his dreams. Interestingly, this was similar to the documented decrease in "ice days" (days when the temperature is below 0°C for 24 hours) in Germany, since he keeps a dream diary. He joked that the effects of global warming may also be present in dreams, but that this could also be influenced by waking worries about such things.
Another interesting pattern was references to money in dreams. When the Deutsche Mark was the prevailing currency, it appeared in his dreams occasionally over the years, but when the German currency changed to the Euro in 2002, the number of references to the Deutsche Mark was replaced by references to the Euro.
Long dream series like this are rare, but they can show us how interwoven dream content is with our waking lives.
Remembering dreams
Some people are better at remembering their dreams than others, remembering them more often and in greater detail. Researchers have long tried to figure out the reasons and mechanisms for this difference. They have looked at factors such as personality and attitudes toward dreams, general memory ability, and the small physiological signals that occur during certain sleep stages. So far, one of the most consistent predictors of more frequent dream recall has been a positive attitude toward dreams; if you think dreams are important, you are likely to be more motivated to try to remember them more often.
In 2022, French researcher Salomé Blain and her colleagues investigated the role of attention in dream recall, a cognitive skill closely related to memory.
Although participants' ability to recall dreams did not appear to be linked to working memory, which temporarily stores information for immediate use, participants with low dream recall ability were better at ignoring distracting stimuli, and vice versa.
They compared people who could recall dreams at low and high frequencies based on their ability to distinguish whether two melodies (both played in the same ear) were different while a distracting melody was played in the other ear.
This suggests that people who are good at remembering dreams may be worse at filtering out irrelevant and distracting information, and therefore may pay more attention to what is going on in their minds while they sleep.
Dream recall, however, is a skill that can be learned. For example, keeping a dream journal can significantly improve dream recall, especially for people who already have relatively low dream recall.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Anthony Bloxham previously received research funding from the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD) to support PhD research in 2018-19.