Matthew Wilson and Kenway Louie of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have evidence that the brains of sleeping rats are functioning in a way that irresistibly suggests dreaming. Much of the dreaming that you do at night is associated with the activities that you engaged in that day. The same seems to be the case in rats. Thus if a rat ran a complex maze during the day he might be expected to dream about it at night. While a rat was awake and learning the maze, electrical recordings were taken from its hippocampus (an area of the brain associated with memory formation and storage). Researchers found that some of these electrical patterns were quite specific and identifiable depending upon what the rat was doing. Later, when the rats were asleep and their brain waves indicated that they had entered the stage where humans normally dream, these same patterns of brain waves appeared. In fact the patterns were so clear and specific that the researchers were able to tell where in the maze the rat would be if it were awake, and whether it would be moving or standing still. Wilson cautiously described the results, saying, "The animal is certainly recalling memories of those events as they occurred during the awake state, and it is doing so during dream sleep and that's just what people do when they dream."
Are you all defining dreaming as a purely mental event? — Monitor
Is there another way to define it? — Baden
could one become a gymnast, or martial artist by studying technique while awake, but only physically practicing it while asleep? — Wosret
Do dreams help reinforce what we believe about ourselves? We can certainly project meaning on our dreams but not much and not reliably. Random white noise visuals that on occasion yield something we can use? — Monitor
Incidentally I've actually read the interpretation of dreams. It was a funny one. Spoiler alert, everything is really dicks. He doesn't go into the formation or characteristics of dreams themselves, but rather only interprets their contents, as dicks. — Wosret
many [critics] are guilty of another mistake, to which they adhere just as stubbornly. They look for the essence of the dream in this latent content, and thereby overlook the distinction between latent dream-thoughts and the dream-work. The dream is fundamentally nothing more than a special form of our thinking, which is made possible by the conditions of the sleeping state. It is the dream-work which produces this form, and it alone is the essence of dreaming -- the only explanation of its singularity. I say this in order to correct the reader's judgment of the notorious `prospective tendency' of dreams. That the dream should concern itself with efforts to perform the tasks with which our psychic life is confronted is no more remarkable than that our conscious waking life should so concern itself, and I will only add that this work may be done also in the preconscious, a fact already familiar to us.
-The Interpretation of Dreams (bold mine)
1) Dreams as changing in form according to sociocultural/historical context.
2) Dreams as a kind of virtual gym. — Baden
While the scientific research on dreams mainly supporting the hypothesis that dreams are 'running through the day's activities' — Shevek
While obviously dream-contents derive from experience, I almost never dream about 'the day's events', — Shevek
it leaves the analysis of dreams wanting — Shevek
You misunderstand what I mean by form, and characteristics. I don't recall him talking about sensory modalities, chronology, spacial, or physical characteristics. Talking about the form as in what particular symbols, and the forms they take in essence stand for, is talking about the content, and not the form in the sense that I mean in. — Wosret
You definitely read too much into my quip about dreams all being about dicks, although I do think that dreams are not nearly as libidinally charged as Freud thought that they were, that his Platonic symbolic essentialism was malarkey, and there is no such thing as the unconscious, preconscious, or any of that. — Wosret
"Running through the day's activities" is poor phrasing. It makes it sound like some kind of playback mechanism. So, if that's the way the researchers you've read are putting it, they're putting it badly. I see it more as a processing of excess/latent/repressed emotional energy. The result doesn't have to look like the day's events at all. But it's often easy - for me at least - to link the nature of my dreams to events of emotional salience occurring during the day. There's a kind of symbolic grammar to dreams that's satisfying to untangle. — Baden
Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.