What Do Dreams Do?
What is a dream? It’s a complex, non-obvious pattern derived from your experience. But you haven’t actually experienced it. Strange. Revealing complex, hidden patterns makes dreams odd. Dreams associate elements of different experiences to make something new: a pattern you didn’t know was there until you dreamt it. Patterns are discernible forms in the way something happens or is done. Some patterns are easy to spot, being certain and obvious: night follows day. Patterns in human/animal experiences are less obvious because, first, the patterned elements appear at different times or places and, second, the pattern exhibits tendencies not certainties. Spotting such patterns depends on non-obvious associations. If prompted with ‘sea’, while awake, your logical brain makes obvious associations, ‘beach’ or ‘boat’, with a seaside pattern i.e. beach-boat-seaside. But after awakening from dreaming, when your brain is still tuned to non-obvious associations, ‘sick’ may come to mind. A less obvious element of sea experiences. You tend to seasickness when it’s rough. But you also get sick if you eat shellfish, have a migraine, or travel in cars—but only if you read. Sea–rough–car–read–shellfish–migraine. Visualizing these non-obvious associations between elements of different experiences becomes dream-like. Dreaming brains evolved to identify non-obvious associations. Across evolutionary time, you didn’t want to get sick. Survival depended on being well enough to anticipate the non-obvious patterns of predators and human competitors, while securing access to food and water. Making associations drives many, if not all, brain functions. Dream associations support memory, emotional stability, creativity, unconscious decision-making, and prediction, while also contributing to mental illness. This book explains how.