You had a strange dream last night that green hair started growing on your head. Write a diary entry describing your experience and the other things that happened in your dreams.
Answers
Dreams are so strange and carry so much significance to us that we often feel the need to tell people about them, sometimes at tedious length. But if you understand what goes on inside the brain as dreams take their course, things start to make a lot more sense – and should make for more interesting dinner conversation than unburdening yourself about your mind’s nocturnal adventures. Your friends will thank you for it. Dreams are much more important than you might think – and we seem to be having less of them. We explore this troubling issue in depth here, but for now, let’s address some common questions about the night-time hallucinations we call dreams.
1. Why are dreams so weird
There’s a good reason why dreams are so skittish and peculiar. Memories of life events – so-called episodic memories – are stored in a part of the brain called the hippocampus, and in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep signals coming out of the hippocampus are shut off. That means we can’t access specific memories of things that happened in the past while we dream.
Read more: Why dreaming is vital: Unlocking the power of REM sleep
But we can still access general memories about people and places, which form the backbone of our dreams. At the same time, activity in brain regions involved in emotional processes are cranked up, forming an overly emotional narrative that stitches these memories together. Bear with me while I use one of my recent dreams as an example. I dreamed that a flood had surrounded the house I grew up in; I needed to try and fly out of the window to escape but I’d forgotten how to fly. The overwhelming feeling was emotion – fear and anxiety about the rising water levels and my inability to fly.
Another part of the brain, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which controls our powers of both logical reasoning and decision making, is also shut down. I don’t stop to question why the flood water is rising so fast, nor why I’m back in my childhood home, nor even why flying to safety is an option.
This difference in brain activity compared to when we are awake helps explain why we feel like we have such scant control over our dreams – we are observers, along for the ride – and why when weird things happen we don’t raise an eyebrow until we wake up. In my dreams of water I often end up breathing underwater, as if it were completely natural.