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Have you ever wondered why your brain needs to dream?

The ancient Greeks and Romans believed that dreams were equal parts predictions of future events and visitations by the dead. Sigmund Freud considered dreaming an expression of repressed conflicts or desires.

Some scientists have framed dreams as simply a byproduct of sleep—a quirky side effect of evolution. But others have suggested it’s not so simple. Research has shown that dreams may help us effectively process emotion and have a positive impact on our overall wellbeing.

In a recent blog post for the Greater Good Science Center, Dr. Matthew Walker, a professor of neuroscience & psychology at the University of California, Berkeley shares his research on ‘Why Your Brain Needs To Dream’.

Dreaming is like ‘overnight therapy’

He likens dreaming to an overnight therapy session for your brain. The dream state that occurs during ‘REM’ (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep can assist in the healing of emotional exhaustion and trauma that we experience and carry with us throughout the day. During REM sleep, our brains are free from the stress hormone noradrenaline. This helps reduce emotional reactivity and calms the amygdala, the emotional center of your brain, meaning emotional or stressful memories can be reactivated and processed in an anxiety-free environment. 

In Walker’s study, participants were split into two groups and made to watch emotion-inducing content while in a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machine- a medical scan that uses radio waves and strong magnetic fields to take detailed images of tissue, organs and bones inside of the body. Twelve hours later, participants were exposed to the images again—half of them saw them in the same day, the other half were sent home to sleep and then exposed to the images the following day.

The study found that participants who slept had a decreased emotional response to seeing the images again, whereas those who didn’t sleep remained highly reactive. Their emotions were intense and easily triggered. 

Dreams help us with our creativity and problem solving skills

Dreaming can also enhance creativity and problem-solving. In another study, participants were woken from sleep and asked to solve puzzles such as unscrambling anagrams (e.g. OSEOG=GOOSE). Half were woken from dream-laden REM sleep, and the other half were woken from non-REM sleep. Those who were made to solve puzzles after being in dream sleep were able to solve 15-35% more puzzles than their counterparts. The latter half were unable to solve as many puzzles and showed markedly less creativity in their problem-solving. 

These studies and those like it seem to support the idea that dream sleep can offer a multitude of benefits, whether it be for inspiration or providing a safe space to explore our emotions. Recognising the positive impact dreaming can have on our cognitive and mental wellbeing by enhancing our creativity, insight and emotional processing, may prompt us to try and get better quality sleep in future.