Jonah Lehrer of the New York Times explains our dreams:
… are layered with significance and substance. The narratives that seem so incomprehensible — why was I running through the airport in my underwear? — are actually careful distillations of experience, a regurgitation of all the new ideas and insights we encounter during the day.
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While we’re fast asleep, the mind is sifting through the helter-skelter of the day, trying to figure out what we need to remember and what we can afford to forget.
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the strangeness of our nighttime narratives is actually an essential feature, as our memories are remixed and reshuffled, a mash-up tape made by the mind.
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In recent years, scientists have discovered that R.E.M. sleep isn’t just essential for the formation of long-term memories: it might also be an essential component of creativity.
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While Freud would certainly celebrate this research — as he predicted, dreams have “a psychological structure … which may be assigned to a specific place in the psychic activities of the waking state” — it’s worth pointing out that the stories we invent while sleeping are much more practical than he imagined. For the most part, they don’t reflect the unleashed id, full of unfulfilled sexual desires. Instead, we dream about what we think about: the mazes and mysteries of everyday life.