Dream Theory

Since ancient times, human beings have been searching for a theory that would explain the meaning of dreams.

People have always wanted to know what happens every night when we seem to visit a world that is very different from the world in which we spend our waking lives.

In many non-western cultures, dream sharing, in which members of a group try to interpret each others’ dreams, is a part of life.

The concept of the Dreamtime, when the world was created, is an important aspect of Australian aboriginal tradition.

In the ancient western world, dream theory was centered around the idea that dreams were were created by gods or other supernatural beings, and could be used to predict the future.

Some ancient Greeks, such as Plato and Hippocrates, however, believed that  it was the dreamer, not the gods, who created the dream, and that a dream could be used to learn more about the mental or the physical state of the dreamer.

At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, Sigmund Freud began developing theories about the existence and the nature of the unconscious. He said that dreams can provide information about the unconscious.  Freud believed that dreams express wishes that are repressed by the conscious mind and held within the unconscious.

Freud’s ideas about the unconscious had a strong influence on the dream theories of Carl Jung.

In modern times, as research in neurology and neuroscience has become more and more advanced, dream theories have become focused on the physical causes of dreaming.

Technology that allows people’s brain waves to be measured led to the discovery of the different sleep stages, including REM sleep, in the 1950s. Dream researches were then able to study the relationship between dreams and REM sleep.

Understanding the different sleep stages has helped scientists to gain a better understanding of sleep disorders such as sleep apnea and narcolepsy.

In the 1970s, J. Allan Hobson and Robert W. McCarley developed the Activation Synthesis Theory of Dreams, which says that dreams are just the brain’s way of making sense of random stimuli from the brain stem. Several decades later, Hobson developed the theory that REM sleep is a form of protoconsciousness, which leads the way toward the development of consciousness.

Francis Crick and Graeme Mitchison suggested, in the 1980s, that dreams are a way for our brains to discard unnecessary information – that dreaming is a form of “reverse learning”.

The study of neurochemicals and their affect on the brain and behavior has led scientists to consider the role of neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, in dreaming.  At the end of the 20th century, Mark Solms used the knowledge that dreams occur when the dopamine pathway is activated to provide a physical explanation for Freud’s idea that dreams are a means of wish fulfillment.

Cognitive psychologists such as Jie Zhang, who created the Continual Activation Theory of Dreams at the beginning of the 21st century, have suggested that dreams are a method of storing memories.

Evolutionary biology has also played a role in modern dream research.  All mammals exhibit REM sleep.  In the first decade of the 21st century, evolutionary biologists such as Antti Revonsuo, Michael Franklin and Michael Zyphur have attempted to explain why human beings evolved to be capable of dreaming.

More recently, W.R. Klemm has used the field of veterinary science to explore how REM sleep evolved and to explain the need for dreaming.

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Dream Theory

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