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Why Do We Dream?

By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Science

One theory that’s gaining a lot of steam suggests it has to do with honing our survival instinct by stimulating potential threat scenarios in our subconsciousness.

From Psychology Today:

The dreaming brain [...] scans emotional memories. When it detects a memory trace with a strong negative emotion, it constructs a nightmare around that theme. The more traumatic the event, the more intense the nightmare. The brain’s system for detecting threats is sensitive and flexible: Anything the brain tags with a strong negative charge gets thrown into the threat bin and dredged up at night.

The argument goes that if we confront negative situations while we’re asleep, we’ll be better able to respond to them in our waking life, and in some cases that could ultimately prove to save our life if it’s put in peril.

Fascinating article. Definitely take a look.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 and is filed under Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Why Do We Dream?”

Link Banana » The Stuff of Dreams Says:
January 6th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
[...] (via donklephant) [...]

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