why we dream

Buckle up, because this is about to blow your mind. Before I get into the why we dream, I need to go over the science behind the mind. I’ll do my best to keep it simple.

Starting with the brain, with all its neurons that make up the whole central nervous system. The neurons fire and create impulses, and that is how we do almost everything that makes up being human. These neurons require energy and all sorts of chemical reactions to do these actions, thus we have this electrical impulse in the brain. This is the same for our senses and making memories. Our brain will categorize memories and tasks in our mind using these impulses and reactions. The brain, therefore, has its own language, devised of these electric currents. The brain is so vast and unexplored that it’s crazy to think this territory is right in between our ears.

So the brain will store this information, including mechanical tasks that we learned in infancy and childhood, however here’s the hitch. As the brain doesn’t need to store certain information anymore, the nervous system, or the neural pathways that were storing it, folds up. They fold up so that they can become new pathways for new things that the human may learn. As a child, this is happening daily as your world is expanding. As an adult, it happens less frequently unless of course, you are out expanding your mind. This doesn’t mean that you can’t learn and relearn things, it just means it’s a little more difficult as an adult.

How does this relate to dreaming? Very good question. You see, we need to talk about our senses, good pun right? When one of our senses is not accessible or destroyed our other senses become heightened. This is actually the brain allowing the neural pathways for that sense to be taken over by the other senses' neural pathways. For instance, when someone is blind, they actually don’t have any pathways for vision and that area of the brain allocated for vision is reclaimed for touch and smell. Same thing for if someone goes blind, those once vision-related neural pathways start getting reclaimed for the other senses. This process happens quite quickly, which brings us to sleep.

Side note: This is also something that is used to describe the phenomenon of phantom limb pain. There is a sort of cognitive dissonance, as in, your brain still has neural pathways that say you have that limb. Let’s say it’s your right leg that was amputated, your brain still has all the electrical energy in those pathways. So, even though you know and can see that you don’t have the right leg, your brain is still trying to send it signals. Therefore, your brain’s cognitive dissonance leads you to think that your leg is in pain. Brain, you crazy organ.

The big reveal: when you dream it could be your vision's last-ditch effort to make sure those neural pathways don’t get overtaken by the other senses! Your vision is basically nudging at the other senses and keeping its neural pathways electric and in use, saying “hey I’m still here even though the human meat suit is sleeping.” Brain, thank you.

Now, this was a rudimentary way to bring this information to the masses. There is so much more to the science and understanding of the brain. If you found this interesting, there is more where that came from. In the context of interest, now is a brilliant time to google more about the brain and maybe understand more about the organ that controls the way you interact with the world. Thanks for coming to my page. Until next time.