Curious About Your Dreams? Experts Decode 11 Of The Most Common Ones

Throughout the night, the brain goes through four different sleep stages, each with its own function. In rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, we have our most vivid dreams. According to neuroscientist and author of The Oracle of the Night: The History and Science of Dreams, Sidarta Ribeiro Ph.D., this process evolved over millions of years due to selective pressures facing mammals.

“If we look at our own brains,” he says, “we see during sleep the brain is doing a lot of memory triage.” The brain forgets some things, remembers others for the long term, and even mixes memories to get new ideas. “So it’s a source of new ideas and creativity,” he adds.

And this, of course, happens at a totally unconscious, cell-based, memory processing level, Ribeiro notes. On top of the neurological processes at play, you have the dream level that’s symbolic and related to your life, he says.

Dreams are often also highly emotionally charged, and for good reason. As Ellis notes, we tend to recall things better when we have strong emotions associated with them.

“In dreaming, we appear to pull out those emotionally charged elements from the previous day or so, and weave them onto our existing memories, but also into a new kind of image or story,” she says. Doing this seems to reduce that emotional charge, “almost as if the emotion has done its job and can now fade,” she adds.