Yet what if the primary purpose of dreaming isn’t psychological at all?
In a paper published last month in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Dr. J. Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist and longtime sleep researcher at Harvard, argues that the main function of rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM, when most dreaming occurs, is physiological. The brain is warming its circuits, anticipating the sights and sounds and emotions of waking.”
[Surely dreaming has some sort of physiological purpose. But how does that undercut the power of interpretation? Dreams aren't designed with analysis in mind – that's precisely what makes them so interesting. In a sense, dreams are the purest form of free-association. When we're not awake to censor ourselves, our expressions run rampant. Dreams can be confusing, scary, mystifying and weird, but they cannot be someone else's. They may feel foreign – they often do – and it's always useful to consider why that's so. After all, one thing's for certain: we are their authors, intentionally or not. -Ed.]
(photo: detail from The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli)
Douglas Faneuil is the founder of Living Proof Productions, a not-for-profit devoted to suicide prevention based in New York City. He also designs database solutions for companies throughout the Northeast.