Question: why do we dream?

Stuart Archer answered on 20 Jun 2013:

Another good question, keep them coming!

Dreams occur during one of the two types of sleep called ‘rapid eye movement’, which as the name suggests involves a lot of eye movement and involves a lot of brain activity.

The question of why we dream is still very much open to debate and there are a lot of different theories, both scientific and spiritual as to why we actually dream. Most experts in the area tend to agree that dreaming has to do with sorting out and storing facts, emotions and experiences that you’ve been exposed to during the day. The actual processes that are going on while this happens are not really understood yet. What’s really interesting is that if you prevent someone from dreaming, either by waking them up as soon as REM sleep begins, or through drugs, they very quickly start to show personality changes and memory problems, so dreaming is clearly very important!