You close your eyes at night and go to sleep and boom, you’re emerged into a completely different world. Dreams are magical things that we are taken into every night when we close our eyes and it’s something completely surreal. Sometimes they send you into things we wish would happen, other times it takes us back in the past and lets us get a second shot at something, and sometimes they just seem completely pointless and meaningless. But what causes dreams? Why do we see these things every night that we end up only vaguely remembering in the morning or just not remembering at all? That’s the question that I hoped to figure out.

It seems that people have been trying to figure out the cause of dreams for as long as humans have been around, but for some reason no one has still come up with a concrete answer. There are really only theories to explain these indescribably detailed images we see every night. At the beginning, answers came mostly from spiritual explanations, but then that changed when Aristotle and Plato came up with a theory of their own that has been expanded on multiple times by many psychoanalysts. Their theory of why dreams happen is that they essentially believe that dreams are a way to act out unconscious desires in a setting that isn’t real because it wouldn’t be safe and/or acceptable to in the natural world. Nowadays, some researchers believe that there is no real purpose to dreaming while other believe that we need to dream in order to maintain a mental, emotion, and physical well-being. A director of the Sleep Disorders Center at Newton Wellesley Hospital in Boston Mass., suggests that “…a possible (though certainly not proven) function of a dream to be weaving new material into the memory system in a way that both reduces emotional arousal and is adaptive in helping us cope with further trauma or stressful events.”

Although there are way too many theories of why we dream to even mention on, I was able to locate a few of the big ones that have been accepted and adapted over time. For example, there is the theory of Sigmund Freud who suggested that dreams were a representation of unconscious desires, thoughts and motivations. This theory is very similar to the theory of Aristotle and Plato in the fact that he believes dreams are things that we wish we could do in the real world but only act out in dreams because that is the only place where it is acceptable and not detrimental. Not only this, but he believed that people are driven by aggressive and sexual instincts more than anything that we then repress from our conscious awareness. Freud suggests that we do not consciously express these feelings therefore they find their way into our “awareness” through our dreams. Finally, he expressed two different components of dreams: the manifest and latent content. Manifest content refers to the make-up of the actual images, thoughts, and content in a dream, and latent content is the hidden meanings within the dream.

A very well-known model of dreaming was first proposed by J. Allan Hobson and Robert McClarley in 1977. This theory proposed that the circuits in the brain become activated when a person goes into REM (rapid eye movement) sleep which then causes areas in the brain that effect emotions, sensations and memories to become active. The brain from that point is said to synthesize and interpret the activity in the brain and find meaning in the signals which results in dreams. Overall, the idea of this model is that dreams come from an interpretation of signals generated by the brain.

So while there are a million reasons as to why we dream it’s hard to find a clear and concise answer. Whether it be that our brain is trying to get out our inner desires or that our brain is sending signals from our emotions, something has to trigger the images that enter our mind and leave them just as quickly in the morning.

http://psychology.about.com/od/statesofconsciousness/p/dream-theories.htm