essay topics about dreams

Essays About Dreams In Life: 14 Examples And Topic Ideas

Dreams in life are necessary; if you are writing essays about dreams in life, you can read these essay examples and topic ideas to get started.

Everyone has a dream – a big one or even a small one. Even the most successful people had dreams before becoming who they are today. Having a dream is like having a purpose in life; you will start working hard to reach your dream and never lose interest in life.

Without hard work, you can never turn a dream into a reality; it will only remain a desire. Level up your essay writing skills by reading our essays about dreams in life examples and prompts and start writing an inspiring essay today!

Writing About Dreams: A Guide

Essays about dreams in life: example essays, 1. chase your dreams: the best advice i ever got by michelle colon-johnson, 2. my dream, my future by deborah massey, 3. the pursuit of dreams by christine nishiyama, 4. my dreams and ambitions by kathy benson, 5. turning big dreams into reality by shyam gokarn, 6. my hopes and dreams by celia robinson, 7. always pursue your dreams – no matter what happens by steve bloom, 8. why do we dream by james roland, 9. bad dreams by eli goldstone, 10. why your brain needs to dream by matthew walker, 11. dreams by hedy marks, 12. do dreams really mean anything by david b. feldman, 13. how to control your dreams by serena alagappan, 14. the sunday essay: my dreams on antidepressants by ashleigh young, essays about dreams in life essay topics, 1. what is a dream, 2. what are your dreams in life, 3. why are dreams important in life, 4. what are the reasons for a person to dream big, 5. what do you think about dreams in life vs. short-term sacrifice, 6. what is the purpose of dreaming, 7. why are dreams so strange and vivid, 8. why do dreams feel so real, 9. why are dreams so hard to remember, 10. do dreams mean anything, what is a dream short essay, how can i write my dream in life.

Writing about dreams is an excellent topic for essays, brainstorming new topic ideas for fiction stories, or just as a creative outlet. We all have dreams, whether in our sleep, during the day, or even while walking on a sunny day. Some of the best ways to begin writing about a topic are by reading examples and using a helpful prompt to get started. Check out our guide to writing about dreams and begin mastering the art of writing today!

“Everyone has the ability to dream, but not everyone has the willingness to truly chase their dreams. When people aren’t living their dreams they often have limited belief systems. They believe that their current circumstances and/or surroundings are keeping them from achieving the things they want to do in life.”

In her essay, author Michelle Colon-Johnson encourages her readers to develop a mindset that will let them chase their dreams. So, you have to visualize your dream, manifest it, and start your journey towards it! Check out these essays about dreams and sleep .

“At the time when I have my job and something to make them feel so proud of me, I would like to give them the best life. I would like to make them feel comfortable and see sweet smiles on their faces. This is really the one I like to achieve in my life; mountains of words can’t explain how much I love and appreciate them.”

Author Deborah Massey’s essay talks about her dreams and everything she wanted to achieve and accomplish in her life. She also tells us that we must live our values, pursue our dreams, and follow our passions for the best future.

“Fast-forward 5+ years, and my first published book is coming out this May with Scholastic. And now, let me tell you the truth: I don’t feel any different. I’m extremely grateful for the opportunity, proud of the work I’ve done, and excited for the book’s release. But on a fundamental level, I feel the same.”

In her essay, author Christine Nishiyama shares what she felt when she first achieved one of her goals in life. She says that with this mindset, you will never feel the satisfaction of achieving your goal or the fulfillment of reaching your dream. Instead, she believes that what fulfills people is the pursuit of their dreams in life.

“My dream is to become a good plastic surgeon and day after day it has transformed into an ambition which I want to move towards. I do not want to be famous, but just good enough to have my own clinic and work for a very successful hospital. Many people think that becoming a doctor is difficult, and I know that takes many years of preparation, but anyone can achieve it if they have determination.”

Author Kathy Benson’s essay narrates her life – all the things and struggles she has been through in pursuing her dreams in life. Yet, no matter how hard the situation gets, she always convinces herself not to give up, hoping her dreams will come true one day. She believes that with determination and commitment, anyone can achieve their dreams and goals in life. 

“I have always been a big dreamer and involved in acting upon it. Though, many times I failed, I continued to dream big and act. As long as I recollect, I always had such wild visions and fantasies of thinking, planning, and acting to achieve great things in life. But, as anyone can observe, there are many people, who think and work in that aspect.”

In his essay, author Shyam Gokarn explains why having a big dream is very important in a person’s life. However, he believes that the problem with some people is that they never hold tight to their dreams, even if they can turn them into reality. As a result, they tend to easily give up on their dreams and even stop trying instead of persevering through the pain and anguish of another failure.

“When I was younger, I’ve always had a fairytale-like dream about my future. To marry my prince, have a Fairy Godmother, be a princess… But now, all of that has changed. I’ve realized how hard life is now; that life cannot be like a fairy tale. What you want can’t happen just like that.”

Celia Robinson’s essay talks about her dream since she was a child. Unfortunately, as we grow old, there’s no “Fairy Godmother” that would help us when things get tough. Everyone wants to succeed in the future, but we have to work hard to achieve our dreams and goals.

“Take writing for example. I’ve wanted to be a professional writer since I was a little boy, but I was too scared that I wouldn’t be any good at it. But several years ago I started pursuing this dream despite knowing how difficult it might be. I fully realize I may not make it, but I’m completely fine with that. At least I tried which is more than most people can say.”

In his essay, author Steve Bloom encourages his readers always to pursue their dreams no matter what happens. He asks, “Would you rather pursue them and fail or never try?”. He believes that it’s always better to try and fail than look back and wonder what might have been. Stop thinking that failure or success is the only end goal for pursuing your dreams. Instead, think of it as a long journey where all the experiences you get along the way are just as important as reaching the end goal.

“Dreams are hallucinations that occur during certain stages of sleep. They’re strongest during REM sleep, or the rapid eye movement stage, when you may be less likely to recall your dream. Much is known about the role of sleep in regulating our metabolism, blood pressure, brain function, and other aspects of health. But it’s been harder for researchers to explain the role of dreams. When you’re awake, your thoughts have a certain logic to them. When you sleep, your brain is still active, but your thoughts or dreams often make little or no sense.”

Author James Roland’s essay explains the purpose of having dreams and the factors that can influence our dreams. He also mentioned some of the reasons that cause nightmares. Debra Sullivan, a nurse educator, medically reviews his essay. Sullivan’s expertise includes cardiology, psoriasis/dermatology, pediatrics, and alternative medicine. For more, you can also see these articles about sleep .

“The first time I experienced sleep paralysis and recognised it for what it was I was a student. I had been taking MDMA and listening to Django Reinhardt. My memories of that time are mainly of taking drugs and listening to Django Reinhardt. When I woke up I was in my paralysed body. I was there, inside it. I was inside my leaden wrists, my ribcage, the thick dead roots of my hair, the bandages of skin. This time the hallucinations were auditory. I could hear someone being beaten outside my door. They were screaming for help. And I could do nothing but lie there, locked inside my body . . . whatever bit of me is not my body. That is the bit that exists, by itself, at night.”

In her essay, Author Eli Goldstone talks about her suffering from bad dreams ever since childhood. She also talks about what she feels every time she has sleep paralysis – a feeling of being conscious but unable to move.

“We often hear stories of people who’ve learned from their dreams or been inspired by them. Think of Paul McCartney’s story of how his hit song “Yesterday” came to him in a dream or of Mendeleev’s dream-inspired construction of the periodic table of elements. But, while many of us may feel that our dreams have special meaning or a useful purpose, science has been more skeptical of that claim. Instead of being harbingers of creativity or some kind of message from our unconscious, some scientists have considered dreaming to being an unintended consequence of sleep—a byproduct of evolution without benefit.”

Author Matthew Walker, a professor of psychology and neuroscience, shares some interesting facts about dreams in his essay. According to research, dreaming is more than just a byproduct of sleep; it also serves essential functions in our well-being. 

“Dreams are basically stories and images that our mind creates while we sleep. They can be vivid. They can make you feel happy, sad, or scared. And they may seem confusing or perfectly rational. Dreams can happen at any time during sleep. But you have your most vivid dreams during a phase called REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, when your brain is most active. Some experts say we dream at least four to six times a night.”

In his essay, Author Hedy Marks discusses everything we need to know about dreams in detail – from defining a dream to tips that may help us remember our dreams. Hedy Marks is an Assistant Managing Editor at WebMD , and Carol DerSarkissian, a board-certified emergency physician, medically reviews his essay.

“Regardless of whether dreams foretell the future, allow us to commune with the divine, or simply provide a better understanding of ourselves, the process of analyzing them has always been highly symbolic. To understand the meaning of dreams, we must interpret them as if they were written in a secret code. A quick search of an online dream dictionary will tell you that haunted houses symbolize “unfinished emotional business,” dimly lit lamps mean you’re “feeling overwhelmed by emotional issues,” a feast indicates “a lack of balance in your life,” and garages symbolize a feeling of “lacking direction or guidance in achieving your goals.” 

Author David B. Feldman, an author, speaker, and professor of counseling psychology, believes that dreams may not mean anything, but they tell us something about our emotions. In other words, if you’ve been suffering from a series of bad dreams, it could be worth checking in with yourself to see how you’ve been feeling and perhaps consider whether there’s anything you can do to improve your mood.

“Ever wish you could ice skate across a winter sky, catching crumbs of gingerbread, like flakes of snow, on your tongue? How about conquering a monster in a nightmare, bouncing between mountain peaks, walking through walls, or reading minds? Have you ever longed to hold the hand of someone you loved and lost? If you want to fulfill your fantasies, or even face your fears, you might want to try taking some control of your dreams (try being the operative). People practiced in lucid dreaming—the phenomenon of being aware that you are dreaming while you are asleep—claim that the experience allows adventure, self-discovery, and euphoric joy.”

In her essay, Author Serena Alagappan talks about lucid dreams – a type of dream where a person becomes conscious during a dream. She also talked about ways to control our dreams, such as keeping a journal, reciting mantras before bed, and believing we can. However, not everyone will be able to control their dreams because the levels of lucidity and control differ significantly between individuals.

“There was a period of six months when I tried to go off my medication – a slowly unfolding disaster – and I’d thought my dreams might settle down. Instead, they grew more deranged. Even now I think of the dream in which I was using a cigarette lighter to melt my own father, who had assumed the form of a large candle. I’ve since learned that, apart from more research being needed, this was probably a case of “REM rebound”. When you stop taking the medication, you’ll likely get a lot more REM sleep than you were getting before. In simple terms, your brain goes on a dreaming frenzy, amping up the detail.”

Author Ashleigh Young’s essay informs us how some medications, such as antidepressants, affect our dreams based on her own life experience. She said, “I’ve tried not to dwell too much on my dreams. Yes, they are vivid and sometimes truly gruesome, full of chaotic, unfathomable violence, but weird nights seemed a reasonable price to pay for the bearable days that SSRIs have helped me to have.” 

In simple terms, a dream is a cherished aspiration, ambition, or ideal; is it the same as your goal in life? In your essay, explore this topic and state your opinion about what the word “dream” means to you.

This is an excellent topic for your statement or “about me” essay. Where do you see yourself in the next ten years? Do you have a career plan? If you still haven’t thought about it, maybe it’s time to start thinking about your future.

Having dreams is very important in a person’s life; it motivates, inspires, and helps you achieve any goal that you have in mind. Without dreams, we would feel lost – having no purpose in life. Therefore, in your essay, you should be able to explain to your readers how important it is to have a dream or ambition in life. 

Dreaming big sounds great; however, it’s easier said than done. First, you’ve got to have reasons to dream big, which will motivate you to achieve your goals in life. If you’re writing an essay about dreams in life, mention why most people dare to dream big and achieve more in life. Is it about freedom, money, praise from other people, satisfaction, or something else entirely?

For example, you could watch movies, play video games, relax every night, or give up all of them to learn a complex skill – what would you choose, and why? In your essay about dreams in life, answer the question and include other examples about this topic so your readers can relate.

There are many answers to this question – one is that dreams may have an evolutionary function, testing us in scenarios crucial to our survival. Dreams may also reduce the severity of emotional trauma. On the other hand, some researchers say dreams have no purpose or meaning, while some say we need dreams for physical and mental health. Take a closer look at this topic, and include what you find in your essay.

Weird dreams could result from anxiety, stress, or sleep deprivation. So, manage your stress levels, and stick to a sleep routine to stop having weird dreams. If you wake up from a weird dream, you can fall back asleep using deep breaths or any relaxing activity. You can research other causes of weird dreams and ways to stop yourself from having them for your essay about dreams and sleep.

The same areas of the brain that are active when we learn and process information in the actual world are active when we dream, and they replay the information as we sleep. Many things we see, hear, and feel in our everyday lives appear in our dreams. If you want to write an informative essay about dreams and sleep, look into more details about this topic.

Tip: When editing for grammar, we also recommend taking the time to improve the readability score of a piece of writing before publishing or submitting it.

People may not remember what happened in their dreams. Studies show that people tend to forget their dreams due to the changing levels of acetylcholine and norepinephrine during sleep. This will be quite an exciting topic for your readers because many people can relate. That being said, research more information about this topic, and discuss it in detail in your essay. 

Although some people believe that dreams don’t mean anything, many psychologists and other experts have theorized about the deeper meaning of dreams. Therefore, your essay about dreams and sleep should delve deeper into this topic. If you’re stuck picking your next essay topic, check out our round-up of essay topics about education .

FAQS on Essays About Dreams in Life

There are many great short essays about dreams; you can write your own too! Some great examples include Do Dreams Really Mean Anything? by David B. Feldman and  Dreams by Hedy Marks.

Writing about your dreams in life is a fantastic creative outlet and can even help you plan your future. Use a prompt to get started, like “What are your dreams in life?” or “What do you aspire to be in ten years?” and begin writing without thinking too much about it. See where the pen takes you and start mapping out your future with this writing exercise.

177 Dream Research Topics & How to Write a Research Paper on Dreams

People have dreams every night. Dreams are different – sweet dreams and nightmares, colored and colorless. However, every psychologist knows that people need to sleep. Why? Well, let us give you the right to answer this question in your research paper on dreams.

A research paper on dreams is a serious research project. That is why you cannot simply write how dreams can be interpreted or describe your dreams in the research paper on dreams. Research papers on dreams require more serious topics and approach.

Below you will find several possible ideas for research papers on dreams.

• 🔎 Dreams Research Topics
• 💤 Dreams Definition
• ✍️ How to Write about Dreams

😴 Easy Research Topics on Dreams

🛌 essay about dreams topics, 😪 topics for a research paper on sleep and dreams, ✏️ importance of sleep essay topics, 👻 nightmare essay topics.

• 📝 My Dreams Essay – Example

✅ Interesting Facts about Dreams

🔎 dreams research topics – 2024.

• The link between our dreams and emotions.
• What is the role of dreaming in creativity development?
• The gender-based patterns in dreaming experience.
• Sigmund Freud and his theory of dreams.
• The key mechanisms that underlie dreaming.
• What knowledge can you gain from your dreams?
• The impact of eating patterns on the quality of dreams.
• How do different cultures perceive and interpret dreams?
• The advantages and disadvantages of dreaming.
• How can people control their dreams?
• The role of dreams in processing emotions.
• How do bizarre and emotionally intense dreams occur?

💤 What Are Dreams?

Psychologists are sure that dreams are the result of what we wish or think about when we are awake. For example, Freud, a famous psychologist, considered that if a man did not have sexual relations for a long time, he would dream about them. If you think about someone, you may also dream about him/her. This is what you may write about in the research paper on dreams if you want to consider this aspect.

Nightmares can also be a very interesting issue to discuss in research papers on dreams. Psychologists relate nightmares to the field of “unconscious”. Very often, people forget about the stressful situations they once had. However, those situations are reflected in their minds and they can appear in dreams. You may also find other points of view on nightmares and discuss them in your research paper on dreams.

✍️ How to Write a Research Paper about Dreams

A research paper about dreams generally includes an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion. First, it is crucial to choose a relevant and exciting topic to write on and decide on the type of research paper (analytical, argumentative, etc.).

Choosing a Topic

Pick a topic that corresponds to your interests and expertise. It will help you stay more motivated throughout the research process. In addition, ensure that your topic is specific, relevant, and follows the assignment instructions.

If you need help choosing a good topic for your paper, try our free research title generator .

Finding Sources

After you have found a perfect topic on dreams, it is time to look for sources for your research. You can look up information in books, similar research papers, or online sources. Communicating with professionals related to dreams , like psychologists or neurologists, is also a good idea since it is an effective method to gain new knowledge or advice.

Writing a Research Paper

The format of your research paper on dreams should consist of the following elements:

• The relation between dreaming and the role of deep-brain structures.
• Dreaming capacity to repeatedly simulate potential threatening events.
• The role of amygdala and hippocampus in the dreaming process.
• The spiritual significance of dreams in different cultures.
• Dream interpretation and its value in self-understanding.
• How does dream recall reflect social relationships?
• The positive impact of dreams on our physical health.
• Dreams and their role in predicting the future.
• The peculiarities of dreams in pregnant women.
• Why does Charcot-Wilbrand syndrome cause the loss of the ability to dream?
• The role of dreaming in developing cognitive capabilities.
• How can dreams reflect the aging process?
• The repetitive character of some dreams and their meaning.
• Why are young people more likely to dream in color?
• The benefits and cautions of lucid dreaming.
• The influence of smartphones on the content of dreams.
• Why do people forget their dreams after waking up?
• The impact of suppressing intrusive thoughts on dream content.
• What is the role of dreams in developing long-term memory?
• The key causes and types of dreams.
• The peculiarities of dreaming during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Everything you need to know about lucid dreams.
• The role of melatonin in determining the dream content.
• What can we learn from our dreams?
• The psychotomimetic nature of dreams.
• The terrors of sleep paralysis.
• Does screen time affect people’s dreams?
• Dreams and the future of sleep technology.
• Are AI technologies capable of generating dreams?
• The hidden cost of insufficient sleep.
• How can nap breaks improve your productivity at work?
• The main facts and myths about sleep and dreams.
• How can our understanding of dreams shape our worldview?
• The link between dreams and telepathy.
• The process of dreaming in animals.
• Why do some people wake up in the middle of the night?
• The impact of mental illnesses on dream content.
• The role of dreams in art as a source of inspiration.
• How do different societies interpret dreams?
• The power of dreaming in everyday life.
• How to become a morning person: the key strategies.
• The impact of sleep time on life length.
• Ways to decode the language of sleep.
• Using cannabis as a method to cope with nightmares.
• The impact of the daily schedule on improving the quality of sleep.
• How to get a good night’s sleep in a new place?
• Methods to combat morning grogginess.
• Taking care of your sleep as one of the pillars of health.
• The use of dreams in filmmaking and book writing.
• The phenomenon of dreaming during sleep.
• The main phases of sleep in a sleep cycle.
• How is alpha activity measured during sleep?
• The use of oneirology in uncovering the dreaming process.
• Dreaming in Christianity and Islam.
• What is the connection between race and sleep disorders?
• The theory of astral projection during sleep.
• The effect of sleep on pain thresholds and sensitivity.
• The consequences of chronic daytime sleepiness.
• Why is dreaming a key part of a sleep cycle?
• The natural patterns of sleeping in children and teenagers.
• REM and non-REM sleep : the difference.
• What is biphasic sleep, and how does it work?
• The influence of dreams on musical creativity.
• The cultural significance of dream symbols.
• How do moon phases affect your sleep?
• The nature and functions of dreaming.
• The use of dream content during expressive arts therapy.
• What are the possible functions of REM sleep and dreaming?
• The value of dreaming and sleep tracking.
• The analysis of mental activity of sleep and disturbing dreams.
• How do sleep disturbances impact skin health?
• The impact of age on our circadian rhythm.
• The phenomenon of conscious control in dreams.
• How do sleep patterns change across different life stages?
• The influence of sleep quality on academic performance.
• The psychological theories of dreaming purpose.
• The disadvantages of oversleeping for adults.
• How does your body use calories while you sleep?
• Factors influencing the memory of dreams.
• What impact does alcohol have on the sleep cycle and dreaming?
• How can dreams contribute to the healing process?
• The role of sleep in underlying psychological issues.
• The benefits of daytime napping for young people.
• Why does sleep deprivation increase the risk of substance abuse?
• The use of daytime naps to increase imagination.
• The value of bedtime routine for toddlers.
• The benefits of a good night’s sleep.
• What is the role of sleeping in achieving life goals?
• Lack of sleep as a key cause of hormonal imbalance.
• The damaging effect of shift work on sleep patterns and health.
• The link between sleep and the immune system.
• What impact does a change of clocks by an hour have on public health?
• The value of sleep for children’s physical, cognitive, and emotional development.
• What would happen if you did not sleep?
• The importance of sleep for children’s development and growth.
• The connection between good mood and quality sleep.
• Why does the lack of sleep increase aggression?
• The role of sleeping in cancer prevention and treatment.
• The value of sleep for the recovery process of athletes.
• How does the quality of sleep impact metabolism?

Essay about Sleep Deprivation

• The economic impact of sleep deprivation in the workplace.
• How can sleep deprivation lead to anxiety and depression?
• The role of sleep deprivation in worsening obesity and diabetes.
• The use of sleeping pills in sleep deprivation treatment.
• How is sleep deprivation diagnosed?
• The prevalence of sleep deprivation among shift workers.
• What is the difference between sleep deprivation and insomnia?
• The key stages of sleep deprivation.
• The role of DNA in the development of sleep deprivation.
• The unique challenges in diagnosing obstructive sleep deprivation.
• How does sleep deprivation affect the human body?
• The issue of sleep deprivation in teenagers due to exams.
• The role of medications in managing sleep deprivation.
• Ways of reducing the risk of developing sleep deprivation.
• What are the key symptoms of sleep deprivation?

Why Is Sleep Important? Essay Topics

• The efficiency of sleeping in losing weight.
• How can sleep improve concentration and productivity?
• Sleep as essential component of healthy aging.
• Why can a lack of sleep be dangerous?
• Sleep satisfaction and its impact on energy level.
• How is poor sleep linked to depression?
• The impact of sleep on emotional intelligence.
• How does sleep help to repair and restore tissues?
• The role of sleeping in removing toxins from the brain.
• Why can the lack of sleep be lethal?
• The link between sleep quality and mental resilience.
• Sleep loss and its impact on reducing the ability to regulate emotions.
• The role of sleep in the regulation of the central nervous system.
• How can the quality of sleep strengthen your heart?
• Sleeping as a method to maximize athletic performance.

Sleeping Disorders Essay Topics

• The connection between sleep disorders and dreaming.
• Do congenitally blind people have visual dreams?
• The effective ways of coping with insomnia.
• Sleep difficulties and their physical and emotional consequences.
• How does weight affect sleep apnea in adults?
• Breathing practices and their efficiency in overcoming sleep disorders.
• The key symptoms of sleep-related hypoventilation .
• What are the risk factors for sleep disorders?
• Minimizing stress as a method to cope with obstructive sleep apnea.
• The side effects of sleep disorder treatment.
• What are the major categories of sleep disorders, and how do they differ?
• Restless legs syndrome as one of the sleep disorder types.
• The effectiveness of light therapy in sleep disorder treatment.
• The peculiarities of sleep disorder diagnosis.
• How to deal with rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder?
• Nightmare disorder and its impact on sleep quality.
• The role of negative thinking, stress, and anxiety in worsening nightmares.
• How may nightmares help to express unresolved emotions?
• The influence of nightmares on interpersonal relationships.
• The use of cognitive behavioral therapy in nightmare treatment.
• Are nightmares a possible consequence of drug abuse?
• The key symptoms of experiencing nightmares.
• The health effects of nightmares in adults.
• How are nightmares connected to waking activity?
• The possible consequences of nightmares.
• The efficiency of psychotherapy in nightmare treatment.
• The main causes of nightmares and methods to cope with them.
• How are nightmares different from sleep terrors?
• The role of sleep hygiene practices in preventing nightmares.
• How do nightmares affect the daily life of teenagers?
• Nightmares as a result of trauma-related experience.
• The link between nightmares and sleep paralysis.
• How does genetics impact the occurrence of nightmares?
• The neurobiological aspects of nightmares in children.
• The risk factors of having nightmare disorder.

📝 My Dreams Essay – Example

We have prepared a dream essay example to show you how everything works in practice!

How Do Different Societies Interpret Dreams?

Throughout history, dreams have been a mysterious experience for people worldwide, receiving various interpretations in many different countries and cultures. From ancient times to the present, people have believed that dreams provide crucial insights into our inner being and may even impact our perception of the universe.

For example, in ancient Egypt, snakes were often associated with danger, deceit, and the underworld. At the same time, seeing calm water in a dream was a good sign that meant peace and tranquility. If people were flying while asleep, it symbolized spiritual growth and escape from mortal concerns.

In ancient Mesopotamia, animals were frequently seen as symbols of the dreamer's personality traits. For instance, a lion might symbolize strength and power, while a sheep could represent humility and submission. Numbers also had a special meaning. People believed their appearance in dreams could be interpreted as messages from the gods.

Nowadays, people still interpret dreams in various ways based on their personal beliefs and traditions. However, it is crucial to understand that there is no correct or incorrect approach to interpreting dreams. The essential thing is to discover a method that resonates with you, allowing you to obtain insights into your subconscious mind. The use of the internet in academic contexts is on the rise, and its role in learning is hotly debated. For many teachers who did not grow up with this technology, its effects seem alarming and potentially harmful. The use of the internet in academic contexts is on the rise, and its role in learning is hotly debated. For many teachers who did not grow up with this technology, its effects seem alarming and potentially harmful.

Do you want to make your research paper on dreams interesting? Then, include a couple of facts into your research paper on dreams:

• Blind people dream;
• You forget 90% of your dreams;
• Dreams prevent psychosis;
• Not everyone sees colorful dreams;
• When you are snoring, you are not dreaming.

Who knows, maybe you will manage to interpret one of these facts from the psychological point of view in your research paper on dreams.

On our blog, useful information on how to write a good research paper and make a cover page for research papers can also be found.

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Dream Essays

Writing an essay on the topic of dreams is important as it allows individuals to explore their subconscious thoughts and desires. Dreams have fascinated people for centuries and have been the subject of much speculation and interpretation. By writing an essay on dreams, individuals can delve into the meaning and significance of their own dreams, as well as explore the cultural and psychological aspects of dreaming.

When writing an essay on dreams, it is important to consider the various interpretations and theories surrounding dreams. This can include the psychological perspective, where dreams are seen as a reflection of one's subconscious thoughts and emotions. It can also include the cultural and spiritual significance of dreams, as seen in various religious and cultural traditions.

It is also important to include personal experiences and examples in the essay. This can help to make the essay more relatable and engaging for the reader. Sharing personal dreams and their interpretation can add depth and insight to the essay, and can also help to connect with the reader on a more personal level.

When writing about dreams, it is important to approach the topic with an open mind and a sense of curiosity. Dreams are complex and multifaceted, and there is no one-size-fits-all interpretation. By approaching the topic with an open mind, individuals can explore the various facets of dreams and their significance in different contexts.

Overall, writing an essay on dreams is important as it allows individuals to explore the fascinating and enigmatic world of dreams. By considering the various interpretations, sharing personal experiences, and approaching the topic with an open mind, individuals can create a compelling and thought-provoking essay on dreams.

What Makes a Good Dream Essay Topics

When it comes to writing an essay about dreams, choosing the right topic is crucial. A good dream essay topic should be thought-provoking, inspiring, and unique. To brainstorm and choose an essay topic, start by reflecting on your own dreams and aspirations. Consider what interests you the most and what you are passionate about. It's also important to consider the audience and the purpose of the essay. A good dream essay topic should be relevant, timely, and impactful. Ultimately, a good essay topic is one that allows you to explore your creativity and express your thoughts and ideas effectively.

Best Dream Essay Topics

• The power of lucid dreaming
• The significance of recurring dreams
• The impact of dreams on mental health
• The symbolism of dream interpretation
• The connection between dreams and reality
• The role of dreams in shaping our future
• The cultural significance of dream mythology
• The science of dream analysis
• The influence of dreams on artistic creativity
• The role of dreams in problem-solving
• The psychology of nightmares
• The relationship between dreams and memory
• The impact of technology on dream experiences
• The role of dreams in spiritual practices
• The connection between dreams and emotions
• The influence of dreams on decision-making
• The role of dreams in understanding the subconscious mind
• The significance of dream journals
• The impact of dream deprivation on overall well-being
• The future of dream research and exploration

Dream Essay Topics Prompts

• If you could control your dreams, what would you dream about and why?
• Write a story about a dream that changed your perspective on life.
• Imagine a world where everyone's dreams were visible to others. How would society be different?
• What do your recurring dreams say about your deepest desires and fears?
• If you could bring one dream to life, what would it be and how would it impact the world around you?

Writing an essay about dreams can be an exciting and insightful journey. By choosing a unique and compelling topic, you can explore the depths of your imagination and share your insights with others. Whether you're interested in the science, psychology, or cultural aspects of dreams, there are endless possibilities for creative and thought-provoking essay topics. So, take the time to brainstorm and choose a topic that resonates with you, and get ready to embark on an inspiring writing adventure.

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July 26, 2011

The Science Behind Dreaming

New research sheds light on how and why we remember dreams--and what purpose they are likely to serve

By Sander van der Linden

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For centuries people have pondered the meaning of dreams. Early civilizations thought of dreams as a medium between our earthly world and that of the gods. In fact, the Greeks and Romans were convinced that dreams had certain prophetic powers. While there has always been a great interest in the interpretation of human dreams, it wasn’t until the end of the nineteenth century that Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung put forth some of the most widely-known modern theories of dreaming. Freud’s theory centred around the notion of repressed longing -- the idea that dreaming allows us to sort through unresolved, repressed wishes. Carl Jung (who studied under Freud) also believed that dreams had psychological importance, but proposed different theories about their meaning.

Since then, technological advancements have allowed for the development of other theories. One prominent neurobiological theory of dreaming is the “activation-synthesis hypothesis,” which states that dreams don’t actually mean anything: they are merely electrical brain impulses that pull random thoughts and imagery from our memories. Humans, the theory goes, construct dream stories after they wake up, in a natural attempt to make sense of it all. Yet, given the vast documentation of realistic aspects to human dreaming as well as indirect experimental evidence that other mammals such as cats also dream, evolutionary psychologists have theorized that dreaming really does serve a purpose. In particular, the “threat simulation theory” suggests that dreaming should be seen as an ancient biological defence mechanism that provided an evolutionary advantage because of  its capacity to repeatedly simulate potential threatening events – enhancing the neuro-cognitive mechanisms required for efficient threat perception and avoidance.

So, over the years, numerous theories have been put forth in an attempt to illuminate the mystery behind human dreams, but, until recently, strong tangible evidence has remained largely elusive.

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Yet, new research published in the Journal of Neuroscience provides compelling insights into the mechanisms that underlie dreaming and the strong relationship our dreams have with our memories. Cristina Marzano and her colleagues at the University of Rome have succeeded, for the first time, in explaining how humans remember their dreams. The scientists predicted the likelihood of successful dream recall based on a signature pattern of brain waves. In order to do this, the Italian research team invited 65 students to spend two consecutive nights in their research laboratory.

During the first night, the students were left to sleep, allowing them to get used to the sound-proofed and temperature-controlled rooms. During the second night the researchers measured the student’s brain waves while they slept. Our brain experiences four types of electrical brain waves: “delta,” “theta,” “alpha,” and “beta.” Each represents a different speed of oscillating electrical voltages and together they form the electroencephalography (EEG). The Italian research team used this technology to measure the participant’s brain waves during various sleep-stages. (There are five stages of sleep; most dreaming and our most intense dreams occur during the REM stage.) The students were woken at various times and asked to fill out a diary detailing whether or not they dreamt, how often they dreamt and whether they could remember the content of their dreams.

While previous studies have already indicated that people are more likely to remember their dreams when woken directly after REM sleep, the current study explains why. Those participants who exhibited more low frequency theta waves in the frontal lobes were also more likely to remember their dreams.

This finding is interesting because the increased frontal theta activity the researchers observed looks just like the successful encoding and retrieval of autobiographical memories seen while we are awake. That is, it is the same electrical oscillations in the frontal cortex that make the recollection of episodic memories (e.g., things that happened to you) possible. Thus, these findings suggest that the neurophysiological mechanisms that we employ while dreaming (and recalling dreams) are the same as when we construct and retrieve memories while we are awake.

In another recent study conducted by the same research team, the authors used the latest MRI techniques to investigate the relation between dreaming and the role of deep-brain structures. In their study, the researchers found that vivid, bizarre and emotionally intense dreams (the dreams that people usually remember) are linked to parts of the amygdala and hippocampus. While the amygdala plays a primary role in the processing and memory of emotional reactions, the hippocampus has been implicated in important memory functions, such as the consolidation of information from short-term to long-term memory.

The proposed link between our dreams and emotions is also highlighted in another recent study published by Matthew Walker and colleagues at the Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab at UC Berkeley, who found that a reduction in REM sleep (or less “dreaming”) influences our ability to understand complex emotions in daily life – an essential feature of human social functioning.  Scientists have also recently identified where dreaming is likely to occur in the brain.  A very rare clinical condition known as “Charcot-Wilbrand Syndrome” has been known to cause (among other neurological symptoms) loss of the ability to dream.  However, it was not until a few years ago that a patient reported to have lost her ability to dream while having virtually no other permanent neurological symptoms. The patient suffered a lesion in a part of the brain known as the right inferior lingual gyrus (located in the visual cortex). Thus, we know that dreams are generated in, or transmitted through this particular area of the brain, which is associated with visual processing, emotion and visual memories.

Taken together, these recent findings tell an important story about the underlying mechanism and possible purpose of dreaming.

Dreams seem to help us process emotions by encoding and constructing memories of them. What we see and experience in our dreams might not necessarily be real, but the emotions attached to these experiences certainly are. Our dream stories essentially try to strip the emotion out of a certain experience by creating a memory of it. This way, the emotion itself is no longer active.  This mechanism fulfils an important role because when we don’t process our emotions, especially negative ones, this increases personal worry and anxiety. In fact, severe REM sleep-deprivation is increasingly correlated to the development of mental disorders. In short, dreams help regulate traffic on that fragile bridge which connects our experiences with our emotions and memories.

Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about? Please send suggestions to Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist at the Boston Globe. He can be reached at garethideas AT gmail.com or Twitter @garethideas .

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Essay Samples on Dream

Explaining why dreams and goals are valuable.

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Jungian Psychology And Dream Analysis Applied To The Movie Sleep Dealer

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Waking Up from a Wishful Dream in Inception

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Best topics on Dream

1. Explaining Why Dreams and Goals Are Valuable

2. A Glimpse into Life 10 Years From Now

3. Turning My Dream to Become an Enterpreneur to Reality

4. If I Had a Million Dollars: Dreams and Possibilities

5. My Passion for Becoming a Registered Nurse

6. Following Dreams: With Special Reference To Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist

7. Illusion vs Reality it “The Great Gatsby” and Other Literature

8. Passion And Dream Vs. Reality In The Face Of Apple

9. Jungian Psychology And Dream Analysis Applied To The Movie Sleep Dealer

10. My Personal Struggles with Financial Need as a Student

11. What I Would Spend Lottery Money On

12. The Pact and Ways to Fulfill a Dream

13. Why I Want to Be a Neonatal Nurse

14. Waking Up from a Wishful Dream in Inception

15. Analysis of Separate Scenes and Narratives in Inception

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• Bad Memories
• Family Values

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Dreams: Why They Happen & What They Mean

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Eric Suni has over a decade of experience as a science writer and was previously an information specialist for the National Cancer Institute.

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Dr. Dimitriu is the founder of Menlo Park Psychiatry and Sleep Medicine. He is board-certified in psychiatry as well as sleep medicine.

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Table of Contents

What Are Dreams?

Why do we dream, when do we dream, do dreams have meaning, what are types of dreams, what are nightmares, do dreams affect sleep, how can you remember dreams, how can you stop nightmares.

• Dreams are mental, emotional, or sensory experiences that take place during sleep.
• Dreams are the most common and intense during REM sleep when brain activity increases, but no one knows for sure why we dream.
• Dreaming is normal and healthy, but frequent nightmares can interfere with sleep.
• Waking up gradually and journaling your dreams may help you remember them better.

Dreams are one of the most fascinating and mystifying aspects of sleep. Since Sigmund Freud helped draw attention to the potential importance of dreams in the late 19th century, considerable research has worked to unravel both the neuroscience and psychology of dreams.

Despite this advancing scientific knowledge, there is much that remains unknown about both sleep and dreams. Even the most fundamental question — why do we dream at all? — is still subject to significant debate.

While everyone dreams, the content of those dreams and their effect on sleep can vary dramatically from person to person. Even though there’s no simple explanation for the meaning and purpose of dreams, it’s helpful to understand the basics of dreams, the potential impact of nightmares, and steps that you can take to sleep better with sweet dreams.

Is Your Troubled Sleep a Health Risk?

A variety of issues can cause problems sleeping. Answer three questions to understand if it’s a concern you should worry about.

Dreams are images, thoughts, or feelings that occur during sleep. Visual imagery is the most common Trusted Source National Library of Medicine, Biotech Information The National Center for Biotechnology Information advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information. View Source , but dreams can involve all of the senses. Some people dream in color while others dream in black and white , and people who are blind tend to have more dream components related to sound, taste, and smell Trusted Source National Library of Medicine, Biotech Information The National Center for Biotechnology Information advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information. View Source .

Studies have revealed diverse types of dream content, but some typical characteristics of dreaming include:

• It has a first-person perspective.
• It is involuntary.
• The content may be illogical or even incoherent.
• The content includes other people who interact with the dreamer and one another.
• It provokes strong emotions.
• Elements of waking life are incorporated into content.

Although these features are not universal, they are found at least to some extent in most normal dreams.

Debate continues among sleep experts Trusted Source National Library of Medicine, Biotech Information The National Center for Biotechnology Information advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information. View Source about why we dream. Different theories Trusted Source Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School A production of WGBH Educational Foundation and the Harvard Medical School Division of Sleep Medicine. View Source about the purpose of dreaming Trusted Source National Center for Biotechnology Information The National Center for Biotechnology Information advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information. View Source include:

• Building memory: Dreaming has been associated with consolidation of memory, which suggests that dreaming may serve an important cognitive function of strengthening memory and informational recall.
• Processing emotion: The ability to engage with and rehearse feelings in different imagined contexts may be part of the brain’s method for managing emotions.
• Mental housekeeping: Periods of dreaming could be the brain’s way of “straightening up,” clearing away partial, erroneous, or unnecessary information.
• Instant replay: Dream content may be a form of distorted instant replay in which recent events are reviewed and analyzed.
• Incidental brain activity: This view holds that dreaming is just a by-product of sleep that has no essential purpose or meaning.

Experts in the fields of neuroscience and psychology continue to conduct experiments to discover what is happening in the brain during sleep, but even with ongoing research, it may be impossible to conclusively prove any theory for why we dream.

On average, most people dream for around two hours per night. Dreaming can happen Trusted Source National Library of Medicine, Biotech Information The National Center for Biotechnology Information advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information. View Source during any stage of sleep , but dreams are the most prolific and intense during the rapid eye movement (REM) stage.

During the REM sleep stage, brain activity ramps up considerably compared to the non-REM stages, which helps explain the distinct types of dreaming Trusted Source National Library of Medicine, Biotech Information The National Center for Biotechnology Information advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information. View Source during these stages. Dreams during REM sleep are typically more vivid, fantastical, and/or bizarre even though they may involve elements of waking life. By contrast, non-REM dreams tend to involve more coherent content that involves thoughts or memories grounded to a specific time and place.

REM sleep is not distributed evenly through the night. The majority of REM sleep happens during the second half of a normal sleep period, which means that dreaming tends to be concentrated in the hours before waking up.

How to interpret dreams, and whether they have meaning at all, are matters of considerable controversy. While some psychologists have argued that dreams provide insight into a person’s psyche or everyday life, others find their content to be too inconsistent or bewildering to reliably deliver meaning.

Virtually all experts acknowledge that dreams can involve content that ties back to waking experiences although the content may be changed or misrepresented. For example, in describing dreams, people often reference people who they recognize clearly even if their appearance is distorted in the dream Trusted Source National Library of Medicine, Biotech Information The National Center for Biotechnology Information advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information. View Source .

The meaning of real-life details appearing in dreams, though, is far from settled. The “continuity hypothesis” in dream research holds that dreams and waking life are intertwined with one another and thus involve overlapping themes and content. The “discontinuity hypothesis,” on the other hand, sees thinking during dreams and wakefulness as structurally distinct.

While analysis of dreams may be a component of personal or psychological self-reflection, it’s hard to state, based on the existing evidence, that there is a definitive method for interpreting and understanding the meaning of dreams in waking, everyday life.

Dreams can take on many different forms. Lucid dreams occur when a person is in a dream while being actively aware that they are dreaming. Vivid dreams involve especially realistic or clear dream content. Bad dreams are composed of bothersome or distressing content. Recurring dreams involve the same imagery repeating in multiple dreams over time.

Even within normal dreams, there are certain types of content that are especially identifiable. Among the most recognizable and common themes Trusted Source National Library of Medicine, Biotech Information The National Center for Biotechnology Information advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information. View Source in dreams are things like flying, falling, being chased, or being unable to find a bathroom.

In sleep medicine, a nightmare is a bad dream that causes a person to wake up from sleep Trusted Source National Library of Medicine, Biotech Information The National Center for Biotechnology Information advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information. View Source . This definition is distinct from common usage that may refer to any threatening, scary, or bothersome dream as a nightmare. While bad dreams are normal and usually benign, frequent nightmares may interfere with a person’s sleep and cause impaired thinking and mood Trusted Source American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM)|National Library of Medicine, Biotech Information View Source during the daytime.

In most cases, dreams don’t affect sleep. Dreaming is part of healthy sleep and is generally considered to be completely normal and without any negative effects on sleep.

Nightmares are the exception. Because nightmares involve awakenings, they can become problematic if they occur frequently. Distressing dreams may cause a person to avoid sleep, leading to insufficient sleep. When they do sleep, the prior sleep deprivation can induce a REM sleep rebound that actually worsens nightmares. This negative cycle can cause some people with frequent nightmares to experience insomnia as a chronic sleep problem.

For this reason, people who have nightmares more than once a week, have fragmented sleep, or have daytime sleepiness or changes to their thinking or mood should talk with a doctor Trusted Source Medline Plus MedlinePlus is an online health information resource for patients and their families and friends. View Source . A doctor can review these symptoms to identify the potential causes and treatments of their sleeping problem.

For people who want to document or interpret dreams, remembering them is a key first step. The ability to recall dreams can be different for every person and may vary based on age Trusted Source National Library of Medicine, Biotech Information The National Center for Biotechnology Information advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information. View Source . While there’s no guaranteed way to improve dream recall, experts recommend certain tips Trusted Source American Psychological Association (APA) APA is the leading scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United States, with more than 121,000 researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants and students as its members. View Source :

• Think about your dreams as soon as you wake up. Dreams can be forgotten in the blink of an eye, so you want to make remembering them the first thing you do when you wake up. Before sitting up or even saying good morning to your bed partner, close your eyes and try to replay your dreams in your mind.
• Have a journal or app on-hand to keep track of your dream content. It’s important to have a method to quickly record dream details before you can forget them, including if you wake up from a dream in the night. For most people, a pen and paper on their nightstand works well, but there are also smartphone apps that help you create an organized and searchable dream journal.
• Try to wake up peacefully in the morning. An abrupt awakening, such as from an alarm clock, may cause you to quickly snap awake and out of a dream, making it harder to remember the dream’s details.
• Remind yourself that dream recall is a priority. In the lead-up to bedtime, tell yourself that you will remember your dreams, and repeat this mantra before going to sleep. While this alone can’t ensure that you will recall your dreams, it can encourage you to remember to take the time to reflect on dreams before starting your day.

People with frequent nightmares that disturb sleep should talk with a doctor who can determine if they have nightmare disorder or any other condition affecting their sleep quality. Treatment for nightmare disorder often includes talk therapy that attempts to counteract negative thinking, stress, and anxiety that can worsen nightmares.

Many types of talk therapy attempt to reduce worries or fears, including those that can arise in nightmares. This type of exposure or desensitization therapy helps many patients reframe their emotional reaction to negative imagery since trying to simply suppress negative thoughts may exacerbate nightmares Trusted Source National Library of Medicine, Biotech Information The National Center for Biotechnology Information advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information. View Source .

Another step in trying to reduce nightmares is to improve sleep hygiene , which includes both sleep-related habits and the bedroom environment . Healthy sleep hygiene can make your nightly sleep more predictable and may help you sleep soundly through the night even if you have bad dreams. Examples of healthy sleep tips include:

• Follow a stable sleep schedule: Keep a steady schedule every day, including on weekends or other days when you don’t have to wake up at a certain time.
• Choose pre-bed content carefully: Avoid scary, distressing, or stimulating content in the hours before bed since it may provoke negative thoughts during sleep.
• Wind down each night: Exercising during the day Trusted Source Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) As the nation’s health protection agency, CDC saves lives and protects people from health threats. View Source can help you sleep better at night. In the evening, try to allow your mind and body to calmly relax before bed such as with light stretching, deep breathing, or other relaxation techniques.
• Limit alcohol and caffeine: Drinking alcohol can cause more concentrated REM sleep later in the night, heightening the risk of nightmares. Caffeine is a stimulant that can throw off your sleep schedule and keep your brain wired when you want to doze off.
• Block out bedroom distractions: Try to foster a sleeping environment that is dark, quiet, smells nice, and has a comfortable temperature. A supportive mattress and pillow can make your bed more inviting and cozy. All of these factors make it easier to feel calm and to prevent unwanted awakenings that can trigger irregular sleep patterns.
• Study Finds Bedtime Procrastination Impacts Sleep Quality
• Only Murders While You’re Sleeping: The Parasomnia Defense
• Crime Risk and Depression Differentially Relate to Aspects of Sleep
• Mechanism During Sleep Found to Determine Which Memories Last

About Our Editorial Team

Eric Suni, Staff Writer

Medically Reviewed by

Alex Dimitriu, Psychiatrist MD

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Dreams and Dreaming

Dreams and dreaming have been discussed in diverse areas of philosophy ranging from epistemology to ethics, ontology, and more recently philosophy of mind and cognitive science. This entry provides an overview of major themes in the philosophy of sleep and dreaming, with a focus on Western analytic philosophy, and discusses relevant scientific findings.

1.1 Cartesian dream skepticism

1.2 earlier discussions of dream skepticism and why descartes’ version is special, 1.3 dreaming and other skeptical scenarios, 1.4 descartes’ solution to the dream problem and real-world dreams, 2.1 are dreams experiences, 2.2 dreams as instantaneous memory insertions, 2.3 empirical evidence on the question of dream experience, 2.4 dreams and hallucinations, 2.5 dreams and illusions, 2.6 dreams as imaginative experiences, 2.7 dreaming and waking mind wandering, 2.8 the problem of dream belief, 3.1 dreaming as a model system and test case for consciousness research, 3.2 dreams, psychosis, and delusions, 3.3 beyond dreams: dreamless sleep experience and the concepts of sleep, waking, and consciousness, 4. dreaming and the self, 5. immorality and moral responsibility in dreams, 6.1 the meaning of dreams, 6.2 the functions of dreaming, 7. conclusions, other internet resources, related entries, 1. dreams and epistemology.

Dream skepticism has traditionally been the most famous and widely discussed philosophical problem raised by dreaming (see Williams 1978; Stroud 1984). In the Meditations , Descartes uses dreams to motivate skepticism about sensory-based beliefs about the external world and his own bodily existence. He notes that sensory experience can also lead us astray in commonplace sensory illusions such as seeing things as too big or small. But he does not think such cases justify general doubts about the reliability of sensory perception: by taking a closer look at an object seen under suboptimal conditions, we can easily avoid deception. By contrast, dreams suggest that even in a seemingly best-case scenario of sensory perception (Stroud 1984), deception is possible. Even the realistic experience of sitting dressed by the fire and looking at a piece of paper in one’s hands (Descartes 1641: I.5) is something that can, and according to Descartes often does, occur in a dream.

There are different ways of construing the dream argument. A strong reading is that Descartes is trapped in a lifelong dream and none of his experiences have ever been caused by external objects (the Always Dreaming Doubt ; see Newman 2019). A weaker reading is that he is just sometimes dreaming but cannot rule out at any given moment that he is dreaming right now (the Now Dreaming Doubt ; see Newman 2019). This is still epistemologically worrisome: even though some of his sensory-based beliefs might be true, he cannot determine which these are unless he can rule out that he is dreaming. Doubt is thus cast on all of his beliefs, making sensory-based knowledge slip out of reach.

Cartesian-style skeptical arguments have the following form (quoted from Klein 2015):

• If I know that p , then there are no genuine grounds for doubting that p .
• U is a genuine ground for doubting that p .
• Therefore, I do not know that p .

If we apply this to the case of dreaming, we get:

• If I know that I am sitting dressed by the fire, then there are no genuine grounds for doubting that I am really sitting dressed by the fire.
• If I were now dreaming, this would be a genuine ground for doubting that I am sitting dressed by the fire: in dreams, I have often had the realistic experience of sitting dressed by the fire when I was actually lying undressed in bed!
• Therefore, I do not know that I am now sitting dressed by the fire.

Importantly, both strong and weak versions of the dream argument cast doubt only on sensory-based beliefs, but leave other beliefs unscathed. According to Descartes, that 2+3=5 or that a square has no more than 4 sides is knowable even if he is now dreaming:

although, in truth, I should be dreaming, the rule still holds that all which is clearly presented to my intellect is indisputably true. (Descartes 1641: V.15)

By Descartes’ lights, dreams do not undermine our ability to engage in the project of pure, rational enquiry (Frankfurt 1970; but see Broughton 2002).

Dream arguments have been a staple of philosophical skepticism since antiquity and were so well known that in his objections to the Meditations , Hobbes (1641) criticized Descartes for not having come up with a more original argument. Yet, Descartes’ version of the problem, more than any other, has left its mark on the philosophical discussion.

Earlier versions tended to touch upon dreams just briefly and discuss them alongside other examples of sensory deception. For example, in the Theaetetus (157e), Plato has Socrates discuss a defect in perception that is common to

dreams and diseases, including insanity, and everything else that is said to cause illusions of sight and hearing and the other senses.

This leads to the conclusion that knowledge cannot be defined through perception.

Dreams also appear in the canon of standard skeptical arguments used by the Pyrrhonists. Again, dreams and sleep are just one of several conditions (including illness, joy, and sorrow) that cast doubt on the trusthworthiness of sensory perception (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers; Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism) .

Augustine ( Against the Academics ; Confessions) thought the dream problem could be contained, arguing that in retrospect, we can distinguish both dreams and illusions from actual perception (Matthew 2005: chapter 8). And Montaigne ( The Apology for Raymond Sebond ) noted that wakefulness itself teems with reveries and illusions, which he thought were even more epistemologically worrisome than nocturnal dreams.

Descartes devoted much more space to the discussion of dreaming and cast it as a unique epistemological threat distinct from both waking illusions and evil genius or brain-in-a-vat-style arguments. His claim that he has often been deceived by his dreams implies he also saw dreaming as a real-world (rather than merely hypothetical) threat.

This is further highlighted by the intimate, first-person style of the Meditations . Their narrator is supposed to exemplify everyone’s epistemic situation, illustrating the typical defects of the human mind. Readers are further drawn in by Descartes’ strategy of moving from commonsense examples towards more sophisticated philosophical claims (Frankfurt 1970). For example, Descartes builds up towards dream skepticism by first considering familiar cases of sensory illusions and then deceptively realistic dreams.

Finally, much attention has been devoted to several dreams Descartes reportedly had as a young man. Some believe these dreams embodied theoretical doubts he developed in the Discourse and Meditations (Baillet 1691; Leibniz 1880: IV; Cole 1992; Keefer 1996). Hacking (2001:252) suggests that for Descartes, dream skepticism was not just a philosophical conundrum but a source of genuine doubt. There is also some discussion about the dream reports’ authenticity (Freud 1940; Cole 1992; Clarke 2006; Browne 1977).

In the Meditations , after discussing the dream argument, Descartes raises the possibility of an omnipotent evil genius determined to deceive us even in our most basic beliefs. Contrary to dream deception, Descartes emphasizes that the evil genius hypothesis is a mere fiction. Still, it radicalizes the dream doubt in two respects. One, where the dream argument left the knowability of certain general truths intact, these are cast in doubt by the evil genius hypothesis . Two, where the dream argument, at least on the weaker reading, involves just temporary deception, the evil genius has us permanently deceived.

One modernized version, the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment, says that if evil scientists placed your brain in a vat and stimulated it just right, your conscious experience would be exactly the same as if you were still an ordinary, embodied human being (Putnam 1981). In the Matrix -trilogy (Chalmers 2005), Matrixers live unbeknownst to themselves in a computer simulation. Unlike the brain-in-a-vat , they have bodies that are kept alive in pods, and flaws in the simulation allow some of them to bend its rules to their advantage.

Unlike dream deception, which is often cast as a regularly recurring actuality (cf. Windt 2011), brain-in-a-vat-style arguments are often thought to be merely logically or nomologically possible. However, there might be good reasons for thinking that we actually live in a computer simulation (Bostrom 2003), and if we lend some credence to radical skeptical scenarios, this may have consequences for how we act (Schwitzgebel 2017).

Even purely hypothetical skeptical scenarios may enhance their psychological force by capitalizing on the analogy with dreams. Clark (2005) argues that the Matrix contains elements of “industrial-strength deception” in which both sensory experience and intellectual functioning are exactly the same as in standard wake-states, whereas other aspects are more similar to the compromised reasoning and bizarre shifts that are the hallmark of dreams.

At the end of the Sixth Meditation , Descartes suggests a solution to the dream problem that is tied to a reassessment of what it is like to dream. Contrary to his remarks in the First Meditation , he notes that dreams are only rarely connected to waking memories and are often discontinuous, as when dream characters suddenly appear or disappear. He then introduces the coherence test:

But when I perceive objects with regard to which I can distinctly determine both the place whence they come, and that in which they are, and the time at which they appear to me, and when, without interruption, I can connect the perception I have of them with the whole of the other parts of my life, I am perfectly sure that what I thus perceive occurs while I am awake and not during sleep. (Meditation VI. 24)

For all practical purposes, he has now found a mark by which dreaming and waking can be distinguished (cf. Meditation I.7), and even if the coherence test is not fail-safe, the threat of dream deception has been averted.

Descartes’ remarks about the discontinuous and ad hoc nature of many dreams are backed up by empirical work on dream bizarreness (see Hobson 1988; Revonsuo & Salmivalli 1995). Still, many of his critics were not convinced this helped his case against the skeptic. Even if Descartes’ revised phenomenological description characterizes most dreams, one might occasionally merely dream of successfully performing the test (Hobbes 1641), and in some dreams, one might seem to have a clear and distinct idea but this impression is false (Bourdin 1641). Both the coherence test and the criterion of clarity and distinctness would then be unreliable.

How considerations of empirical plausibility impact the dream argument continues to be a matter of debate. Grundmann (2002) appeals to scientific dream research to introduce an introspective criterion: when we introspectively notice that we are able to engage in critical reflection, we have good reason to think that we are awake and not dreaming. However, this assumes critical reasoning to be uniformly absent in dreams. If attempts at critical reasoning do occur in dreams and if they generally tend to be corrupted, the introspective criterion might again be problematic (Windt 2011, 2015a). There are also cases in which even after awakening, people mistake what was in fact a dream for reality (Wamsley et al. 2014). At least in certain situations and for some people, dream deception might be a genuine cause of concern (Windt 2015a).

2. The ontology of dreams

In what follows, the term “conscious experience” is used as an umbrella term for the occurrence of sensations, thoughts, impressions, emotions etc. in dreams (cf. Dennett 1976). These are all phenomenal states: there is something it is like to be in these states for the subject of experience (cf. Nagel 1974). To ask about dream experience is to ask whether it is like something to dream while dreaming, and whether what it is like is similar to (or relevantly different from) corresponding waking experiences.

Cartesian dream skepticism depends on a seemingly innocent background assumption: that dreams are conscious experiences. If this is false, then dreams are not deceptive experiences during sleep and we cannot be deceived, while dreaming, about anything at all. Whether dreams are experiences is a major question for the ontology of dreams and closely bound up with dream skepticism.

The most famous argument denying that dreams are experiences was formulated by Norman Malcolm (1956, 1959). Today, his position is commonly rejected as implausible. Still, it set the tone for the analysis of dreaming as a target phenomenon for philosophy of mind.

For Malcolm, the denial of dream experience followed from the conceptual analysis of sleep: “if a person is in any state of consciousness it logically follows that he is not sound asleep” (Malcolm 1956: 21). Following some remarks of Wittgenstein’s (1953: 184; see Chihara 1965 for discussion), Malcolm claimed

the concept of dreaming is derived, not from dreaming, but from descriptions of dreams, i.e., from the familiar phenomenon that we call “telling a dream”. (Malcolm 1959:55)

Malcolm argued that retrospective dream reports are the sole criterion for determining whether a dream occurred and there is no independent way of verifying dream reports. While first-person, past-tense psychological statements (such as “I felt afraid”) can at least in principle be verified by independent observations (but see Canfield 1961; Siegler 1967; Schröder 1997), he argued dream reports (such as “in my dream, I felt afraid”) are governed by different grammars and merely superficially resemble waking reports. In particular, he denied dream reports imply the occurrence of experiences (such as thoughts, feelings, or judgements) in sleep:

If a man had certain thoughts and feelings in a dream it no more follows that he had those thoughts and feelings while asleep, than it follows from his having climbed a mountain in a dream that he climbed a mountain while asleep. (Malcolm 1959/1962: 51–52)

What exactly Malcolm means by “conscious experience” is unclear. Sometimes he seems to be saying that conscious experience is conceptually tied to wakefulness (Malcolm 1956); other times he claims that terms such as mental activity or conscious experience are vague and it is senseless to apply them to sleep and dreams (Malcolm 1959: 52).

Malcolm’s analysis of dreaming has been criticized as assuming an overly strict form of verificationism and a naïve view of language and conceptual change. A particularly counterintuitive consequence of his view is that there can be no observational evidence for the occurrence of dreams in sleep aside from dream reports. This includes behavioral evidence such as sleepwalking or sleeptalking, which he thought showed the person was partially awake; as he also thought dreams occur in sound sleep, such sleep behaviors were largely irrelevant to the investigation of dreaming proper. He also claimed adopting a physiological criterion of dreaming (such as EEG measures of brain activity during sleep) would change the concept of dreaming, which he argued was tied exclusively to dream reporting. This claim was particularly radical as it explicitly targeted the discovery of REM sleep and its association with dreaming (Dement & Kleitman 1957), which is commonly regarded as the beginning of the science of sleep and dreaming. Malcolm’s position was that the very project of a science of dreaming was misguided.

Contra Malcolm, most assume that justification does not depend on strict criteria with the help of which the truth of a statement can be determined with absolute certainty, but “on appeals to the simplicity, plausibility, and predictive adequacy of an explanatory system as a whole” (Chihara & Fodor 1965: 197). In this view, behavioral and/or physiological evidence can be used to verify dream reports (Ayer 1960) and the alleged principled difference between dream reports and other first-person, past-tense psychological sentences (Siegler 1967; Schröder 1997) disappears.

Putnam noted that Malcolm’s analysis of the concept of dreaming relies on the dubious idea that philosophers have access to deep conceptual truths that are hidden to laypeople:

the lexicographer would undoubtedly perceive the logical (or semantical) connection between being a pediatrician and being a doctor, but he would miss the allegedly “logical” character of the connection between dreams and waking impressions. […] this “depth grammar” kind of analyticity (or “logical dependence”) does not exist. (Putnam 1962 [1986]: 306)

Nagel argued that even if one accepts Malcolm’s analysis of the concept of dreaming,

it is a mistake to invest the demonstration that it is impossible to have experiences while asleep with more import than it has. It is an observation about our use of the word “experience”, and no more. It does not imply that nothing goes on in our minds while we dream. (Nagel 1959: 114)

Whether dream thoughts, feelings or beliefs should count as real instances of their kind now becomes an open question, and in any case there is no conceptual contradiction involved in saying one has experiences while asleep and dreaming.

To ask about dream experience is also to ask whether there is something it is like to dream during sleep as opposed to there just being something it is like to remember dreaming after awakening. Dennett’s (1976, 1979) cassette theory says dreams are the product of instantaneous memory insertion at the moment of the awakening, as if a cassette with pre-scripted dreams had been inserted into memory, ready for replay. Dennett claims the cassette theory and the view that dreams are experiences can deal equally well with empirical evidence for instance on the relationship between dreaming and REM sleep. The cassette theory is preferable because it is more parsimonious, positing only an unconscious dream composition process rather than an additional conscious presentation process in sleep. For Dennett, the important point is that it is impossible to distinguish between the two rival theories based on dream recall; the question of dream experience should be settled by independent empirical evidence.

While Dennett shares Malcolm’s skepticism about dream experience, this latter claim is diametrically opposed to Malcolm’s rejection of a science of dreaming. For Dennett, the unreliability of dream recall also is not unique, but exemplifies a broader problem with memory reports: we generally cannot use retrospective recall to distinguish conscious experience from memory insertion (Dennett 1991; see also Emmett 1978).

An earlier and much discussed (Binz 1878; Goblot 1896; Freud 1899; Hall 1981; Kramer 2007:22–24) version of Dennett’s cassette theory goes back to Maury’s (1861) description of a long and complex dream about the French revolution that culminated in his execution at the guillotine, at which point Maury suddenly awoke to find that the headboard had fallen on his neck. Because the dream seemed to systematically build up to this dramatic conclusion, which in turn coincided with a sudden external event, he suggested that such cases were best explained as instantaneous memory insertions experienced at the moment of awakening. Similarly, Gregory (1916) described dreams are psychical explosions occurring at the moment of awakening.

The trustworthiness of dream reports continues to be contentious. Rosen (2013) argues that dream reports are often fabricated and fail to accurately describe experiences occurring during sleep. By contrast, Windt (2013, 2015a) argues that dream reports can at least under certain conditions (such as in laboratory studies, when dreams are reported immediately after awakening by trained participants) be regarded as trustworthy sources of evidence with respect to previous experience during sleep.

Unlike Malcolm, many believe that whether dreams are experiences is an empirical question; and unlike Dennett, the predominant view is that the empirical evidence does indeed support this claim (Flanagan 2000; Metzinger 2003; Revonsuo 2006; Rosen 2013; Windt 2013, 2015a).

A first reason for thinking that dreams are experiences during sleep is the relationship between dreaming and REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. Researchers in the 1950s discovered that sleep is not a uniform state of rest and passivity, but there is a sleep architecture involving different stages of sleep that is relatively stable both within and across individuals (Aserinsky & Kleitman 1953, 1955; Dement & Kleitman 1957). Following sleep onset, periods of non-REM (or NREM) sleep including slow wave sleep (so called because of the presence of characteristic slow-wave, high-voltage EEG activity) are followed by periods of high-frequency, low-voltage activity during REM sleep. EEG measures from REM sleep strongly resemble waking EEG. REM sleep is additionally characterized by rapid eye movements and a near-complete loss of muscle tone (Dement 1999: 27–50; Jouvet 1999).

The alignment between conscious experience on the one hand and wake-like brain activity and muscular paralysis on the other hand would seem to support the experiential status of dreams as well as explain the outward passivity that typically accompanies them. Reports of dreaming are in fact much more frequent following REM (81.9%) than NREM sleep awakenings (43%; Nielsen 2000). REM reports tend to be more elaborate, vivid, and emotionally intense, whereas NREM reports tend to be more thought-like, confused, non-progressive, and repetitive (Hobson et al. 2000). These differences led to the idea that REM sleep is an objective marker of dreaming (Dement & Kleitman 1957; Hobson 1988: 154).

Attempts to identify dreaming with mental activity during REM sleep have not, however, been successful, and many now hold that dreams can occur in all stages of sleep (e.g., Antrobus 1990; Foulkes 1993b; Solms 1997, 2000; Domhoff 2003; Nemeth & Fazekas 2018). In recent years there has been renewed interest in NREM sleep for the study of dreaming (Noreika et al. 2009; Siclari et al. 2013, 2017). This suggests the inference from the physiology of REM sleep to the phenomenology of dreaming is not straightforward.

A second line of evidence comes from lucid dreams, or dreams in which one knows one is dreaming and often has some level of dream control (Voss et al. 2013; Voss & Hobson 2015; Baird et al. 2019). The term lucid dreaming was coined by van Eeden (1913), but Aristotle ( On Dreams ) already noted that one can sometimes be aware while dreaming that one is dreaming.

Scientific evidence that lucid dreaming is real and a genuine sleep phenomenon comes from laboratory studies (Hearne 1978; LaBerge et al. 1981) showing lucid dreamers can use specific, pre-arranged patterns of eye movements (e.g., right-left-right-left) to signal in real-time that they are now lucid and engaging in dream experiments. These signals are clearly identifiable on the EOG and suggest a correspondence between dream-eye movements and real-eye movements (as predicted by the so-called scanning hypothesis ; see Dement & Kleitman 1957; Leclair-Visonneau et al. 2010). Retrospective reports confirm that the dreamer really was lucid and signalled lucidity (Dresler et al. 2012; Stumbrys et al. 2014).

Signal-verified lucid dreams have been used to study muscular activity accompanying body movements in dreams (Erlacher et al. 2003; Dresler et al. 2011), for advanced EEG analysis of brain activity during lucid dreaming (Voss et al. 2009), and imaging studies (Dresler et al. 2011, 2012). Eye signals can also be used to measure the duration of different activities performed in lucid dreams; contrary to the cassette theory, lucid dreams have temporal extension and certain dream actions even seem to take slightly longer than in waking (Erlacher et al. 2014). There have also been attempts to induce lucidity through non-invasive electrical stimulation during sleep (Stumbrys et al. 2013; Voss et al. 2014). The combination of signal-verified lucid dreaming with volitional control over dream content, retrospective report, and objective sleep measures has been proposed to provide controlled conditions for the study of conscious experience in sleep and a new methodology for investigating the relationship between conscious experience and neurophysiological processes (Baird et al.2019).

A third line of evidence (Revonsuo 2006: 77) comes from dream-enactment behavior (Nielsen et al. 2009), most prominently in patients with REM-sleep behavior disorder (RBD; Schenck & Mahowald 1996; Schenck 2005; Leclair-Visonneau et al. 2010). Due to a loss of the muscular atonia that accompanies REM sleep in healthy subjects, these patients show complex, seemingly goal-directed outward behaviors such as running or fighting off an attacker during REM sleep. Retrospective dream reports often match these behaviors, suggesting that patients literally act out their dreams during sleep.

While persuasive, these lines of evidence might not satisfy skeptics about dream experience. They might worry that results from lucid dreaming and dream enactment do not generalize to ordinary, non-lucid dreams; they might also construe alternative explanations that do not require conscious experience in sleep. There are also methodological concerns, for instance about how closely sleep-behaviors actually match dream experience. A key issue is that to support the experiential status of dreams, evidence from sleep polysomnography, signal verified lucid dreams, or sleep behavior requires convergence with retrospective dream reports. This means trusting dream reports is built into any attempt to empirically resolve the question of dream experience – which then invites the familiar skeptical concerns. Again, an anti-skeptical strategy may be to appeal to explanatory considerations. In this view, the convergence of dream reports and objective polysomnographic or behavioral observations is best explained by the assumption that dreams are experiences in sleep, and this assumption is strengthened by further incoming findings. This strategy places dream reports at the center of scientific dream research while avoiding the contentious claim that their trustworthiness, and with it the experiential status of dreams, can be demonstrated conclusively by independent empirical means (Windt 2013, 2015a).

Even where philosophers agree dreams are experiences, they often disagree on how exactly to characterize dreaming relative to wake-state psychological terms. Often, questions about the ontology of dreaming intersect with epistemological issues. Increasingly, they also incorporate empirical findings.

The standard view is that dreams have the same phenomenal character as waking perception in that they seemingly put us in contact with mind-independent objects, yet no such object is actually being perceived. This means dreams count as hallucinations in the philosophical sense (Crane & French 2017; Macpherson 2013). Even if, in a particularly realistic dream, my visual experience was exactly as it would be if I were awake (I could see my bedroom, my hands on the bed sheets, etc.), as long as my eyes were closed during the episode, I would not, literally, be seeing anything.

There is some controversy in the psychological literature about whether dreams should be regarded as hallucinations. Some believe the term hallucination should be reserved for clinical contexts and wake-state pathologies (Aleman & Larøi 2008: 17; but see ffytche 2007; ffytche et al. 2010).

The view that dreams involve hallucinations is implicit in Descartes’ assumption that even when dreaming,

it is certain that I seem to see light, hear a noise, and feel heat; this cannot be false, and this is what in me is properly called perceiving ( sentire ). (Descartes 1641: II.9)

It also lies at the heart of Aristotle’s ( On Dreams ) assumption that dreams result from the movements of the sensory organs that continue even after the original stimulus has ceased. He believed that in the silence of sleep, these residual movements result in vivid sensory imagery that is subjectively indistinguishable from genuine perception (see also Dreisbach 2000; Barbera 2008).

The assumption of phenomenological equivalence between dream and waking experience can also be found in Berkeley’s (1710: I.18) idealist claim that the existence of external bodies is not necessary for the production of vivid, wake-like perceptual experience. Similarly, Russell defended sense-data theory by noting that in dreams,

I have all the experiences that I seem to have; it is only things outside my mind that are not as I believe them to be while I am dreaming. (Russell 1948: 149–150)

Elsewhere, he argued dreams and waking life

must be treated with equal respect; it is only by some reality not merely sensible that dreams can be condemned. (Russell 1914: 69)

Hume was less clear on this matter, proposing that dreams occupy an intermediate position between vivid and largely non-voluntary sensory impressions and ideas, or “the faint images of previous impressions in thinking and reasoning” (Hume 1739: 1.1.1.1). On the one hand, as mere creatures of the mind, Hume wanted to categorize dreams as ideas. On the other hand, he acknowledged that in sleep, “our ideas can approach the vivacity of sensory impressions” (Hume 1739: 1.1.1.1). Dreams do not fit comfortably into Hume’s attempt to draw a dichotomous distinction between impressions, including perception, and ideas, including sensory imagination (Ryle 1949; Waxman 1994; Broughton 2006).

Phenomenologists often focus not so much on the quality of dream imagery as on the overall character of experience, noting that dreams are experienced as reality; as in waking perception, we simply feel present in a world. This also sets dreams apart from waking fantasy and daydreams (Husserl 1904/1905; Uslar 1964; Conrad 1968; Globus 1987: 89.

At its strongest, the hallucination view claims that dreaming and waking experience are identical in both the quality of sensory imagery and their overall, self-in-a-world structure (Revonsuo 2006: 84). This claim is central to the virtual reality metaphor , according to which consciousness itself is dreamlike and waking perception a kind of online hallucination modulated by the senses (Llinás & Ribary 1994; Llinás & Paré 1991; Revonsuo 2006; Metzinger 2003, 2009).

This seems to be empirically supported. Neuroimaging studies (Dang-Vu et al. 2007; Nir & Tononi 2010; Desseilles et al. 2011) show that the predominance of visual and motor imagery as well as strong emotions in dreams is paralleled by high activation of the corresponding brain areas in REM sleep, which may exceed waking; at the same time, the cognitive deficits often thought to characterize dreams such as the loss of self-awareness, the absence of critical thinking, delusional reasoning, and mnemonic deficits fit in well with the comparative deactivation of frontal areas (Hobson et al. 2000). Hobson (1988, Hobson et al. 2000) has argued that the vivid, hallucinatory character of dreaming results from the fact that in REM sleep, the visual and motor areas are activated in the same way as in waking perception, the sole difference being dreams’ dependence on internal signal generation. Horikawa and colleagues (2013) used neuroimaging data from sleep onset to predict the types of objects described in mentation reports, which they took to support the perceptual equivalence between dreaming and waking.

Generally, versions of the hallucination view that suggest dreams replicate all aspects of waking perception are too vague to be informative. Especially for subtle perceptual activities (such as visual search), we might not know enough about dream phenomenology to make any strong claims (Nielsen 2010). Specifying points of similarity leads to a more informative and precise, but likely also more nuanced view. Dreams are heterogeneous, and some might be more perception-like while others resemble imagination (Windt 2015a). There might also be differences between or even within specific types of imagery. For example, visual imagery might be quite different from touch sensations, which tend to be rare in dreams (Hobson 1988). Visual dream imagery might overall resemble waking perception but lack color saturation, background detail and focus (Rechtschaffen & Buchignani, 1992). Classifying dreams as either hallucinatory or imaginative is further complicated by the fact that there is strong overlap in cortical activity associated with both visual imagery and perception (Zeidman & Maguire, 2016). This means even a strong overlap in cortical activity between, say, visual dream imagery and visual perception does not necessarily set dreaming apart from waking imagination.

This is also true for evidence on eye movements in dreams. LaBerge and colleagues (2018) recently showed that eye tracking of objects is smooth in lucid dreaming and perceiving, but not in imagining. Drawing from this evidence, Rosen (forthcoming) suggests many dreams mimic the phenomenology of interacting with a stable world, including eye movements and visual search. Others argue we should not analogize dream imagery to mind-independent, scannable objects and that eye movements might instead be implicated in the generation of dream imagery (Windt 2018).

Another way to make sense of the claim that dreaming has the same phenomenal character as waking perception is to say some kinds of dream imagery are illusory: they involve misperception of an external object as having different properties than it actually has (cf. Smith 2002; Crane & French 2017). The illusion view disagrees with the hallucination view on whether dreams have a contemporaneous external stimulus source.

The illusion view has fallen out of favor but has a long history. The Ancients believed dreams have bodily sources. This idea underlies the practice of using dreams to diagnose illness, as practiced in the shrines at Epidaurus (Galen On Diagnosis in Dreams ; van de Castle 1994). Aristotle ( On Dreams ) thought some dreams are caused by indigestion, and Hobbes adopted this view, claiming different kinds of dreams could be traced to different bodily sensations. For instance, “lying cold breedeth Dreams of Feare, and raiseth the thought and Image of some fearfull object” (Hobbes 1651: 91).

Appeals to the bodily sources of dreaming became especially popular in the 19 th and early 20 th centuries. Many believed specific dream themes such as flying were linked to sleeping position (Macnish 1838; Scherner 1861; Vold 1910/1912; Ellis 1911) and realizing, in sleep, that one’s feet are not touching the ground (Bergson 1914).

There were also attempts to explain the phenomenology of dreaming by appealing to the absence of outward movement. The lack of appropriate feedback and of movement and touch sensations was thought to cause dreams of being unable to move (Bradley 1894) or of trying but failing to do something (Gregory 1918).

Some proponents of the “ Leibreiztheorie ” (or somatic-stimulus theory) of dreaming attempted to go beyond anecdotal observations to conduct controlled experiments. Weygandt (1893) investigated the influence of various factors including breathing, blood circulation, temperature changes, urge to urinate, sleeping position, and visual or auditory stimulation during sleep on dream content (see Schredl 2010 for details). Singer (1924) proposed experiments on stimulus incorporation in dreams can inform claims on the ontology of dreaming: If dreams are sensations, a particular auditory stimulus should increase the frequency of dreams in nearby sleepers as well as the frequency of sound in their dreams, and it should decrease the range of quality and intensity of these dreams, making them overall more similar and predictable.

Newer studies provide evidence for the incorporation of external stimuli in dreams, including light flashes, sounds, sprays of water applied to the skin (Dement & Wolpert 1958), thermal (Baldridge 1966), electrical (Koulack 1969), and verbal stimuli (Berger 1963; Breger et al. 1971; Hoelscher et al., 1981), as well as blood pressure cuff stimulation on the leg (Nielsen et al. 1995; Sauvageau et al. 1998).

Muscular activity also often leaves its mark on dreams. It occurs throughout sleep but is especially frequent in REM sleep, mostly in the form of twitching but occasionally also in the form of larger, seemingly goal-directed movements (Blumberg 2010; Blumberg & Plumeau 2016). The relation between outward and dream movements is complex: in some cases, outward movements might mirror dream movements, while in others, sensory feedback might prompt dream imagery (Windt 2018).

Generally, it seems external and bodily stimuli can be related to varying degrees to dream and sleep onset imagery (Nielsen 2017; Windt 2018; Windt et al. 2016). Some of these cases appear to fit the concept of illusion, as in when the sound of the alarm clock is experienced, in a dream, as a siren, or when blood pressure cuff inflation on the leg leads to dreams of wearing strange shoes (Windt 2018; for these and other examples, see Nielsen et al. 1995). In other cases, such as when blood pressure cuff stimulation on the leg prompts a dream of seeing someone else’s leg being run over, describing this as illusory misperception might be less straightforward.

Saying that dreams can be prompted by external stimuli and that in some cases these are best described as illusions is different from the stronger claim, sometimes advanced by historical proponents of somatic-stimulus theory, that dreams generally are caused by external or bodily stimuli. As an example of the stronger claim, consider Wundt’s proposal that the

ideas which arise in dreams come, at least to a great extent, from sensations, especially from those of the general sense, and are therefore mostly illusions of fancy, probably only seldom pure memory ideas which hence become hallucinations. (Wundt 1896: 179)

This claim is likely too strong. It is also likely that appeals to external or bodily stimuli on their own cannot fully explain dream imagery, including when and how external stimuli are incorporated in dreams. Sensory incorporation in dreams is often hard to predict and indirect; associated imagery seems related not just to stimulus intensity, but also to short- and long term memories. A full explanation of dream content additionally has to take the cognitive and memory sources of dreaming into account (Windt 2018; Nielsen 2017; cf. Silberer 1919).

The most important rival to the hallucination view is that dreams are imaginative experiences (Liao & Gendler 2019; Thomas 2014). This can mean dream imagery involves imaginings rather than percepts (including hallucinations or illusions; McGinn 2004), that dream beliefs are imaginative and not real beliefs (Sosa 2007), or both (Ichikawa 2008, 2009). An important advantage is that by assimilating dreams to commonplace mental states such as waking fantasy and daydreaming, rather than a rare and often pathological occurrence such as hallucinations, it provides a more unified account of mental life (Stone 1984). However, the reasons for adopting the imagination view are diverse, and dreams have been proposed to resemble imaginings and differ from perception along a number of dimensions (e.g. McGinn 2004, 2005a,b; Thomas 2014). This issue is complicated by the fact that there is little agreement on the definition of imagination and its relation to perception (Kind 2013).

One way is to deny dreams involve presence or the feeling of being in a world, which many believe is central to waking perception. Imagination theorists compare the sense in which we feel present in our dreams to cognitive absorption, as when we are lost in a novel, film, or vivid daydream (Sartre 1940; McGinn 2004; but see Hering 1947; Globus 1987). Some argue that reflexive consciousness or meta-awareness (as in lucid dreams) interrupts cognitive absorption and terminates the ongoing dream (Sartre 1940), essentially denying lucid dreams are possible.

Another issue is whether dreams are subject to the will (Ichikawa 2009). Imagination is often characterized as active and under our control (Wittgenstein 1967: 621, 633), involving “a special effort of the mind” (Descartes 1641: VI, 2), whereas perception is passive. Because dreams just seem to happen to us without being under voluntary control, they present an important challenge for the imagination view. Ichikawa (2009) argues lucid control dreams show dreams are generally subject to the will even where they are not under deliberate control.

Dreams are widely described as more indeterminate than waking perception (James 1890: 47; Stone 1984). In scientific dream research, vagueness is regarded as one of three main subtypes of bizarreness (Hobson 1988; Revonsuo & Salmivalli 1995). An example are dream characters who are identified not by their behavior or looks, but by just knowing (Kahn et al. 2000, 2002; Revonsuo & Tarkko 2002). Dreams are also attention-dependent and lack foreground-background structure (Thompson 2014); while it is tempting to construe the dream world as rich in detail, there is no more to dreams than meets the eye, and many think dream experience is exhausted by what is the focus of selective attention (Hunter 1983; Thompson 2014).

Indeterminacy is also related to the question of whether we dream in color or in black and white. Based on a review of historical and recent studies, Schwitzgebel (2002, 2011) argues there has been a shift in theories on dream color that coincides with the rise first of black-and-white and then color television. He argues it is unlikely that dreams themselves changed from colored to black and white and back to colored, proposing that a change in opinion is a more plausible explanation. Maybe dreams were either black and white or colored all along; or maybe they are indeterminate with respect to color, as may be the case for imagined or fictional objects; were this the case, it would strengthen the imagination view (Ichikawa 2009). Schwitzgebel’s main point is that reports of colored dreaming are unreliable and our opinions about dreams can be mistaken (but see Windt 2013, 2015a). This relates to Schwitzgebel’s (2011; Hurlburt & Schwitzgebel 2007) general skepticism about the reliability of introspection.

The issue of dream color has led to a number of follow-up studies (Schwitzgebel 2003; Schwitzgebel et al. 2006; Murzyn 2008; Schredl et al. 2008; Hoss 2010). They suggest most people dream in color and a small percentage describe grayscale or even mixed dreams (Murzyn 2008) or dreams involving moderate color saturation (Rechtschaffen and Buchignani 1992). Indeterminacy is rarely reported.

The imagination view has consequences for Cartesian dream skepticism. If dream pain does not feel like real pain, there is a fail-safe way to determine whether one is now dreaming: one need only pinch oneself (Nelson 1966; Stone 1984; but see Hodges & Carter 1969; Kantor 1970). As Locke put it,

if our dreamer pleases to try, whether the glowing heat of a glass furnace, be barely a wandering imagination in a drowsy man’s fancy, by putting his hand into it, he may perhaps be wakened into a certainty greater than he could wish, that it is something more than bare imagination. (Locke 1689: IV.XI.8)

If dreaming feels different from waking, this raises the question why we tend to describe dreams in the same terms as waking perception. Maybe this is because most people haven’t thought about these matters and they would find the imagination view plausible if they considered it (Ichikawa 2009). Or maybe

it is just because we all know that dreams are throughout un like waking experiences that we can safely use ordinary expressions in the narration of them. (Austin 1962: 42)

Some authors classify dreams as imaginings while acknowledging they feel like perceiving. For example, Hobbes describes dreams as “the imaginations of them that sleep” (Hobbes 1651: 90), and imagination as a “ decaying sense ” (Hobbes 1651: 88). Yet he also uses the concepts of imagination and fancy to describe perception and argues “their appearance to us is Fancy, the same waking, that dreaming” (Hobbes 1651: 86).

In the scientific literature, the imagination view is complemented by cognitive theories. Foulkes (1978: 5) describes dreaming as a form of thinking with its own grammar and syntax, but allows that dream imagery is sufficently perception-like to deceive us. Domhoff’s neurocognitive model of dreaming (2001, 2003) emphasizes the dependence of dreaming on visuospatial skills and on a network including the association areas of the forebrain. The theory draws from findings on the partial or global cessation of dreaming following brain lesions (cf. Solms 1997, 2000), evidence that dreaming develops gradually and in tandem with visuospatial skills in children (Foulkes 1993a, 1999; but see Resnick et al. 1994), and results from dream content analysis supporting the continuity of dreaming with waking concerns and memories (the so-called continuity hypothesis ; see Domhoff 2001, 2003; Schredl & Hofmann 2003; Schredl 2006; see also Nir & Tononi 2010).

A number of researchers have begun to consider dreaming in the context of theories of mind wandering. Mind wandering is frequent in waking and involves spontaneous thoughts that unfold dynamically and are only weakly constrained by ongoing tasks and environmental demands (Schooler et al. 2011; Smallwood & Schooler 2015; Christoff et al. 2016). Based on phenomenological and neurophysiological similarities, dreams have been proposed to be an intensified form of waking mind wandering (Pace-Schott 2007, 2013; Domhoff 2011; Wamsley 2013; Fox et al. 2013). This basic idea seems to have been anticipated by Leibniz, who noted that the spontaneous formation of visions in dreams surpasses the capacity of our waking imagination (Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters , Vol. I, 177–178).

The analogy between dreams and waking mind wandering has been discussed in the context of cognitive agency. Metzinger (2013a,b, 2015) describes dreams and waking mind wandering as involving a cyclically recurring loss of mental autonomy, or the ability to deliberately control one’s conscious thought processes. Dreams and waking mind wandering are not mental actions but unintentional mental behaviors, comparable to subpersonal processes such as breathing or heartbeat. Because dreaming and waking mind wandering make up a the majority of our conscious mental lives, he argues that cognitive agency and mental autonomy are the exception, not the rule.

This raises the question of how to make sense of lucid control dreams, which involve both meta-awareness and agency. Windt and Voss (2018) argue that in such cases, spontaneous processes including imagery formation co-exist alongside more deliberate, top-down control; they also argue metacognitive insight and control themselves can have spontaneous elements. This suggests spontaneity and control are not opposites, but a more complex account is needed. Possibly, certain dreams and instances of waking mind wandering can be both spontaneous and agentive.

The analogy with mind wandering might help move forward the debate on the ontology of dreaming. In this debate, a common assumption is that dreams can be categorized as either hallucinatory or imaginative. Yet the application of these terms to dreams quickly runs into counterexamples and it is unclear they are mutually exclusive. One option is pluralism (Rosen 2018b), in which some aspects of dreaming are hallucinatory, others imaginative, and yet again others illusory. Another is that dreams are sui generis, combining aspects associated with wake states such as hallucinating, imagining, or perceiving in a novel manner without mimicking them completely. Windt (2015a) proposes that mind wandering, which describes a range of mental states loosely characterized by their spontaneous and dynamic character, might be particularly suitable for the characterization of dreaming precisely because that term leaves open more specific questions on the phenomenology of dreaming, allowing for variation in control, determinacy, and so on. This might be a good starting point for describing what is unique about dreaming while also acknowledging continuities across sleep-wake states and capitalizing on the strengths of the hallucination, illusion, imagination, and cognitive views.

The second strand of the imagination view argues that dream beliefs are not real beliefs, but propositional imaginings. This may or may not be combined with the claim that dream imagery is imaginative rather than perceptual (Sosa 2007; Ichikawa 2009).

Denying that dream beliefs have the status of real beliefs only makes sense before the background of a specific account of what beliefs are and how they are distinguished from other mental states such as delusions or propositional imaginings. For instance, Ichikawa (2009) argues that if we follow interpretationist or dispositionalist accounts of belief, dream beliefs fall short of real beliefs. He claims dream beliefs lack connection with perceptual experience and fail to motivate actions; consequently, they do not have the same functional role as real beliefs. Moreover, we cannot ascribe dream beliefs to a person by observing them lying asleep in bed. Dream beliefs are often inconsistent with longstanding waking beliefs and acquired and discarded without any process of belief revision (Ichikawa 2009).

This analysis of dream beliefs has consequences for skepticism. If dream beliefs are propositional imaginings, then we do not falsely believe while dreaming that we are now awake, but only imagine that we do (Sosa 2007). It is not clear though that this protects us from deception. If dream beliefs fall short of real beliefs, this might even make the specter of dream deception more worrisome: in mistaking dream beliefs for the real thing, we would now be deceived about the status of our own mental states (Ichikawa 2008).

It is also not clear whether the same type of argument extends to mental states other than beliefs. As Lewis points out, a person might

in fact believe or realize in the course of a dream that he was dreaming, and even if we said that, in such case, he only dreamt that he was dreaming, this still leaves it possible for someone who is asleep to entertain at the time the thought that he is asleep. (Lewis 1969: 133)

Mental states other than believing such as entertaining, thinking, or minimally appraisive instances of taking for granted might be sufficient for deception (Reed 1979).

The debate about dream beliefs is paralleled by a debate about whether delusions are beliefs or imaginings (see Currie 2000; Currie & Ravenscroft 2002; McGinn 2004; Bayne & Pacherie 2005; Bortolotti 2009; Gendler 2013). Both debates might plausibly inform each other, especially as dreams are sometimes proposed to be delusional (Hobson 1999).

3. Dreaming and theories of consciousness

Dreams are a global state of consciousness in which experience arises under altered behavioral and neurophysiological conditions as compared to standard wakefulness; unlike other altered states of consciousness (such as drug-induced or deep meditative states) and pathological wake states (such as psychosis or neurological syndromes), dreams occur spontaneously and regularly in healthy subjects. For both reasons, many regard dreams as a test case for theories of consciousness or even an ideal model system for consciousness research (Churchland 1988; Revonsuo 2006).

Existing proposals differ on the phenomenology of dreaming: referring to dream bizarreness, Churchland describes dream experience as robustly different from waking, whereas Revonsuo argues dreaming is similar to waking and the purest form of experience:

the dreaming brain brings out the phenomenal level of organization in a clear and distinct form. Dreaming is phenomenality pure and simple, untouched by external physical stimulation or behavioural activity. (Revonsuo 2006: 75)

Revonsuo argues dreaming reveals the basic, state-independent structure of consciousness to be immersive: “dreaming depicts consciousness first and foremost as a subjective world- for-me ” (Revonsuo 2006: 75). This leads him to introduce the “world-simulation metaphor of consciousness”, according to which consciousness itself is essentially simulational and dreamlike. This is taken to support internalism about conscious experience.

This latter claim is also contentious. Noë (2004: 213) argues that phenomenological differences between dreaming and waking (such as greater instability of visual dream imagery) result from the lack of dynamic interaction with the environment in dreams. He proposes this shows that neural states are sufficient for dreaming but denies they are also sufficient for perceptual experience.

A possible problem for both views is their reliance on background assumptions about the phenomenology of dreaming and its disconnection from environmental stimuli and bodily sensations. Windt (2015a, 2018) argues both internalism and externalism mistakenly assume dreams to be isolated from external sensory input and own-body perception; she believes both the phenomenology of dreaming and its correlation with external stimuli are complex and variable. She argues the analysis of dreaming does not clearly support either side in the debate on internalism vs externalism (but see Rosen 2018a). Generally, in the absence of a well worked out theory of dreaming and its sleep-stage and neural correlates, proposals for using dreaming as a model system or test case run the risk of relying on an oversimplified description of the target phenomenon (Windt & Noreika 2011).

Recent accounts appealing to generative models and predictive processing (Clark 2013b; Hohwy 2013) suggest a new, unified account of perception, imagination, and dreaming. In these accounts, different mental states, including perception and action, embody different strategies of hypothesis testing and prediction error minimization. Perception is the attempt to model the hidden external causes of sensory stimuli; action involves keeping the internal model stable while changing the sensory input. Clark argues that on such a model,

systems that know how to perceive an object as a cat are thus systems that, ipso facto , are able to use a top-down cascade to bring about the kinds of activity pattern that would be characteristic of the presence of a cat. […] Perceivers like us, if this is correct, are inevitably potential dreamers and imaginers too. Moreover, they are beings who, in dreaming and imagining, are deploying many of the very same strategies and resources used in ordinary perception. (Clark 2013a: 764)

Predictive processing accounts have also been used to explain specific features of dreaming. Bizarreness has been associated with the comparative lack of external stimulus processing, implying dream imagery is relatively unconstrained by prediction errors (cf. Hobson & Friston 2012; Fletcher & Frith 2008; Bucci & Grasso 2017). Windt (2018) suggests a predictive processing account of dream imagery generation that links bodily self-experience to own-body perception and subtle motor behaviors such as twitching in REM sleep (Blumberg 2010; Blumberg & Plumeau 2016). She argues that movement sensations in dreams, in relation to REM-sleep related muscle twitching, involve a form of bodily self-sampling in which coordinated muscular activity contributes to the generation and maintenance of a body model. This is important because in predictive processing accounts neither the bodily nor the external causes of sensory inputs are known; at the same time, having an accurate body model is a prerequisite for action, requiring the system to disambiguate between self- and other generated changes to sensory inputs. Especially in early development, sleep might provide the ideal conditions for exploring one’s own body via subtle but coordinated muscular activity while processing of visual and auditory stimuli is reduced.

Dreams have also been suggested as a test case for whether phenomenal consciousness can be divorced from cognitive access (e.g., Block 2007; but see Cohen & Dennett 2011). Sebastián (2014a) argues that dreams provide empirical evidence that conscious experience can occur independently of cognitive access. This is because during (non-lucid) REM-sleep dreams, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) as the most plausible mechanism underlying cognitive access is selectively deactivated (see also Pantani et al. 2018). This would challenge theories linking conscious experience to access, such as higher-order-thought theory (Sebastián 2014b). However, both the hypoactivation of the dlPCF in REM sleep and its association with cognitive access have been debated. Fazekas and Nemeth (2018) suggest that certain kinds of cognitive access may be independent of dlPFC activation, necessitating a more complex account.

Dreaming has been suggested as a model system not just of waking consciousness in general, but also of psychotic wake states in particular. The analogy between dreaming and madness has a long philosophical history (Plato, Phaedrus ; Kant 1766; Schopenhauer 1847) and finds particularly stark expression in Hobson’s claim that “dreaming is not a model of a psychosis. It is a psychosis. It’s just a healthy one” (Hobson 1999: 44). Gottesmann (2006) proposes dreaming as a neurophysiological model of schizophrenia. There is a rich discussion on the theoretical and methodological implications of dream research for psychiatry (see Scarone et al. 2007; d’Agostino et al. 2013; see Windt & Noreika 2011 as well as the other papers in this special issue) and a number of studies have investigated differences in dream reports from schizophrenic and healthy subjects (Limosani et al. 2011a,b).

Rather than likening dreaming to waking in general or specific wake states such as psychosis, there have also been attempts to compare specific dream phenomena to wake-state delusions. Gerrans (2012, 2013, 2014) focuses on character misidentification in dreams and delusions of hyperfamiliarity (such as the Frégoli delusion, in which strangers are mistakenly identified as family members, and déjà vu ) to argue that anomalous experience and faulty reality testing both play a role in delusion formation. Rosen (2015) analyzes instances of thought insertion and of auditory hallucinations, which are key symptoms of schizophrenia, to raise broader questions about the altered sense of agency in dreams as compared to waking.

Philosophers have focused almost exclusively on dreaming, largely leaving to the side questions about dreamless sleep including whether it is uniformly unconscious. In recent years there has been a surge of interest in the possibility of dreamless sleep experience and foundational issues about the definition of sleep and waking. This has been paralleled by growing interest in dreaming in NREM sleep.

Conceptually, interest in dreamless sleep experience has been facilitated by the precise definition of dreaming offered by simulation views (Revonsuo et al. 2015). If dreams are immersive sleep experiences characterized by their here -and- now structure, it makes sense to ask whether this is true for all or just a subset of sleep-related experiences and whether non-immersive sleep experiences exist. By contrast, if dreaming is broadly identified with any conscious mentation in sleep (Pagel et al. 2001), there is no conceptual space for dreamless sleep experience.

Following Thompson's (2014, 2015) discussion of dreamless sleep in Indian and Buddhist philosophy, Windt and colleagues (2016; see also Windt 2015b) introduce a framework for different kinds of dreamless sleep experience ranging from thinking and isolated imagery, perception, or bodily sensations, where these lack integration into a scene, to minimal kinds of experience lacking imagery or specific thought contents. A possible example of minimal phenomenal experience in sleep are white dreams, where people report having had experiences during sleep but cannot remember any details. Taken at face value, some white dream reports might describe experiences that lack reportable content (Windt 2015b); others might describe forgotten dreams or dreams with degraded content (Fazekas et al. 2018). Another example are reports of witnessing dreamless sleep, as described in certain meditation practices. This state is said to involve non-conceptual awareness of sleep, again in the absence of imagery or specific thought contents, and loss of sense of self (Thompson 2014, 2015). Some schools in Buddhist philosophy explain claims of deep and dreamless sleep by saying we never fully lose consciousness in sleep (Prasad 2000, 66; and Thompson 2014, 2015).

Empirically, interest in dreamless sleep experience is paralleled by increasing interest in experiences in NREM sleep (Fazekas et al. 2018). Most researchers now accept that dreaming is not confined to REM sleep, but also occurs at sleep onset and in NREM sleep. The deeper stages of NREM sleep are particularly interesting as they involve roughly similar proportions of dreaming, unconscious sleep, and white dreams (Noreika et al. 2009: Siclari et al. 2013, 2017). In the search for the neural correlates of dreaming vs unconscious dreamless sleep, this makes comparisons within the same sleep stage possible and avoids confounds involved in comparing presumably dreamful REM sleep with presumably dreamless NREM sleep. Findings suggest that activity in the same parietal hot zone underlies dreaming in both NREM and REM sleep (Siclari et al. 2017).

Where sleep and dream research have traditionally tried to identify the sleep stage correlates of dreaming, newer research suggests local changes occurring independently of sleep stages might in fact be more relevant. Traditionally regarded as global, whole-brain phenomena, there is now increasing evidence that sleep itself is locally driven, and local changes in sleep depth might be associated with changes in sleep-related experience (Siclari & Tononi 2017; Andrillon et al. 2019). While sleep and dream research are often considered as separate fields, changes in how sleep in general and sleep stages in particular are defined appear closely associated with changes in the theoretical conception of dreaming and its empirical investigation.

Historically, discoveries about dreaming have precipitated changing conceptions of sleep (for an excellent history of the study of sleep and dreaming, see Kroker 2007). Following Aristotle ( On Sleeping and Waking ), sleep was traditionally defined in negative terms as the absence of wakefulness and perception. This is still reflected in Malcolm’s assumption that “to a person who is sound asleep, ‘dead to the world’, things cannot even seem” (Malcolm 1956: 26). With the discovery of REM sleep, sleep came to be regarded as a heterogeneous phenomenon characterized by the cyclic alteration of different sleep stages. REM sleep was now considered as “neither sleeping nor waking. It was obviously a third state of the brain, as different from sleep as sleep is from wakefulness” (Jouvet 1999: 5). The folk-psychological dichotomy between sleep and wakefulness now seemed oversimplified and empirically implausible. At the same time dreaming, which had previously been considered as an intermediate state of half-sleeping and half-waking, came to be regarded as a genuine sleep phenomenon, but narrowed to REM sleep. Today, the framework for describing dreams and other sleep-related experiences is more precise, but dreaming has also been cast adrift from REM sleep.

A closely associated issue is how to define waking. Crowther’s (2018) capacitation thesis casts waking consciousness as a state in which the individual is fully switched on to their environment, but also to their own epistemic (cf. O’Shaugnessy 2002) and agentive potential; the waking individual is empowered to act and think in certain ways, though this potential need not be actualized. By contrast, dreaming is an “imagining-of consciousness” (O’Shaughnessy 2002: 430) and consciousness is conceptually tied to wakefulness. Because in lucid dreams, the epistemic and agentive profile of waking is at least partly realized, they might, according to Crowther, be regarded as closer to waking than nonlucid dreams.

This account of waking and sleep may also have consequences for the imagination model of dreaming and dream skepticism (Soteriou 2017). As in the imagination model, dreaming would be passive and action, including cognitive agency, would be tied to waking. If dreaming nonetheless involved passive episodes of imagining oneself to be active, one would be unable to tell that one were dreaming and imagining, as this insight would require the exercise of real agency. The sceptical consequence would be that when dreaming, one would lose agency as well as the capacity to gain insight into one’s current state. Yet our ability to know we are waking when waking would be unscathed; according to Soteriou, waking would thus have an epistemic function connected to the capacity to exercise agency over our mental lives.

Finally, definitions of consciousness themselves are bound up with conceptions of sleep and dreaming. As dreaming went from a state whose experiential status was doubted to being widely recognized as a second global state of consciousness, consciousness sometimes came to be defined contrastively as that which disappears in deep, dreamless sleep and reappears in waking and dreaming (Searle 2000; Tononi 2008). In light of dreamless sleep experience, such definitions are problematic (Thompson 2014, 2015; Windt 2015b; Windt et al. 2016). Dreamless sleep experience has been proposed to be particularly relevant for understanding minimal phenomenal experience, or the conditions under which the simplest kind of conscious experience arises (Windt 2015b). The investigation of dreamless sleep might thus shed light on the transition from unconscious sleep to sleep-related experience.

We almost always have a self in dreams, though this self can sometimes be a slightly different (e.g. older or younger) version of our waking self or even a different person entirely. Dreams therefore raise interesting questions about the identity between the dream and waking self. Locke (1689) invites us to imagine two men alternating in turns between sleep and wakefulness and sharing one continuously thinking soul (Locke 1689: II.I.12). He argues that if one man retained no memory of the soul’s thoughts and perceptions while it was linked to the other man’s body, they would be distinct persons. His position is that personal identity depends on psychological continuity, including recall: in the absence of recall, as illustrated by the toy example of two people sharing one soul, continuous conscious thinking does not suffice for identity. Locke also rejects the possibility of unrecalled dreams and the idea that we dream throughout sleep, remembering only a small proportion of our dreams (Locke 1689: II.I.19).

Valberg distinguishes between the subject of the dream (i.e., the dream self) and the sleeping person who is the dreamer of the dream and recalls it upon awakening (Valberg 2007). He argues that awakening from a dream involves crossing a chasm between discrete worlds with discrete spaces and times; it does not make sense to say that “the ‘I’ at these times [is] a single individual who crosses from one world to the other” (Valberg 2007: 69). According to Valberg, this is relevant to dream skepticism because there is no simple way to make sense of the claims that it is I who emerge from a dream or that I was the victim of dream deception.

Vicarious dreams, or dreams in which the protagonist of the dream seems to be a different person from the dreamer, are particularly puzzling with respect to identity. They may even raise the question of whether the dream self has an independent existence (Rosen & Sutton 2013: 1047). Such dreams are superficially similar to cases in which we imagine being another person, but according to Rosen and Sutton require a different explanation: in the case of dreaming, the imagined person’s thoughts are not framed as diverging from one’s own and one does not retain one’s own perspective in addition to the imagined one; in nonlucid dreams, only the perspective of the dream’s protagonist is retained.

The dream self is also at the center of simulation views of dreaming, which define dreaming via its immersive, here and now character as the experience of a self in a world. This leads to further questions about the phenomenology of self-experience in dreams and how it is different from waking self-experience. Different versions of the simulation view focus on different aspects of self- and world experience in dreams, ranging from social simulation (Revonsuo et al. 2015) to the typical features of selfhood in dreams (Revonsuo 2005, 2006, Metzinger 2003, 2009) to the minimal conditions for experiencing oneself as a self in dreams and what this tells us about minimal phenomenal selfhood in general (Windt 2015a, 2018). Yet these different versions of the simulation view are largely complementary and together have forged unity in a field that was previously hampered by lack of agreement about the definition of dreaming. They also integrate the philosophy of dreaming and scientific dream research.

As so often in debates about dreaming, there is disagreement about basic phenomenological questions. Revonsuo (2005) describes self-experience including bodily experience in dreams as identical to waking, whereas Metzinger (2003, 2009; see also Windt & Metzinger 2007) argues that important layers of waking self-experience (such as autobiographical memory, agency, a stable first-person perspective, metacognitive insight, and self-knowledge) are missing in nonlucid dreams. He argues this is due to the cognitive and mnemonic deficit that characterizes nonlucid dreams (cf. Hobson et al. 2000). Windt (2015a) analyzes the range of cognitive and bodily self-experience in dreams, both of which she describes as variable. She argues that in a majority of cases, dreams are weakly phenomenally embodied states in which bodily experience is largely related to movement sensations but a detailed and integrated body representation is lacking; instead, bodily experience in dreams is largely indeterminate (for an attempt to test this empirically, see Koppehele-Gossel et al. 2016). She proposes this is because dreams are also weakly functionally embodied states, in which the specific pattern of bodily experience reflects altered processing of bodily sensations (as in the illusion view). She also analyzes instances of bodiless dreams, in which dreamers say they experienced themselves as disembodied entities, to argue that self-experience can be reduced to pure spatiotemporal-self-location (Windt 2010); she proposes these cases can help identify the conditions for the emergence of minimal phenomenal selfhood (Blanke & Metzinger 2009; see also Metzinger 2013b).

How the phenomenology of dreaming compares to waking and what to say about how the dream self relates to the waking self bears on questions about the moral status of dreams. For Augustine ( Confessions ) dreams were a cause of moral concern because of their indistinguishability from waking life. What particularly worried him about dreams of sexual acts was their vividness, as well as the feeling of pleasure and seeming acquiescence or consent on the part of the dreamer. He concluded, however, that the transition from sleep to wakefulness involves a radical chasm, enabling the dreamer to awaken with a clear conscience and absolving them from taking responsibility for their dream actions.

What exactly Augustine thought the chasm between dreaming and waking consists in allows for different interpretations (Matthews 1981). Firstly, if the dream and waking self are not identical, then waking Augustine is not morally responsible for dream-Augustine’s actions. Secondly, actions performed in dreams might be morally irrelevant because they did not really happen. And thirdly, assuming that moral responsibility requires the ability to act otherwise, dreams provide no grounds for moral concern because we cannot refrain from having certain types of dreams.

The issue of dream immorality may also present a choice point between different accounts of moral evaluation. Where internalists assume the moral status of a person’s actions is entirely determined by internal factors such as intentions and motives, externalists look beyond these to the effects of actions. Driver (2007) argues that the absurdity of dream immorality itself should count against purely internalist accounts; yet she also acknowledges this absurdity is not a necessary feature of dreams.

Central to the question of dream immorality is the status of dreams as actions rather than mere behaviors. Mullane (1965) argues that while we don’t have full control over our dreams, they are not completely involuntary either; as is the case for blushing, considerable effort is required to attain control over our dreams and in some cases they can even be considered as actions. That lucid dream control is, to some extent, a learnable skill (Stumbrys et al. 2014) lends some support to this claim.

6. The meaning of dreams and the functions of dreaming

Philosophical discussions of dreaming tend to focus on (a) dream deception and (b) questions about the ontology of dreaming, its moral status, etc., that tend to intersect with dream skepticism. By contrast, the main source of interest in dreams outside of philosophy traditionally has been dream interpretation and whether dreams are a source of knowledge and insight. Historically, the epistemic status of dreams and the use of prophetic and diagnostic dreams was not just a theoretical, but a practical problem (Barbera 2008). Different types of dreams were distinguished by their putative epistemic value. Artemidorus, for instance, used the term enhypnion to refer to dreams that merely reflect the sleeper’s current bodily or psychological state and hence do not merit further interpretation, whereas he reserved the term oneiron for meaningful and symbolic dreams of divine origin.

The practice of dream interpretation was famously attacked by Aristotle in On Prophecy in Sleep . He denied that dreams are of divine origin, but allowed that occasionally, small affections of the sensory organs as might stem from distant events that cannot be perceived in waking are perceptible in the quiet of sleep. He also believed such dreams were mostly likely to occur in dullards whose minds resemble an empty desert – an assessment that was not apt to encourage interest in dreams (Kroker 2007: 37). A similarly negative view was held by early modern philosophers who believed dreams were often the source of superstitious beliefs (Hobbes 1651; Kant 1766; Schopenhauer 1847).

In Freudian dream theory, dream interpretation once more assumed a prominent role as the royal road to knowledge of the unconscious. This was associated with claims about the psychic sources of dreaming. Freud (1899) also rejected the influence of external or bodily sources, as championed by contemporary proponents of somatic-stimulus theory.

In the neuroscience of dreaming, Hobson famously argued that dreams are the product of the random, brain-stem driven activation of the brain during sleep (Hobson 1988) and at best enable personal insights in the same way as a Rorschach test (Hobson et al. 2000). Dennett (1991) illustrates the lack of design underlying the production of dream narratives through the “party game of psychoanalysis”, which involves an aimless game of question-and-answer. In the game, players follow simple rules to jointly produce narratives that can seem symbolic and meaningful, even though no intelligent and deliberate process of narration was involved.

Even if we grant that dreams are not messages from a hidden entity in need of decoding, this does not imply that dream interpretation cannot be a personally meaningful source of insight and creativity (Hobson & Wohl 2005). Whether and under which conditions, and following which methods, dream interpretation can lead to personally significant insights is an empirical question that is only beginning to be investigated systematically (see Edwards et al. 2013).

Finally, throughout history, views on the epistemic status of dreams and the type of knowledge to be gained from dream interpretation (e.g., knowledge about the future, diagnosis of physical illness, or insights about one’s current concerns) often changed in tandem with views on the origin and sources of dreaming, which gradually moved from divine origins and external sources, via the body, to the unconscious, and finally to the brain.

Different theories on the functions of dreaming have been proposed and the debate is ongoing. An important distinction is between the functions of sleep stages and the functions of dreaming. Well-documented functions of REM sleep include thermoregulation and the development of cortical structures in birds and mammals, as well as neurotransmitter repletion, the reconstruction and maintenance of little-used brain circuits, the structural development of the brain in early developmental phases, as well as the preparation of a repertoire of reflexive or instinctive behaviors (Hobson 2009). Yet none of these functions are obviously linked to dreaming. An exception is protoconsciousness theory, in which REM sleep plays an important role in foetal development by providing a virtual world model even before the emergence of full-blown consciousness (Hobson 2009: 808) .

Numerous studies have investigated the contribution of sleep to memory consolidation, with different sleep stages promoting different types of memories (Diekelmann et al. 2009; Walker 2009). However, only a few studies have investigated the relationship between dream content and memory consolidation in sleep (for a review, see Nielsen & Stenstrom 2005). Dreams rarely involve episodic replay of waking memories (Fosse et al. 2003). The incorporation of memory sources seems to follow a specific temporal pattern in which recent memories are integrated with older but semantically related memories (Blagrove et al. 2011). Nielsen (2017) presents a model of how external and bodily stimuli on one hand and short- and long-term memories on the other hand form seemingly novel, complex, and dreamlike images at sleep onset; he proposes these microdreams shed light on the formation and sources of more complex dreams. There is also some evidence that dream imagery might be associated with memory consolidation and task performance after sleep, though this is preliminary (Wamsley & Stickgold 2009, 2010; Wamsley et al. 2010).

Prominent theories on the function of dreaming focus on bad dreams and nightmares. It has long been thought that dreaming contributes to emotional processing and that this is particularly obvious in the dreams of nightmare sufferers or in dreams following traumatic experiences (e.g., Hartmann 1998; Nielsen & Lara-Carrasco 2007; Levin & Nielsen 2009; Cartwright 2010; Perogamvros et al. 2013). Based on the high prevalence of negative emotions and threatening dream content, threat simulation theory suggests that the evolutionary function of dreaming lies in the simulation of ancestral threats and the rehearsal of threatening events and avoidance skills in dreams has an adaptive value by enhancing the individual’s chances of survival (see Revonsuo 2000; Valli 2008). A more recent proposal is social simulation theory, in which social imagery in dreams supports social cognition, bonds, and social skills. (Revonsuo et al. 2015).

An evolutionary perspective can also be fruitfully applied to specific aspects of dream phenomenology. According to the vigilance hypothesis , natural selection disfavored the occurrence of those types of sensations during sleep that would compromise vigilance (Symons 1993). Dream sounds, but also smells or pains might distract attention from the potentially dangerous surroundings of the sleeping subject, and the vigilance hypothesis predicts that they only rarely occur in dreams without causing awakening. By contrast, because most mammals sleep with their eyes closed and in an immobile position, vivid visual and movement hallucinations during sleep would not comprise vigilance and thus can occur in dreams without endangering the sleeping subject. Focusing on the stuff dreams are not made of might then be at least as important for understanding the function of dreaming as developing a positive account.

Finally, even if dreaming in general and specific types of dream content in particular were found to be strongly associated with specific cognitive functions, it would still be possible that dreams are mere epiphenomena of brain activity during sleep (Flanagan 1995, 2000). It is also possible that the function of dreams is not knowable (Springett 2019).

A particular problem for any theory on the function of dreaming is to explain why a majority of dreams are forgotten and how dreams can fulfill their putative function independently of recall. Crick and Mitchinson (1983) famously proposed that REM sleep “erases” or deletes surplus information and unnecessary memories, which would suggest that enhanced dream recall is counterproductive. Another problem is that dreaming can be lost selectively and independently of other cognitive deficits (Solms 1997, 2000).

Some of the problems that arise for theories on the functions of dreaming can be avoided if we do not assume that dreaming has a specific function, separate from the function(s) of conscious wakeful states. This depends on the broader taxonomy of dreaming in relation to wakeful states. For example, if dreaming is continuous with waking mind wandering, imagination, and/or own-body perception, we should not expect it to have a unique function, but rather to express a similar function as these wakeful states, perhaps to varying degrees. Nor should we expect dreams to have a single function; the functions of dreaming might be as varied and complex as those of consciousness, and given the complexity of the target phenomenon, the failure to pin down a single function should not be surprising (Windt 2015a).

Questions about dreaming in different areas of philosophy such as epistemology, ontology, philosophy of mind and cognitive science, and ethics are closely intertwined. Scientific evidence from sleep and dream research can meaningfully inform the philosophical discussion and has often done so in the past. The discussion of dreaming has also often functioned as a lens on broader questions about knowledge, morality, consciousness, and self. Long a marginalized area, the philosophy of dreaming and of sleep is central to important philosophical questions and increasingly plays an important role in interdisciplinary consciousness research, for example in the search for the neural correlates of conscious states, in conscious state taxonomies, and in research on the minimal conditions for phenomenal selfhood and conscious experience.

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belief | Berkeley, George | delusion | Descartes, René: epistemology | imagination | Locke, John | perception: the problem of | personal identity | personal identity: and ethics | Plato: on knowledge in the Theaetetus | sense data | skepticism | skepticism: and content externalism

Acknowledgments

I want to thank Regina Fabry and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and constructive criticism on an earlier version of this manuscript. And as always, I am greatly indebted to Stefan Pitz for his support.

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Verywell / Madelyn Goodnight

What Is a Dream Theory?

• The Role of Dreams
• Reflect the Unconscious
• Process Information
• Aid In Memory
• Spur Creativity
• Reflect Your Life
• Prepare and Protect
• Process Emotions
• Other Theories

Lucid Dreaming

Stress dreams.

A dream theory is a proposed explanation for why people dream that is backed by scientific evidence. Despite scientific inquiry, we still don't have a solid answer for why people dream. Some of the most notable theories are that dreaming helps us process memories and better understand our emotions , also providing a way to express what we want or to practice facing our challenges.

At a Glance

There is no single dream theory that fully explains all of the aspects of why we dream. The most prominent theory is that dreams help us to process and consolidate information from the previous day. However, other theories have suggested that dreams are critical for emotional processing, creativity, and self-knowledge.

Some theories suggest that dreams also have symbolic meanings that offer a glimpse into the unconscious mind. Keep reading to learn more about some of the best-known theories about why we dream.

7 Theories on Why We Dream

A dream theory focuses on understanding the nature and purpose of dreams. Studying dreams can be challenging since they can vary greatly in how they are remembered and what they are about.

Dreams include the images, thoughts, and emotions that are experienced during sleep. They can range from extraordinarily intense or emotional to very vague, fleeting, confusing, or even boring.

Some dreams are joyful, while others are frightening or sad. Sometimes dreams seem to have a clear narrative, while many others appear to make no sense at all.

There are many unknowns about dreaming and sleep, but what scientists do know is that just about everyone dreams every time they sleep, for a total of around two hours per night, whether they remember it upon waking or not .

Beyond what's in a particular dream, there is the question of why we dream at all. Below, we detail the most prominent theories on the purpose of dreaming and how these explanations can be applied to specific dreams.

How Do Scientists Study Dreams?

The question of why we dream has fascinated philosophers and scientists for thousands of years. Traditionally, dream content is measured by the subjective recollections of the dreamer upon waking. However, observation is also accomplished through objective evaluation in a lab.

In one study, researchers even created a rudimentary dream content map that was able to track what people dreamed about in real time using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) patterns. The map was then backed up by the dreamers' reports upon waking.

What Dream Theory Suggests About the Role of Dreams

Some of the more prominent dream theories suggest that the reason we dream is to:

• Consolidate memories
• Process emotions
• Express our deepest desires
• Gain practice confronting potential dangers

Many experts believe that we dream due to a combination of these reasons rather than any one particular theory. Additionally, while many researchers believe that dreaming is essential to mental, emotional, and physical well-being, some scientists suggest that dreams serve no real purpose at all.

The bottom line is that while many theories have been proposed, no single consensus has emerged about which dream theory best explains why we dream.

Dreaming during different phases of sleep may also serve unique purposes. The most vivid dreams happen during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep , and these are the dreams that we're most likely to recall. We also dream during non-rapid eye movement (non-REM) sleep, but those dreams are known to be remembered less often and have more mundane content.

Sigmund Freud's Dream Theory

Sigmund Freud’s theory of dreams suggests that dreams represent  unconscious desires, thoughts, wish fulfillment, and motivations. According to Freud, people are driven by repressed and unconscious longings, such as aggressive and sexual instincts .

While many of Freud's assertions have been debunked, research suggests there is a dream rebound effect, also known as dream rebound theory, in which suppression of a thought tends to result in dreaming about it.

What Causes Dreams to Happen?

In " The Interpretation of Dreams ," Freud wrote that dreams are "disguised fulfillments of repressed wishes." He also described two different components of dreams: manifest content (actual images) and latent content (hidden meaning).

Freud’s theory contributed to the rise and popularity of dream interpretation . While research has failed to demonstrate that the manifest content disguises the psychological significance of a dream, some experts believe that dreams play an important role in processing emotions and stressful experiences.

Activation-Synthesis Dream Theory

According to the activation-synthesis model of dreaming , which was first proposed by J. Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley, circuits in the brain become activated during REM sleep, which triggers the amygdala and hippocampus to create an array of electrical impulses. This results in a compilation of random thoughts, images, and memories that appear while dreaming.

When we wake, our active minds pull together the dream's various images and memory fragments to create a cohesive narrative.  

In the activation-synthesis hypothesis, dreams are a compilation of randomness that appear to the sleeping mind and are brought together in a meaningful way when we wake. In this sense, dreams may provoke the dreamer to make new connections, inspire useful ideas, or have creative epiphanies in their waking lives.

Self-Organization Dream Theory

According to the information-processing theory, sleep allows us to consolidate and process all of the information and memories that we have collected during the previous day. Some dream experts suggest that dreaming is a byproduct, or even an active part, of this experience processing.  

This model, known as the self-organization theory of dreaming , explains that dreaming is a side effect of brain neural activity as memories are consolidated during sleep.

During this process of unconscious information redistribution, it is suggested that memories are either strengthened or weakened. According to the self-organization theory of dreaming, while we dream, helpful memories are made stronger, while less useful ones fade away.

Research supports this theory, finding improvement in complex tasks when a person dreams about doing them. Studies also show that during REM sleep, low-frequency theta waves were more active in the frontal lobe, just like they are when people are learning, storing, and remembering information when awake.

Creativity and Problem-Solving Dream Theory

Another theory about dreams says that their purpose is to help us solve problems. In this creativity theory of dreaming, the unconstrained, unconscious mind is free to wander its limitless potential while unburdened by the often stifling realities of the conscious world. In fact, research has shown dreaming to be an effective promoter of creative thinking.

Scientific research and anecdotal evidence back up the fact that many people do successfully mine their dreams for inspiration and credit their dreams for their big "aha" moments.

The ability to make unexpected connections between memories and ideas that appear in your dreams often proves to be an especially fertile ground for creativity.

Continuity Hypothesis Dream Theory

Under the continuity hypothesis, dreams function as a reflection of a person's real life, incorporating conscious experiences into their dreams. Rather than a straightforward replay of waking life, dreams show up as a patchwork of memory fragments.

Still, studies show that non-REM sleep may be more involved with declarative memory (the more routine stuff), while REM dreams include more emotional and instructive memories.

In general, REM dreams tend to be easier to recall compared to non-REM dreams.

Under the continuity hypothesis, memories may be fragmented purposefully in our dreams as part of incorporating new learning and experiences into long-term memory . Still, there are many unanswered questions as to why some aspects of memories are featured more or less prominently in our dreams.

Rehearsal and Adaptation Dream Theory

The primitive instinct rehearsal and adaptive strategy theories of dreaming propose that we dream to better prepare ourselves to confront dangers in the real world. The dream as a social simulation function or threat simulation provides the dreamer a safe environment to practice important survival skills.

While dreaming, we hone our fight-or-flight instincts and build mental capability for handling threatening scenarios. Under the threat simulation theory, our sleeping brains focus on the fight-or-flight mechanism to prep us for life-threatening and/or emotionally intense scenarios including:

• Running away from a pursuer
• Falling over a cliff
• Showing up somewhere naked
• Going to the bathroom in public
• Forgetting to study for a final exam

This theory suggests that practicing or rehearsing these skills in our dreams gives us an evolutionary advantage in that we can better cope with or avoid threatening scenarios in the real world. This helps explain why so many dreams contain scary, dramatic, or intense content.

Emotional Regulation Dream Theory

The emotional regulation dream theory says that the function of dreams is to help us process and cope with our emotions or trauma in the safe space of slumber.

Research shows that the amygdala , which is involved in processing emotions, and the hippocampus , which plays a vital role in condensing information and moving it from short-term to long-term memory storage, are active during vivid, intense dreaming.

This illustrates a strong link between dreaming, memory storage, and emotional processing.

This theory suggests that REM sleep plays a vital role in emotional brain regulation. It also helps explain why so many dreams are emotionally vivid and why emotional or traumatic experiences tend to show up on repeat. Research has shown a connection between the ability to process emotions and the amount of REM sleep a person gets.

Sharing Dreams Promotes Connection

Talking about content similarities and common dreams with others may help promote belongingness and connection. Research notes heightened empathy among people who share their dreams with others, pointing to another way dreams can help us cope by promoting community and interpersonal support.

Other Theories About Why We Dream

Many other theories have been suggested to account for why we dream.

• One dream theory contends that dreams are the result of our brains trying to interpret external stimuli (such as a dog's bark, music, or a baby's cry) during sleep.
• Another theory uses a computer metaphor to account for dreams, noting that dreams serve to "clean up" clutter from the mind, refreshing the brain for the next day.
• The reverse-learning theory suggests that we dream to forget. Our brains have thousands of neural connections between memories—too many to remember them all—and that dreaming is part of "pruning" those connections.
• In the continual-activation theory, we dream to keep the brain active while we sleep, in order to keep it functioning properly.

Overfitted Dream Hypothesis

One recently introduced dream theory, known as the overfitted dream hypothesis, suggests that dreams are the brain's way of introducing random, disruptive data to help break up repetitive daily tasks and information. Researcher Erik Hoel suggests that such disruptions helps to keep the brain fit.

Lucid dreams are relatively rare dreams where the dreamer has awareness of being in their dream and often has some control over the dream content. Research indicates that around 50% of people recall having had at least one lucid dream in their lifetime and just over 10% report having them two or more times per month.

It is unknown why certain people experience lucid dreams more frequently than others. While experts are unclear as to why or how lucid dreaming occurs, preliminary research signals that the prefrontal and parietal regions of the brain play a significant role.

How to Lucid Dream

Many people covet lucid dreaming and seek to experience it more often. Lucid dreaming has been compared to virtual reality and hyper-realistic video games, giving lucid dreamers the ultimate self-directed dreamscape experience.

Potential training methods for inducing lucid dreaming include cognitive training, external stimulation during sleep, and medications. While these methods may show some promise, none have been rigorously tested or shown to be effective.

A strong link has been found between lucid dreaming and highly imaginative thinking and creative output. Research has shown that lucid dreamers perform better on creative tasks than those who do not experience lucid dreaming.

Stressful experiences tend to show up with great frequency in our dreams. Stress dreams may be described as sad, scary, and nightmarish .

Experts do not fully understand how or why specific stressful content ends up in our dreams, but many point to a variety of theories, including the continuity hypothesis, adaptive strategy, and emotional regulation dream theories to explain these occurrences. Stress dreams and mental health seem to go hand-in-hand.

• Daily stress shows up in dreams : Research has shown that those who experience greater levels of worry in their waking lives and people diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) report higher frequency and intensity of nightmares.
• Mental health disorders may contribute to stress dreams : Those with mental health disorders such as anxiety, bipolar disorder , and depression tend to have more distressing dreams, as well as more difficulty sleeping in general.
• Anxiety is linked to stress dreams : Research indicates a strong connection between anxiety and stressful dream content. These dreams may be the brain's attempt to help us cope with and make sense of these stressful experiences.

While many theories exist about why we dream, more research is needed to fully understand their purpose. Rather than assuming only one dream theory is correct, dreams likely serve various purposes. In reality, many of these dream theories may be useful for explaining different aspects of the dreaming process.

If you are concerned about your dreams and/or are having frequent nightmares , consider speaking to your doctor or consulting a sleep specialist.

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By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Essay on My Dreams and Goals

Students are often asked to write an essay on My Dreams and Goals in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on My Dreams and Goals

Introduction.

Dreams and goals are the driving forces of life. They provide a sense of purpose and direction, guiding us towards a fulfilling future.

My dreams are my inspiration. I dream of becoming a scientist, exploring the mysteries of the universe, and contributing to humanity’s progress.

To realize my dreams, I have set goals. My immediate goal is to excel in my studies, especially in science and mathematics, the pillars of my dream profession.

Dreams and goals are intertwined. They motivate us to strive, to grow, and to achieve our highest potential.

250 Words Essay on My Dreams and Goals

The essence of dreams and goals.

Dreams are the grand visions we have for our lives, the ideal scenarios we aspire to. They are the manifestation of our deepest desires and ambitions, often transcending the boundaries of reality. Goals, on the other hand, are the concrete steps we take towards realizing these dreams. They are realistic, measurable, and time-bound, providing a clear path towards our dreams.

The Interplay of Dreams and Goals

The relationship between dreams and goals is a symbiotic one. Dreams provide the motivation and inspiration for setting goals, while goals give dreams a tangible form. Goals are the stepping stones that bridge the gap between our current reality and our dream future.

Personal Dreams and Goals

As a college student, my dreams are a blend of professional success and personal fulfillment. I aspire to excel in my chosen field, making significant contributions to society. Concurrently, I yearn for a balanced life, rich in experiences and relationships. My goals, therefore, revolve around academic excellence, skill development, networking, and personal growth.

In conclusion, dreams and goals are essential elements of our lives. They shape our future, motivate our present, and give meaning to our past. As college students, it’s crucial for us to understand the value of dreams and goals, and to strive relentlessly towards them.

500 Words Essay on My Dreams and Goals

Dreams and goals are the propellers that drive us towards our desired future. They are the mental projections of our ambitions, aspirations, and the life we yearn for. As a college student, my dreams and goals are not just a mere fantasy, but a roadmap, a strategic plan that guides me towards my personal and professional growth.

My Academic Goals

My career goals.

As for my career, I aspire to be a professional who contributes significantly to my field. I dream of working in a position where I can utilize my skills and knowledge to make a positive impact. I also plan to pursue further education, possibly a Master’s degree or a Doctorate, to specialize in my field and enhance my professional competence.

Personal Development Goals

On a personal level, my goal is to become a well-rounded individual. I strive to develop my interpersonal skills, leadership qualities, and emotional intelligence, which are crucial for both personal and professional success. I also aim to maintain a healthy work-life balance, as I believe that personal well-being is equally important as professional growth.

My Social Goals

Challenges and strategies.

Achieving these dreams and goals is not without challenges. Time management, maintaining motivation, and balancing academic, personal, and social responsibilities are some of the hurdles I anticipate. However, I am prepared to tackle these challenges head-on.

My strategy involves setting SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) goals, staying organized, and maintaining a positive mindset. I plan to leverage the resources available to me, such as academic advisors, career counselors, and peer support, to help me navigate my journey.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

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Essay on My Dream for Students and Children

500+ words essay on my dream.

Everyone has a dream in his life which they want to achieve when they grow up. Some kids want to become rich so that they can buy anything and some want to be a doctor, lawyer, or engineer. But only you know that for achieving these goals you have to work hard and stay attentive to it. In this essay on my dream, we are going to discuss the basic things that will help in achieving my dream .

Determination

For turning a dream into reality the first thing that you need is determination. This will help you in a lot of ways. Firstly, it will help you decide the course of action for doing anything. Besides, it will also help you to plan the journey ahead. Also, it will help to take things slow and maintain a steady pace towards the dream.

Moreover, no matter how big my dream planning and setting short term goals will always help. This is important because rushing to your dream will not going to help you in any way. Besides, there is some dream that requires time and they follow a process without following it you cannot achieve that dream.

Staying Motivated

Lack of motivation is one of the main causes that force a person to leave his dream behind. So, staying motivated is also part of the goal. And if you can’t stay positive then you won’t be able to achieve the dream. There are many people out there that quit the journey of their dreams mid-way because they lack motivation .

Keep Remembering Goal

For completing the dream you have to keep your dream in the mind. And remind this dream to yourself daily. There come hard times when you feel like quitting at those times just remember the goal it helps you stay positive . And if you feel like you messed up big times then start over with a fresh mind.

Reward Yourself

You don’t need to cover milestones to reward yourself. Set a small target towards your dream and on fulfilling them reward yourself . These rewards can be anything from toffee to your favorite thing. Besides, this is a good way of self-motivation.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Take Some Breaks

Working towards your goal not mean that you work day and night without stopping. Apart from that, due to continuous efforts, people soon start to become de-motivated. So, taking a break will help your body and mind. For doing so, take a break in between your schedule for some time an engage yourself in other activities.

Stay Among Positive People

Your company affects you in a lot of ways than you can imagine. So, be with people who appreciate you and stay away from people who distract and criticize you.

Don’t Hesitate to Make Mistakes

To sum it up, we can say that dreaming of a goal is far easier than achieving it. And for fulfilling your dream you need a lot of things and also have to sacrifice many things.

Above all, for fulfilling your dream plan and work according to it because it will lead you to the right path. And never forget to dream big because they help in overcoming every obstacle in life.

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124 American Dream Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

Inside This Article

The American Dream is a concept deeply rooted in the American ethos, representing the belief that anyone, regardless of their background or circumstances, can achieve success and prosperity through hard work and determination. This idea has been a source of inspiration for countless individuals and has shaped the nation's history and identity. If you are tasked with writing an essay on the American Dream, here are 124 topic ideas and examples to help you get started:

• The evolution of the American Dream throughout history.
• The impact of the American Dream on immigration patterns.
• The portrayal of the American Dream in literature and film.
• The role of education in achieving the American Dream.
• The American Dream and socioeconomic mobility.
• The American Dream in the context of racial and gender equality.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of happiness.
• The influence of the American Dream on consumer culture.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of homeownership.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of higher education.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of entrepreneurship.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of fame and fortune.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a better life for future generations.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of freedom and democracy.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of equal opportunities.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of social justice.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a healthy and fulfilling lifestyle.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of personal growth and self-improvement.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of financial security.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong work ethic.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of individualism.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of technological advancement.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a better environment.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of cultural diversity.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of religious freedom.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of political power.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of social mobility.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of community engagement.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of personal happiness.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a balanced lifestyle.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of creativity and innovation.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of equal rights and opportunities for all.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong family unit.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of volunteerism and philanthropy.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a fair and just society.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong healthcare system.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a secure retirement.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a sustainable future.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of personal freedom and liberty.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong national identity.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of technological innovation.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of social equality.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong economy.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a diverse and inclusive society.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong education system.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong justice system.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong military.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong infrastructure.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong environmental policy.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong social safety net.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong democracy.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong international presence.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong cultural identity.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong work-life balance.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong sense of community.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong national pride.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong sense of belonging.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong sense of purpose.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong sense of justice.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong sense of equality.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong sense of opportunity.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong sense of achievement.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong sense of ambition.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong sense of success.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong sense of fulfillment.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong sense of contentment.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong sense of peace.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong sense of optimism.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong sense of resilience.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong sense of determination.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong sense of perseverance.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong sense of endurance.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong sense of hope.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong sense of courage.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong sense of empathy.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong sense of compassion.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong sense of integrity.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong sense of honesty.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong sense of trust.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong sense of responsibility.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong sense of accountability.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong sense of transparency.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong sense of fairness.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong sense of freedom.
• The American Dream and the pursuit of a strong sense of democracy.

These topic ideas and examples should give you a starting point for your essay on the American Dream. Remember to use critical thinking, research, and personal insights to develop a compelling and thought-provoking piece that explores the complexities and nuances of this enduring concept.

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Winter Dreams

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A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

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Discussion Questions

Describe Fitzgerald’s use of paradox throughout the story. What subtext does it bring to the story?

How does Fitzgerald convey the disparity between dreams and reality—that is, the theme of illusion and disillusionment?

How would you describe Dexter’s winter dreams? Using evidence from the text, explain the content of Dexter’s winter dreams and what actions he takes to pursue them.

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Character Analysis of Willy Loman

How it works

Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” brings us Willy Loman, a guy who shows both the big American dream and its traps. Willy’s a complicated character and his life tells us a lot about success, failure, and just being human. This essay looks into Willy’s character, his dreams, flaws, and how he eventually falls apart.

• 1 The Dreamer in a Concrete Jungle
• 2 Flaws and Foibles
• 3 The Tragic Downfall
• 4 Conclusion

The Dreamer in a Concrete Jungle

At heart, Willy Loman’s a dreamer. He’s always chasing this perfect idea of success where being liked and looking good are key.

His dreams aren’t just goals; they’re part of who he is. Willy wants to be rich and respected, beyond what he actually has. His dreams are shaped by stories of his brother Ben, who got rich finding diamonds in Africa. Willy thinks success is a sure thing if he can just figure out the right way to get it.

But, these dreams are also Willy’s biggest problem. They make him live in a constant state of denial. He lies to himself and his family about how well he’s doing at work, believing he’s always just one step away from a big break. His dreams push him forward but also blind him to the real, tough parts of his life.

Flaws and Foibles

Willy Loman has a lot of flaws that lead to his tragic end. One big issue is his strong belief that being liked is super important. This makes him value charm over actual skills and hard work. He teaches his sons, especially Biff, that looking good and knowing people are what you need to succeed. This wrong idea sets Biff up for lots of failures, just like Willy’s own life.

Willy’s stubbornness is another big flaw. He doesn’t want to change or adapt. Even though the business world is changing, Willy sticks to old ideas about salesmanship and won’t accept that his ways don’t work anymore. This leaves him out of touch and bad at his job.

Willy’s family relationships are also full of tension and unmet expectations. His cheating and constant criticism push his wife Linda and sons Biff and Happy away. He loves his family a lot, but his actions often hurt them. His unrealistic hopes and constant pressure make Biff rebel and Happy shallow.

The Tragic Downfall

Willy’s tragic fall is a mix of his dreams, flaws, and harsh life realities. As he gets older, he feels more and more left out in a world that values youth and new ideas. His mind starts to break down as he struggles with not reaching the success he always dreamed of. He often hallucinates and talks to his dead brother Ben, showing how fragile his mind is and how he clings to the past.

The turning point is when Willy realizes Biff, who he thought was destined for greatness, isn’t the star he imagined. This shatters Willy’s illusions and is a huge blow because he had pinned all his hopes on Biff. Willy’s final desperate act is to kill himself, thinking the insurance money will help Biff get the success he couldn’t.

Willy’s suicide is both tragic and sad. It shows how pointless his relentless chase for an impossible dream was and the harmful impact of his wrong beliefs. In the end, Willy’s death is a stark reminder of the dangers of living in illusions and the need to face reality, no matter how tough it is.

Willy Loman is a character whose life and struggles strike a chord with many of us. His dreams, flaws, and downfall offer a strong critique of the American dream and societal pressures. Through Willy, Arthur Miller explores human ambition, the consequences of fooling ourselves, and the deep impact of family relationships. Willy’s story reminds us of the importance of self-awareness, being able to adapt, and balancing dreams with reality.

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Titan submersible 'malfunctioned days before fatal dive', science director says

One passenger was left "hanging upside down" and it took an hour to get the passengers out of the water, but Stephen Ross said he couldn't be sure if the vessel or its hull had been safety-checked afterwards.

Thursday 19 September 2024 23:32, UK

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The Titan submersible that imploded on its way to the wreck of the Titanic, killing all five people on board, had malfunctioned just days before last year's fatal dive, the company's scientific director has said.

Stephen Ross told a US Coast Guard panel investigating the tragedy on Thursday that a platform issue earlier in June 2023 caused passengers to "tumble about" and left one "hanging upside down".

Days later, the Titan submersible , owned by underwater tourism company, OceanGate Expeditions, imploded en route to the wreck site in the North Atlantic Ocean.

British adventurer Hamish Harding, father and son Shahzada and Suleman Dawood, OceanGate Expeditions' CEO Stockton Rush, and Frenchman Paul-Henri Nargeolet all died.

Mr Ross told the hearing it took an hour to get the passengers out of the water after the earlier malfunction which left "one passenger hanging upside down" while "the other two managed to wedge themselves into the bow end cap".

Mr Rush, who was piloting the submersible, crashed into bulkheading, and, though no one was injured, it was uncomfortable, he added.

He said he didn't know if a safety assessment of the Titan or an inspection of its hull was carried out afterwards.

The Titanic wreck site is about 370 nautical miles (690 km) south-southeast of Newfoundland, Canada, at a depth of about 12,500 feet (3,800m).

Earlier, investigators heard from OceanGate's mission specialist, who said some of the company's staff were "very hard-working individuals that were just trying to make dreams come true".

Renata Rojas said she was "learning a lot and working with amazing people" at OceanGate.

Video footage of the submersible on the ocean floor was also published on Thursday.

Ms Rojas's comments contrasted sharply with previous evidence, in which Mr Rush, the CEO, was described as volatile and short-tempered by other staff.

On Wednesday, former operations director David Lochridge called the vessel "an abomination" and said the company was committed only to making money .

Along with other witnesses, Mr Lochridge painted a picture of a company led by people who were impatient to get the unconventionally designed craft into the water.

Keep up with all the latest news from the UK and around the world by following Sky News

Read more from Sky News: The stories of the Titan submersible crew What happened to the Titan?

When the submersible was reported missing, rescuers rushed ships, planes, and other equipment to an area about 435 miles south of St John's, Newfoundland.

Four days later, the wreckage of the Titan was found on the ocean floor about 300 metres off the bow of the Titanic, Coast Guard officials said.

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The experimental Titan had been making voyages to the Titanic wreckage site since 2021.

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82 I Have a Dream Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best i have a dream topic ideas & essay examples, ⭐ good research topics about i have a dream, 👍 simple & easy i have a dream essay titles, ❓ questions about i have a dream speech.

• “I Have a Dream” Speech Analysis – Essay Although the speech is of great significance in our society today critics say that King was excessively rhetorical and that he did not provide a way to solve the many problems he addressed.
• I Have a Dream Speech Analysis The speech has become a symbol of a new era of freedom and symbol of the American civil rights movement.”I Have a Dream” is a representation of the “America Dream” about a free and equal […]
• Use of Pathos: Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” During his lifetime, Martin Luther King Junior had the privilege of giving several speeches whose main theme in almost all was on the freedom of the black Americans.’I have a dream’ was among the many […]
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• Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” Speech Critique The purpose of the king’s speech was to motivate the endorsement of change within the Americans, and the state, in relation to Americans’ inappropriate views towards unlike races or tribal groups in America.
• Analysis of “I Have a Dream “, by Martin Luther King, Jr. They are used in the speech to capture the attention of the audience. Repetition is used throughout the speech to put an emphasis on the main idea of the message.
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• “I Have a Dream” and “Animal Farm” The Old Major’s speech as portrayed in the narrative Animal Farm has myriad of similarities and differences to the speech given by Martin Luther King Jr.in his attempt to liberate the black race from discrimination.
• M. L. King’s “I Have a Dream” Speech Delivery In addition, during the time without the internet, the number of people a certain location could hold also contributed to the overall speech’s effect.
• The Civil Rights Movement: I Have a Dream The civil rights movement has changed many aspects of the nation, such as housing, the economy, and jobs. The movement changed the outlook, the power structure, and the very core of the nation.
• Martin Luther King’s Speech “I Have a Dream” In conclusion, it is necessary to note that King’s speech is still relevant as nowadays, African Americans, immigrants, and females do not have opportunities that they would have in the world of justice.
• “I Have a Dream” by Martin Luther King: What Has Changed The constitution was drafted by the framers in such a manner that only White men who owned acres of land and property would be given the right to voice their opinion and decide the functioning […]
• “I Have a Dream” by Martin Luther King: What We Already Achieved Martin Luther King is a figure of world significance whose famous speech influenced millions of people and led to significant reforms in the U.S. Yet, there are still certain areas in which the U.S.and would […]
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