Why Dreams Are So Weird
A Theory of the Brain Cataloguing and Mashing Up Memories into Dreamscapes
IANAS (for the acronym-challenged, that stands for “I Am Not A Scientist”). That is, I am not a professional scientist. But, as “science” basically equates to “knowledge,” all who seek knowledge can be considered scientists, whether they get paid for it or have diplomas declaiming such as their profession or not.
From empirical observation (noting my own dreams and listening to people talk about theirs), it seems that many if not most of them are quite strange. Things that don’t belong together are stitched together in our brain, and things that we know are bogus or wrong or illogical in our conscious state present themselves as something normal and unsurprising while we sleep.
But note this: when we are asleep, our brain is, in essence, in isolation—quarantined within itself, in an echo chamber or feedback loop. While we are asleep, we are not (for the most part) reacting to things happening around us; we are not using our brain for coping with the myriad situations that arise in our daily lives. Our brain is perhaps more “pure” or “itself” when at rest than when we are awake. Of course, sometimes we do respond to external stimuli, even when sleeping. That’s why you will sometimes incorporate a noise that occurs in the real world in a dream. If the noise occurs in your dream in “real time” with the external aural stimulus, your brain must be wonderfully fast to add that feature to a dream so quickly.
There’s something else, though, a theory I have about why our dreams are often so bizarre. “I don’t know where that came from!” we might say about a dream. Maybe an occurrence from the past which we weren’t consciously aware of is being taken out and examined by our brain at rest. Then again, oftentimes we do realize why we dream about a certain thing. For example, if we are planning a trip to Yosemite, it shouldn’t shock us if we dream about Yosemite Sam chasing John Muir up a tree, or Ansel Adams taking a selfie at El Capitan’s summit and falling backward off that precipice—until you rush forward to his aid and pull him back to safety. Thinking about Yosemite naturally conjures up visions of Yosemite Sam, John Muir, and Ansel Adams, so it’s no mystery why you would dream about them.
But what about other dreams that make you wonder, ‘Why in the world did I dream of that?’?
This is my theory: our brain at rest (while slumbering and free to do some housecleaning) “defrags” itself, much like defragging a computer will move seldom-used segments of data “toward the back” and shifts frequently-used (perhaps newly so) stuff closer to the front—to the “tip of your brain” so to speak.
Have you noticed that when you’re trying to remember something from a long time ago (it’s in your brain somewhere, obviously, as everything you see and hear and experience gets stored away there), you can pretty confidently say, whether just to yourself or aloud, “I’ll think of it,” and your brain starts up a thread to work on finding this memory while your conscious brain’s processes are doing other things. In the background, your brain is searching through its labyrinthine nooks and crannies and recesses until it finally uncovers the long-dormant memory. “A-ha! It was The Left Banke—like Anne of Green Gables, ‘with an E’—who had the hit song Walk Away, Renee (and which was covered by the Four Tops).”
The last time you had been made aware or reminded that it was The Left Banke that did that song, your brain pushed it way off into a dusty and dingy corner, not knowing whether that intelligence would ever need to be accessed again. That’s why it took some background churning for it to finally pop forward.
So what does this have to do with dreams? I suspect that when this defragging, or moving around of memories—the oft-referenced to the front, the seldom-referenced to the back—is taking place, your brain might “spark” or “flash” upon several moving items simultaneously, and then construct a dream story using those elements.
This reminds me of something Mark Twain’s three daughters had him do when he told them a tale: they demanded that he make up a new story each time, on the spot, using only the things in the room as subjects. These might be a mirror, a sofa, a piano, a cat or two, a rug, the girls themselves, etc.
It may be that when your brain “lights up” on these memory bits being moved around, it constructs a story from them. That’s why you might dream about something you haven’t thought of for a long time (it was “flashed upon” while it was being moved to the furthest recess of your brain) as well as something that has recently been on your mind. For example, you dream of the time in 3rd grade when somebody dropped your show-and-tell octopus (which was ensconced in a glass jar filled with formaldehyde), but it’s happening while you’re eating veggie tacos from Chipotle and watching your favorite football team play last week’s or next week’s opponent.
Sometimes your dreams are apparently trying to remind you of some upcoming event that your conscious mind seems to have misplaced. “Oh, that’s why I dreamt that!” I have sometimes told myself, after forgetting a dentist appointment and then recalling that I had a dream of a hippopotamus gnashing its chompers, or an evil scientist conducting experiments in a torture chamber—my subconscious was trying to remind me of my odontic obligation.
Other times, though, you—if your experience is similar to mine—have an odd dream that seems to have no bearing or relationship to anything whatsoever, past or present. For example, I recently dreamt of a friend who could not, or would not, say the numberword “1.” If she was given a phone number with a “1” in it, she would repeat it back for verification, but omit the “1.” Giving her own phone number, she would omit the “1”; if somebody asked her, “Do you mean bla-bla-bla 1?” she would say, “Yes,” but still not verbalize the number “1.”
Perhaps my brain had flashed on this person and the number 1 at the same time. Who knows? My subconscious knows, no doubt, but it’s playing keepaway from my conscious thoughts.