What causes a person to learn how to do something in a dream?

Question

I was about 10 years old and never went skiing in my life and I dreamed that I was skiing and kept falling until I would ski with slightly bent knees, then I never fell. I remembered the dream my first time skiing, and never fell except when I got to the bottom of the hill and needed to stop and at the time did not know how to snow plow.

Answer 1

The person that is dreaming and fails at something knows whats wrong. In your conscience life you learn more about something, all the knowledge you know now, goes inside your dream and you fix it. You must have seen something, or learn something about skiing, and in your dream you had some knowledge about it and fixed it on your own.

Answer 2

In my psych class I just learned about dreams and there are 4 kinda.
1. Dreams that are symbolic
2. Dreams that you figure something out/learn something
3. Random neurons firing (doesn't mean anything)
4. there's another one but i forget..

you probably heard someone talking about bending your knees while skiing once and the info was stored in a part of your brain that wasn't the part that you have thoughts about. Dreams often times bring out things you are thinking about already. Also, there have been studies done that have found that if you learn something just before you go to bed you have a better chance of retaining the info. I'm not sure how that fits with your skiing thing, but just an idea.