Why do we have dreams?

Answer 1

I believe it's an outlet for emotions. Everything within you, in your subconscious mind acts out in your dreams rather than in reality so you can get all those emotions out, otherwise we'd probably explode from overload.

I also believe dreams are also a place where your relatives that passed on can come and visit you.

Answer 2

My own theory has always been that as we have experiences during the day the brain just throws those experiences into short-term memory. It doesn't have time to deal with them because it is busy taking care of things in the present. Then when we sleep those experiences need to get dealt with. The brain sifts through them. Some are determined to be irrelevant or just "more of the same" and are discarded. Some are worth keeping and need to get merged in with similar information. The brain performs the merge by replaying real and/or imaginary events. The brain is building a new model of how the outside world works.

Answer 3

Some think that it helps with memory, reinforcing connections.

In a study volunteers were waken up right before they began the stage of dreaming when we sleep so that they got no dreams, no REM sleep. That group of volunteers had worse short term memory than a control group.

Answer 4

Well some tend to think that we use our dreams as a playground for our subconcious. What we do in dreams tends to go against the laws of nature or society.

Others tend to think that it is simply just moiving and getting rid of superflous info from that day.

Answer 5

There is what is called subconscious & unconscious mind.The unconscious mind stores your unfulfilled desires.During sleep the unfulfilled desires find way to your sub conscious mind in the form of dreams.It can be called a saftey valve.At least some of your unfulfilled desires find an outlet.This you call as dream.

Answer 6

We have dreams to get rid of some subconscious thoughts that are useless to us, and we can't do that while we're awake because we're preoccupied with other things and those things don't come into our minds. But at night we can dream about them to get rid of them. So that's why we have them.

Answer 7

when you go to sleep your brain is actually really active and takes different things from short and long term memory to form a dream.

Answer 8

There is no concrete evidence on why we dream, only theories, most of which have been mentioned above.

Answer 9

because in our sleep our brain processes information and memories, and sometimes our consciousness becomes tricked into kinda "living in the memories" so we have dreams

Answer 10

I read somewhere (years and years ago) that our dreams function as kind of a defrag system. I dunno really. But I guess it would explain why there are common themes in such a diverse world.