Regarding why we dream, I've always thought that it's got something to do with exercising our right brain. We feed our left brain when we're awake, we feed our right brain when we're asleep ...
can anyone confirm or deny this ?
can anyone confirm or deny this ?
The neocortex is incredibly powerful, but the limbic system notices stuff that the neocortex misses on our day-to day routine. Things like micro-gestures (emotions drawn by our faces for mere fractions of a second), non-spoken language, etc.
This neocortex-unperceived stuff is perceived by us as 'feelings', the operating material of the limbic system.
The REM dream stage is the limbic system putting all those feelings as requests to the neocortex, in the way of: "give me a logical and understandable explanation for this feeling I've been having all week".
Then we experience crazy stuff that actually matches the limbic sensation, or we get the right answer. This also helps/interacts with learning processes.
For the rest of the dream state, I have no current theory/explanation.