What are dreams for? | Hacker News Reader

What are dreams for?

newyorker.com

57 pointsCharlesW56 comments

Odd that there’s no mention at all in the article of Carl Jung’s perspective on dreams - being one of Freud’s more prominent students and having spent an inordinate amount of his life analyzing his own and others’ dreams.

EDIT: The reason I bring this up is that it seems as though the prevailing reductionist perspective on dreaming is that it’s “random noise” created by the brain. This article effectively says the same thing, but says that the noise is created by arbitrary muscle twitches during sleep while the brain “learns the body”.

Jung and his students spent a huge amount of their time looking for patterns in that “random noise”.

It’s entirely possible that there are layers to the purpose of dreams. Yes, they could help the brain “learn the body” better. But why those specific dream characters and not others? Why those specific scenes and not others? How do those scenes and characters relate to what’s going on in a person’s life right now?

It seems unlikely that evolution would produce very wasteful complex processes - it seems far more likely to me that they also serve a use in a certain type of psychological (and therefore ultimately physical) energy dissipation or tension resolution - an idea that seems to come up through Jung’s insights.

Jung and his students then analyzed out common themes in the symbols in people’s dreams and discovered themes that were common across cultures, implying connections to common biological and sociological patterns (e.g. the fact that each of us grows older facing different kinds of challenges along the way).

> How do those scenes and characters relate to what’s going on in a person’s life

I started writing down super-brief summaries of parts of my dreams on a near daily basis a while back.

There are absolutely clear connections between things I've seen, heard or experienced recently and things which show up in dreams. One curious aspect of this is that there's often a delay of at least several days between the actual event and when something like it shows up in a dream, usually after I've stopped consciously thinking about it.

My understanding of Jung’s hypothesis about this was that every facet of the dream (the scene, the characters, etc.) is you - your psyche. In other words, your subconscious is effectively using those images as puppets to act out a play of sorts that reveals or releases some kind of tension.

Even if it's just random noise, if you feed noise into a system you can measure the response and infer properties of the system based on what resonates.

I think shouldn't be surprising that if you pay attention to what pops up in dreams you can gain some understanding of our minds. Fourier analysis is just a lot more straightforward than Jungian analysis... and it's made harder from how it's trying to analyze a system from within itself.

In modern brain science another theory is that a dream is a type of replay of things the brain is busy with and allows for fine-tuning of it.

Like when you learn something and it's better the next day.

If it's just a brain region which has to be awake for the rem sleep to do what it does, it can also be a compensation mechanism.

I'm not following the idea that energy has to dissipate. The firing origin is not some electricity which needs to discharge,

I like to think of dreams as our brains' leisure time, an opportunity for them to do whatever they want to do, unencumbered by the demands of sensory processing or conscious thought.

However, that doesn't mean our brains necessarily take it easy. Indeed, I've noticed what I would consider considerable cognitive load in certain dreams.

Here's a great example. I recently had a dream in which I was at a party, playing a game with some friends. We had to come up with a silly name for a person, given their profession. I was assigned "dentist," and so I thought through some possibilities: Paul A. Tooth, Paula Tooth, Paul M. Out, Paul M. Allout, etc.

Then another person at the party, who was assigned "obstetrician," announced the silly name they had come up with, and I chuckled at it.

What's fascinating to me is that until they announced the name, I had no perception of the critical thinking necessary to construct it -- even though it was my own brain that was creating it! Somehow, as I was perceiving myself thinking up silly dentist names, another part of my brain was simultaneously thinking up silly obstetrician names, but I could only perceive the thinking about dentists.

Isn't it fascinating that our brains can pull that off?

It's interesting that you included the funny dentist names that you came up with but you didn't include the funny obstetrician name (that you also came up with).

I thought it would be amusing to see if anyone could guess it.

Perhaps another "Paul M. Out"

Bertha Lots

It is indeed amazing. I’m don’t generally remember dreams in much detail, but have sometimes been amazed to recall that part of my dream was reading a newspaper or magazine article. Like, close up. So my brain was manufacturing copy _and_ doing typesetting, all in real time!

The part of your brain that can interpret writing and language is not active in dreams, so it’s not possible. What happens when you “read” in dreams is you sort of go through the motions and already know what’s on the page, so your brain is skipping the part where the text is processed by the visual cortex, language center, etc.

Perhaps the dream is just pressing the buttons that make you think you are looking at a fully realised magazine article.

I'm not seriously proposing this, but what if the "subconscious" (whatever came up with your obstetrician names without you perceiving it) is actually another consciousness, "locked in". Perhaps there is another story here, where a dream was had about a party, and the observer felt they were coming up with humorous names for an obstetrician.

Something similar to this idea is actually called internal family systems, and is a useful concept for certain types of dissociative disorders afaik. You may not be as far off as you think, but I don’t know if there’s conclusive evidence for this viewpoint. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Family_Systems_Model

You should look up the split brain experiments. It sure seems like there are non verbal parts of the mind that have their own thoughts on everything.

In reality, the "conscious" part of the processing that happens in the brain is just a [small] part. There is so much more that is going on.

The way I think about it is that the brain is a massively, self organizing processing unit where consciousness/attention runs on just one thread (try consciously thinking about two things at once :) ). Most of the processing, including vital operations that are needed to keep up alive (eg breathing, heart operation, the myriad of hormonal regulation feedback loops, memory organization and consolidation) are happening under the hood and we don't have access to that part.

This is such a fascinating aspect of the brain. It feels as if there is some kind of "latent/subconscious" thinking involved and the 'conscious' thought only rises to the surface when the trigger arises.

I've had a similar feelings of awe about our own brain during dreams at times. I could talk in a different language, come up with tunes I have never heard before, create visual art in my head etc.

The same extends to some of.my psychedelic trips. There could be a possible connection here.

Would love to see more BCI experiments on both fronts.

Interestingly, all of the descriptions can be experienced as you fall asleep. If you can pay good attention, you can experience paralysis consciously when it starts. You will even experience twitching and you will see it has nothing to do with visual dreaming.

You can also experience the shift of this balance center mentioned in the article, feeling as if you’re turning or falling. If you can persist the attention, even though this shifting feels very scary, you will have a feeling as if your face is squished against the pillow and not the back of your head.

The body feels the closest when it is paralyzed, you feel an expansion of your experience, not a reduction.

The name for this is conscious sleep (yoga nidra) and there’s some research on it.

I wish I could do that. If I am paying attention I wont fall asleep.

It is a very subtle skill. It's not paying attention with the intensity of e.g. playing a game. It's more like barely observing what's going on in front of your mind's eye, barely floating above the water without sinking into oblivion.

You get better at it with practice. Not that I'm an expert, but it is an interesting experience.

This is correct. I experience hypnogogic and -pompic hallucinations, and the same technique works to experience them more vividly and for extended periods of time.

It depends on where your brain creates the anchor. For me it is very close to visual thoughts so I can very easily feel when the attention moves to a place where you can relax to paralysis.

Thoughts are just thought beginnings where the attention creates this illusion of a continuous thought. So when attention is moved you will see hundreds of thoughts arising, seemingly random, all over the place, almost as if you’re dreaming, but the attention can be moved to avoid this pointless loop of random thought observing.

Attention starts with feeling the distance from the observation point created by the brain to your body parts. Then this attention needs to eventually make the feeling of your body very close which for me results in a paralysis. But the whole process does not feel like I’m guiding it. It’s like the attention mechanism of the brain finds a place from which it can consciously sleep. There is no effort at all.

> So when attention is moved you will see hundreds of thoughts arising, seemingly random, all over the place, almost as if you’re dreaming, but the attention can be moved to avoid this pointless loop of random thought observing.

Can you expand substantially on what you're saying here? It seems utterly foreign to me...do you experience them all at once, or one at a time in a series???

I might be delusional. I do think that observing the balance center moving is possible, many people sometimes almost fall asleep but wake up because they feel they are falling or falling off the bed. Paralysis is also experienced.

But the way I pay attention to thoughts might be different from you. Neurodivergent people might experience noise where their thoughts are, some might think but have intrusive thoughts, some like me can have a strong sense of choosing the thought stream, thinking clearly through problems without any intrusion.

So when I move away from a single thought stream and brush over all thought beginnings I might be hallucinating the facts that I read about thinking. The brain never stops thinking, it always produces hundreds of thoughts, that’s energy efficient. What happens to me is that I quickly glance over most thought beginnings, sometimes shocked by what is starting, feeling it is completely unrelated. I sometimes fall away and focus on a particular thought (which then starts a coherent thought stream) and then need to start being attentive again to move away.

I never observed hundreds of parallel thought streams, only thought beginnings that are just vague visual and verbal starts on which you can focus and observe the coherent stream. But maybe that’s an illusion and the thoughts are fully formed but it is only my attention not being able to see it fully once it moves away. Brain is weird and not even the user understands it.

I do not know if I’m just dreaming that up or if it is just how it is.

When I move away further and pay attention to body signals that’s the place from which I can experience conscious sleep. But it is very weird sensation as there is no effort or control over that process. It is just very relaxed dreamy attention.

Your experiences during "conscious sleep" almost exactly match many phenomenon described by meditators and that of ego/mind death as described by UG Krishnamurti. On the experience of "being flattened":

>“When I lie down and close my eyes, the outside world completely disappears, and there is only the awareness of what is happening inside, the lub-dub of the heart. The whole human being is reduced to just this awareness of the heartbeat (laughs), and then suddenly even that is gone. I don’t want to use the word ‘samadhi’. Every time it happens, it happens in a different way. And then sometimes there is a flash of light and everything is gone, it is totally blank; perhaps that is pure consciousness. This is not a vision. You know I am very sceptical. But I can’t compare this with anything. And I don’t rush out to refer to some book to find out what it could be. I’ll have to discover it myself and this is a moment-to-moment business.”

>“This is perhaps called samadhi, going into samadhi. Say you are lying down on the bed and because there is nothing else to do, you watch your body. Actually you are not aware of your total body when you lie down, only those spots of the body that touch the bed. And when this happens, after a while, all of a sudden some kind of a searchlight is thrown on this point (head?)—this is some kind of awareness, not a vision—this is like a searchlight from the top like you find at airports, and it moves from one point to another, slowly, back and forth”

>“Yesterday, I was lying on the bed and the body disappeared. There was awareness of only the head. (This was unrelated to the previous state, yet a similar one. But how it comes into being every time is different). And then all of a sudden the awareness disappeared from my head and there was only the bed. When you are in this state, you can’t do anything. But, later, I was narrating this to Valentine. It is like the Mickey Mouse story—what you see in the Tom & Jerry cartoon film. Something hard and heavy falls on the cat and the cat becomes flat... When I woke up, I thought, ‘What is this? My body is so flat!’ At the time you can’t do anything, only later the mind comes in and tries to understand but it cannot—it can only speculate, imagine, which shows that the trace of the mind is still there. It comes but gets no answer.”

> you will have a feeling as if your face is squished against the pillow

That’s an excellent description. I watch myself fall asleep occasionally and this is indeed the case. Sometimes it’s like I’m flattened entirely or squeezed into a point. Strangely it feels expansive instead of restrictive.

To be a bit more precise, to me it feels like a point that’s behind my face just rotates to the back, almost as if it is rolling in a jar affected by gravity.

The end state then feels closer to the pillow and I guess because the point was closer to the face it feels like face is squished.

My take is that it is not entirely disimilar from some AI research I have seen where applying conditions to simulations that are not real actually trains the model better in some ways in addition to training with real data. I remember they were using a robotic arm simulation with different gravity, friction, and other physical constants.

It makes sense to me that if you saw a small version of an animal but never saw a large one you might dream of a big one. Then if you ever saw one your brain would not have to have a brand new thought at something it may have thought impossible. I think dreams make our brains more flexible than is possible with just real data.

Do you really need dreams to accomplish that though?

Attention needs to be distracted, maybe.

For the example the op gave, probably not for an adult. But younger kids might. Also for complex domains, I find that dreams enumerate more possibilities/scenarios than I would have if awake.

Hadn't seen it mentioned anywhere, but thought it might be interesting for you folks who do technical and scientific work:

https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/

McCarthy's perspective on language is interesting in this regard: dreams being a sort of pre-language mind for operating an animal without the kind of consciousness that developed in us quite some time ago. That mind remains, it is distrustful of the language virus that took over, but it tries to help.

It's an interesting thought.

Thanks for this read. I enjoyed its down-to-earthiness. I felt pranked at times the author's assertions of obvious truth that are quite challengeable. It felt like there were many but here's one I could recover:

"There are no languages whose form is in a state of development. And their forms are all basically the same."

I made a double take at that, and moved along for the ride.

Ultimately I wonder if my enjoyment of the piece is because it takes great acrobatics to be bereft of reason, just enough to make you think. No, not you. That other you.

I'm just coming out of a very stressful period that encompassed nearly every waking and resting minute of my day for several years. After a fairly major life change and quite a few problems clearing up I noticed that I was suddenly dreaming again.

I hadn't realized that I had stopped so I'm not even sure how long it's been, but now that I'm doing it again see how damaged my sleep has been. After just a few good sleep cycles with dreams I feel like my mental state has been turning around significantly.

What are dreams for? I'm not sure the specifics, but they definitely make me feel better.

I think there's a lot going on when we dream, and it's not all directly related or cause and effect of a single process. The idea that a twitch causes a neurological response that we interpret as a part of a dream sounds nice, until you ask yourself why sleepwalkers act out dreams. They're not twitching, their minds are wandering and their bodies are responding. I have a feeling the guy is on to something, but I don't think it's quite as simple as "the reverse of what we thought is true". I would think the body and mind take advantage of downtime to do all the things they need downtime to do, and it makes sense evolutionarily for them to multitask so as to spend the least amount of time incapacitated as possible. So probably, many unrelated or tangentially related things are going on, and possibly even some hokey shit for good measure.

“ Blumberg plays the drums, and, when he learns a new rhythm, he wonders whether sleep is involved. “You struggle and struggle for several days, then one day you wake up and start playing and boom—it’s automatic,” he said. “Did sleep play a role in that? If I had been recording my limb movements, would I have seen something interesting? That keeps me up at night.”

As a musician whose spent many late nights practicing, I’ll be thinking about this all weekend. It took me a long time to give sleep the respect in my life it deserves! Same thinking applies to any problem solving for me, really. How often have you woke about after a refreshing sleep with an elusive solution readily apparent the next morning?

Mark and sweep GC.

Pretty much this IMHO. Memory consolidation and defragmentation. Do I need to store these two memories as separate memories? Do I need to keep them at all?

With these types of questions, I could explain many of my dreams, especially the more superficially strange ones.

But also planning: some situation that worries you, you might dream about how to solve that solution. I've had that many times.

This also happens when you are awake though.

I have sometimes wondered if what we seem to remember of dreams is just a rationalization our conscious mind makes of the state it finds our brain in when we awake.

If, however, scanning shows a good deal of similarity between the states a subject’s brain goes through while asleep and when recalling a dream afterwards, the most parsimonious explanation would seem to be that memories of dreams do represent what was going through one’s mind while asleep.

This seems likely to me. When we recall memories, we "fill in the gaps" during the recall process. For example, paraphrasing a quote because you can't recite it verbatim: you'll express the ideas and emotions important to you, include impactful words or phrases, but otherwise make it up.

Dreams are like really fuzzy memories. So when we try to recall them, we have to add a lot. When a person talks about a dream they had, they're probably saying more about their mental state as they're recalling the dream than during the dream.

I cannot remember dreams at all unless my sleep is interrupted.

Dreams are fine tuning of the model

I remember watching a movie of someone being decapitated, and that night I dreamed of that scene with some relative's face.

It generated a primitive, a feeling of sadness

So consciously I can't explain why, or need to, I just know, I will know be sad if she dies, and don't want it to happen

I'm convinced there is a connection between dreaming and EMDR (therapy). Anyone who has reprocessed a chain of old memories can probably understand that. On two occasions I've had REM while conscious with eyes closed and witnessed a bunch of reprocessing.

I've read here & there that smoking weed makes it impossible to remember dreams.

Now that weed is more widespread and openly discussable in the USA, can anyone verify or refute this claim ?

Slightly off-topic, but I can't stand people tell me their dreams. It annoys me to no end, but I can't quite figure out why.

I think it's for the same reason that "It was all just a dream" is such a terrible plot device.

There is a meaninglessness inherent in the retelling of a dream. You know at the outset that it didn't actually happen, so why is it interesting?

> There is a meaninglessness inherent in the retelling of a dream.

There is meaning in the person considering the dream meaningful enough to tell it.

I used to feel the same when I thought dreams were utterly meaningless, then I had a series of undeniably meaningful dreams and I became not only interested but proactively curious (ie have you seen this character in other dreams? Was anything important happening in your life when this dream happened? How did this event in the dream make you feel, if anything?).

So now I have a question for you: what is your personal stance on dreams?

I've run amateur dream groups, where people get together and tell each other their dreams, and then each participant interprets the dream back to the dream-teller. One method was to start one's interpretation by saying, "If this were my dream..." This helps the interpreter relate what they are hearing to their own life, and anything they might say to the dream-teller is really about the interpreter and their own psyche. So you might try such a self-reflective stance if you ever get stuck having to listen to someone else's dream.

With that said, if I ever choose to tell a trusted friend about a compelling dream (in a non-dream-group context), I try to relate the story in about 20 seconds, just hitting the highlights, cause I know how you feel about having to listen to someone else's unsolicited dream story!

Most people, even when being quite generous and patient, need to have some involvement in the story to remain interested. For me it's a similar annoyance as listening to someone's long vacation story or about a project idea they have that you know they won't actually start. But at least with a vacation story you can imagine yourself taking the vacation someday, but with a dream you can never go there or experience the same things so it's intensely boring.

For? What is the nuclear waste from a reactor for? It's a byproduct.

But it's a process, and one that presumably consumes quite large amounts of energy. Doesn't sound like a simple byproduct to me.

Not everyone is paralysed in sleep of course.

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