What is the evolutionary function of dreams?

I always thought it was to order your thoughts, but recently I have started thinking that they are to be analysed like a window into the soul. I think it has something to do with how some people don't remember their dreams and others remember them vividly.

Anon's thought?

The purpose of dreams are to release stored neuron energy in preparation for the next day.  Traditionally, this has lead people in to believing in gods, angels, faries, and werewolves.

Also used to simulate social situations, this is very important in early age - even though it isn't conscious.

Oh, also, go to http://www.ld4all.com I  used to do lucid dreaming a lot, but seem to have lost the ability now that my life has gotten very stressed.

Man I had repeated dreams of blacking out and being paralyzed last night. I'm simulating some fucked up social situations.

I once had a lucid dream... or I had a dream that I had a lucid dream >_< I can't tell. I was conscious, or dreamt that I was.

>>1

people usually only remember dreams if they woke up during or close to the time of dreaming and in REM sleep

>>2

i think you got that backwards, brain activity (storing information you acquired during the day by forming new neural connections) during sleep causes dreaming (interpreting neurons firing off as a signal to recall a memory or event)

the brain regenerates, updates, reorganises, and maintains itself while you sleep. dreams are a side-effect

I agree with everyone here, it's quite obvious how we dream, but I think the answer to this question is a little more "deeper". Most of your conscious thought occurs in our neo-cortex and it hasn't been around for very long. The neo-cortex is mostly blank waiting to be arranged sort of like a processor and our memories are mostly collected elsewhere in the brain with only a few abstract concepts stored in our neo-cortex for later use. Language for instance is in a completely seperate part of the brain than the neo-cortex and the neo-cortex is quite dependant on this part of the brain in order to remember things. So we can remember music and quotes, but we have trouble rememberring abstract concepts of similiar complexity..

Anyway, my point is, as you are waking up, this new part of the brain often wakes up first, so you are conscious, but asleep. When the rest of the brain wakes up you begin to remember and experience things here and order reactions as if you are in the real world. Dreams can become quite vivid like this and in some sleep disorders, some parts of your brain can be asleep whilst parts of your neo-cortex order your body to walk around and perform actions as you would normally do whilst you are awake.

You do not hallucinate, you simply do not think properly. The brain is much more malleable than a computer, so you don't "crash" and do react to situations with some degree of intelligence. You still act, think and perceive, you just do it more randomly.

Of course you have trouble rememberring things due to the mental confusion. Whether these experiences become a nightmare or a dream depends on your emotional state. If you wake up and think "oh i was dreaming hehe" your amygdala (emotional part of the brain strongly linked to the neo-cortex) responds in kind by relieving stress. Whereas if you are shocked by something and you are reminded of a situation you would normally react to with shock, you will experience stress.

In some rares cases a person sleep walks whilst shocked by a dream, this happenned to me once. I thought that someoen had planted a bomb and it was about to detonate and i had to gt the fuck out of the building before it blew up, I literally jumped up onto my desk next to the window and ssqueezed through a horizontal window openning about 20 cms wide and 2 metres high, jumped 1 storey down on top of my porch, then jumped onto the bonnet of my car and ran halfway down the street before I realised i wasn't dreaming.

For some interesting stuff relating to dreams, watch the film Waking Life.

Go read up on the Wake-Sleep Algorithm. They got an artificial neural network to have something resembling dreams during a 'sleep' phase, and it would automatically categorize what they fed into it during the 'wake' phase.

Dreaming = Window that shows what's whipping through the buffer as your brain defrags

>>12
This is as best as one line can get to define what dreams are.

Why can't we record dreams as data or analog signals?

Because we don't know shit of how and where are they ran and we can't connect anything to dump that (we don't even know how many points we'd have to sample, perhaps the whole brain), let alone reproduce it.

>>12
Yeah, I think that's the best way to put it.  Well said.

>>12
ssssage.

It seems why we have dreams is difficult to pin point. Maybe it has something to do with hypnosis and that sort of thing, because I don't know any theory by evolutionists of why hypnosis happens.

hyper dimensional quatum physics
we're all travelin thru different realities

quantum dumbass...go back to ur reality

>>20
NO U

SCIIIIEEEEEENNNNNCNCCCCCE!