What Dreams Are Made Of

The Content of Our Dreams

Dreaming is a profoundly personal experience. Most of the time, our dreams are recognizable as echoes of what’s going on in our lives. But every now and then, you get one that’s so baffling, it leaves you wondering if you got someone else’s by mistake. As singularly bizarre as dreams tend to be, their content and themes are, to some extent, universally shared and easily categorized. The golden oldies include: flying dreams, falling dreams, running away from some threat (usually in slow motion), unable to get somewhere you want or need to go, being late for something important, turning up naked in public, and (here’s an odd one) having your teeth fall out. We would be remiss if we didn’t also mention sex dreams.

Sometimes dreams feature the so-called false awakening: you wake up, get out of bed and go about your business like normal, but you’re only dreaming that you woke up. These dreams can seem particularly real because the “experience” of waking feels so authentic.

Most dreams generally lack a sense of context, which gives them a certain amnesia-like quality. Right now, for instance, you know that you’re sitting here reading this webpage. But you remember exactly how you got here; you remember what you were doing five minutes ago, what you did earlier today, and so forth. Dream experiences usually just plunk you down somewhere with no explanation: Suddenly, out of the blue, you find yourself at work, or at the airport, or in the backyard of the house you grew up in — but there’s never much sense of remembering how you got there.

Dreams also tend to lack a logical progression or timeline as they move from place to place; one scene morphs into another without rhyme or reason. You may dream that you’re hiking up a mountain trail, but an instant later, you’re walking through a busy grocery store — which suddenly turns itself into your old high school or some such thing.

Research has found that the content of dreams can actually be influenced by what’s going on around you in your sleep environment — a phenomenon known as dream incorporation. One study found that if you spritz someone with a little water while they’re sleeping, there’s a 40% chance they’ll end up dreaming about something having to do with water or rain (if you try this on your spouse, don’t tell them where you got the idea). Sounds, smells, and ambient conditions like room temperature can similarly insinuate themselves into the dream world. Illnesses have been known to have an effect too, i.e. fevers become rampaging fires and upset stomachs yield rollercoaster rides.

Nightmares and Pleasant Dreams

Sometimes dreams can be completely ordinary and even boring, as if they were just playing back a random scene from everyday life: you might dream that you’re brushing your teeth or driving to work or something. But the overwhelming majority of dreams are, in fact, intense, deeply emotional, often unsettling experiences. Dreams have a way of leaving you feeling stirred up and wrung out — even when they’re not full-blown nightmares. This sad fact has been confirmed in study after study. One found that negative emotions — such as anger, panic, anxiety, dread, and despair — were more common in dreams than more positive emotions by a factor of 2 to 1. (We’ll take a look at why this might be the case in a later installment.)

Looking at it this way, dreams can seem like something of a burden. After a long hard day, when you turn off the light and hit the pillow, you sort of look forward to a little temporary oblivion; a nice little respite from the grind of existence. But then you go to sleep and you wind up falling out of buildings, chased by monsters, late for your appointment, and naked with your teeth falling out. You get the feeling that if someone came up with a pill that would guarantee a dreamless night, they could make some money.

But that would be a deal with the devil. The good dreams — the ones that provide enjoyment, amusement, and insight — far outweigh the uglier dreams in the pleasure they give us. We should consider dreaming as a valuable, enriching part of life. We may never know what they really mean or what function they serve; but there is this sense that when we dream, something vital and extraordinary is happening. It’s as if they took all the contents of your mind and just sort of hit the shuffle button. Maybe they prevent our memories and our knowledge from going stale somehow — helping us to see the world around us in a continually dynamic way, by making new mental connections with what we already know. Whatever they are, we would be poorer without them.