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Study finds novel evidence that dreams reflect multiple memories, anticipate future events:
Dreams result from a process that often combines fragments of multiple life experiences and anticipates future events, according to novel evidence from a new study.
Results show that 53.5% of dreams were traced to a memory, and nearly 50% of reports with a memory source were connected to multiple past experiences. The study also found that 25.7% of dreams were related to specific impending events, and 37.4% of dreams with a future event source were additionally related to one or more specific memories of past experiences. Future-oriented dreams became proportionally more common later in the night.
"Humans have struggled to understand the meaning of dreams for millennia," said principal investigator Erin Wamsley, who has a doctorate in cognitive neuroscience and is an associate professor in the department of psychology and program in neuroscience at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. "We present new evidence that dreams reflect a memory-processing function. Although it has long been known that dreams incorporate fragments of past experience, our data suggest that dreams also anticipate probable future events."
According to Wamsley, the proportional increase of future-oriented dreams later in the night may be driven by temporal proximity to the upcoming events. While these dreams rarely depict future events realistically, the activation and recombination of future-relevant memory fragments may nonetheless serve an adaptive function.
Journal Reference:
Wamsley, Erin. 034 Dreaming as Constructive Episodic Future Simulation, Sleep (DOI: 10.1093/sleep/zsab072.033)
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 09 2021, @06:07PM
I think there are somewhat separate waking and sleeping memories/though processes. There is some communications between the two as you are waking which gives the waking side (the conscious 'me') a glimpse at the sleeping side.
The glimpses show that there is a continuity of thought between dreams (memory) and some familiarity with the waking world on the dream side, that sort of works assuming the same physical world, but is not so much ruled by the physics or common sense. (Like a dream about flying or getting stuck in a easy to think your way out of situation.)
Some dreams seem anchored in conscious experiences, but I don't buy it that all are. Some dreams seem completely from another place or time or something else. (But the 'not so much rules by physics or common sense' part makes them seem perfectly plausible.) I wonder if some of the better plots for SiFi come from dreams?