

Dreams: Night School - dood
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php?term=pto-20071029-000003&print=1

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maurycy
What about erotic dreams? What about abstract dreams? I frequently dream about
the code, or, even, in the code.

Quoting: "Dreaming is a sensitive system that tries to pay much attention to
the threatening cues in our environment," Revonsuo concludes. "Their function
is to protect and prepare us."

So, the erotic dreams are here to protect and prepare us... ?

But, more seriously, if you believe that erotic and mathematical dreams are
yet another kind of survival scenario, it doesn't take a genius to realize
that in more broader sense, all your activities, not only dreams, can be
generalized to survival training. What's the difference between thinking about
math during the sleep, or no?

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mynameishere
I suspect dreaming is just a process that goes on constantly but gets
completely stifled by either consciousness or deep sleep. The notion that we
rehearse our instincts at night makes me wonder why we don't dream about the
full gamut of our instincts more often--things like: 1) Placing food in mouth,
2) Finding a designated area to defecate, 3) Forming social hierarchies, 4)
Killing animals, 5) Enforcing mores, etc. I've never dreamed about any of
those things.

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randallsquared
The suggestion here is not that dreams are rehearsing _instincts_ , but that
they're rehearsing of behaviors which are important for survival, and the
selection of which behaviors to rehearse depends mainly on what the waking
mind is concerned with, since that's a good indicator of "important survival
behavior".

Hence dreaming about code for those that program all day, or having World of
Warcraft dreams after playing too much WoW. Er... not that I've ever done that
last. Nope. Not me.

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Alex3917
That's funny because there is that BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares
about how politicians gain power by attaching their message to whatever the
populace is currently having nightmares about, and by creating new nightmares
as well.

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mojuba
While it seems pretty logical that everything in our behavior, including
dreams, comes down to evolutionary processes and survival, still positive
dreams remain unexplained from this point of view.

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mwerty
Don't positive thoughts help survival?

Perhaps we have evolved to an optimum mix of the two (nightmare & positive
dreams).

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mojuba
Or maybe a positive dream is a successful resolution of a nightmare scenario.
When we wake up we remember only emotionally intense episodes and forget
others. If you did solve a problem in your dream, the solution "dominates"
over the original problem in terms of its emotional charge.

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chaostheory
Given all the new articles/submarine ads for drugs that let you stay awake
straight for a week - probably not a good idea to use them now...

