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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?