NYT: Is dreaming a way for the brain to warm up for the sights, sounds, and emotions of being awake? "It helps explain a lot of things, like why people forget so many dreams... It's like jogging; the body doesn't remember every step, but it knows it has exercised. It has been tuned up. It's the same idea here: dreams are tuning the mind for conscious awareness."
Is dreaming just a warm-up for being awake?
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But studies show that deprivation of dreaming (waking a sleeper when they start to dream, not just depriving them of ALL sleep), will eventually lead to hallucinations and bizarre behavior. It doesn't seem like this "warm-up" function is the only reason. Also, artificial neural networks seem to need sleep and dreaming or they, too, begin to fail in the AI equivalent of hallucinations.
I believe that people so easily forget their dreams because their actual physical senses were not involved. Actual sensory experience has a "deepening" effect on memory.
If you believe in evolution, then the question isn't really "why do people sleep and dream?" but rather, "why do mice and cats and dogs sleep and dream?" Any explanation that involves deep thinking or cognitive ability above that of a fish is probably going down the wrong path.
Maybe. But how about dreams being what our light sleep mind notices while it defrags?
its been said before that it is infact "training" for situations you enter into or may in the future enter into so that your response is sorta pre-programmed and automated.
many times people being interviewed after a traumatic experience, (ie. car crash)... or a tough snap decision that they may have known was coming... they say, "it felt like a dream". maybe they were brain trained.
I'm convinced that dreaming is a simulation training exercise of the brain. I usually dream abous common life situations (you can call "conflicts") and it's like a videogame. No, not Quake-style, more like conversational adventure. ;^)