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Throughout human history, people have wondered whether dreams have a purpose. Modern scientists are also fascinated by this question. For a long time, the science of dreams has oscillated between fringe research and the mainstream. But creative study designs and new technology are turning it into an exciting and serious research field. Here are four recent breakthroughs that could pave the way to a better understanding of dreams.
lucid dream
An international study in 2021 showed that two-way communication was possible between a lucid dreamer and a researcher in the laboratory. In 2024, another study followed this up by training lucid dreamers to control a virtual car from within their dreams.
The 12 dreamers involved in the experiment made slight muscle movements, which prompted the computer to make the virtual vehicle move forward or turn. The signals were sent to tell the dreamers about obstacles that had to be avoided. Some were able to steer the car well, but others, no matter how hard they tried, could not do it.
While interesting, it is still unknown how this kind of technology could be used in everyday life. And the small sample size of this study, partly due to the rarity of skilled lucid dreamers, limits the conclusions we can draw. But the findings do suggest that it may be possible for some people to make decisions from within a dream and communicate them to the outside world (at least with practice).
Why do we dream?
Sleep and dreams researcher Mark Blagrove of Swansea University believes that dreams are meant to be socially shared and have evolved in humans to enhance emotional intelligence and empathy. Since 2016, Blagrove has collaborated with artist Julia Lockhart in a dream discussion and illustration group. A viewer is invited to share a recent dream they have had. Blagrove leads the discussion while Lockhart sketches the interpretation of the dream on the pages of Sigmund Freud’s book The Interpretation of Dreams.
His 2019 research paper showed that discussing dreams in this way can increase empathy between the dream sharer and the listener. Blagrove argues that this may have been valuable for ancestral survival in forming important connections with others.
Other theories about why we dream have also begun to emerge in recent years, and some were discussed in a panel at the annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD) in June 2024. For example, the embodied cognition theory of dreams, which proposes that dreams prepare us for the cognitive functions of normal waking life. This has not yet been tested, but it reflects growing scientific interest in the adaptive purpose of dreams.
Insights from a long dream series
Michael Schredl of the University of Mannheim in Germany is one of the most prolific dream researchers working today, having published hundreds of articles and books since beginning his career in the 1990s. He has been keeping dream diaries since the early 1980s. At the IASD conference, he gave a keynote address analyzing more than 12,000 of his dreams. Overall, the patterns seemed to support the dream continuity hypothesis – that our dreams are influenced by events and concerns in our waking lives.
Schredl believes he is one of the first people to observe weather patterns in dreams. He has noticed a steady decrease in the number of snow, ice and hail in his dreams over the past few years. Interestingly, this was similar to the documented decline in the number of “snow days” (days when the temperature was below 0°C for 24 hours) in Germany since he has been keeping a dream journal. He joked that perhaps the effects of global warming are also reflected in dreams, but this could also be influenced by waking worries about such things.
Another interesting pattern was references to money in dreams. When the Deutsche Mark was the prevailing currency, it occasionally appeared in their dreams for years, but when the German currency changed to the euro in 2002, the number of Deutsche Mark references was replaced by references to the euro. Such long dream series are rare, but they can show us how intertwined the content of dreams is with our waking lives.
dream recall
Some people remember their dreams better than others, recalling dreams more often and in more detail. For a long time, researchers have tried to determine the causes and mechanisms of this difference. They have looked at factors including personality and attitudes toward dreams, general memory capacity, and small physiological signals that occur during certain sleep stages. So far, the most consistent predictor of more frequent dream recall has been a positive attitude toward dreams; if you think dreams are important, you’ll probably be more motivated to try to remember them more often.
In 2022 French researcher Salomé Blain and her colleagues examined the role of attention in dream recall, a cognitive skill closely linked to memory. While their participants’ ability to recall dreams was not associated with working memory – which temporarily holds information for immediate use – participants who remembered fewer dreams were better at ignoring distracting stimuli, and vice versa.
They compared low and high dream recallers in how well they were able to recognize that two tunes (both playing in the same ear) were different, compared to a distracting tune playing in the opposite ear. This suggests that people who are good at remembering dreams may be poor at filtering out irrelevant and distracting information, so they may pay more attention to what’s going on in their minds while they sleep. However, dream recall is a learnable skill. For example, keeping a dream journal can significantly improve dream recall, especially for people who already have poor dream recall.
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