and What Do Our Dreams Mean?

Why do we dream, and could your bizarre nightmare actually mean something profound? Every night, our brains stage a private cinema of visions: some mundane, some terrifying, some straight-up surreal. We’ve all awoken from a dream – be it the classic one where you’re falling, or the one where your high school math teacher inexplicably turns into a talking cat – and wondered: Was that trying to tell me something? For as long as humans have closed their eyes to sleep, we’ve been collectively scratching our heads in the morning, pondering if our dreams are random mental static or secret messages from the beyond. It’s a question that has tantalized spiritual leaders, puzzled scientists, and inspired artists to create monsters and melodies drawn directly from their REM sleep​.

We might casually dismiss our own dreams as “just a dream,” yet across history and cultures, people have lived and died by the significance of these nocturnal stories.

Long before psychologists tried to map the dreamscape, ancient peoples were busy interpreting it. In ancient Egypt, dreaming was serious business – literally a line to the divine. If you dozed off by the temple of a god, you might wake up with instructions for the future, since Egyptians believed dreams were messages from deities or the spirits of the dead​. They even had professional dream interpreters and “incubation” rituals to induce prophetic dreams​.

Half a world away and millennia later, many Indigenous cultures have never stopped viewing dreams as vitally real. For the Ese Eja people of the Amazon, a dream about, say, a white-lipped peccary isn’t random at all – it signals good hunting ahead, while a dream of an elephant warns of sickness​.

In these communities, the boundary between the dream and waking world is permeable. Animals, plants, and ancestors all cross over to deliver wisdom, and a skilled dreamer might guide the tribe with information gleaned in sleep. From the Greek oracles at Delphi to the visions of shamans in Siberia, dreams have been thought of as portals: entry points to the spirit realm, sources of artistic inspiration, or previews of events yet to come. The Bible portrays dreams as divine communication (think of Joseph interpreting Pharaoh’s nightmares of fat and thin cows), and Islam too has a rich tradition of meaningful dreams. A sturdy dreamcatcher hanging above a child’s bed – originally an Ojibwe practice, now global – is meant to filter out evil visions in the night​

Whether it’s a medicine man in a First Nations community or a village elder in ancient Mesopotamia, there’s a perennial human hope that those weird stories we experience in sleep matter. They might carry messages from gods or ancestors, hint at hidden desires, or warn us of danger on the horizon.

Artists aren’t shy about mining our dreams. Dreams have been the secret sauce behind some world-changing creative moments. Mary Shelley literally dreamed up Frankenstein’s monster after telling ghost stories late into the night​. Paul McCartney woke up one morning with the melody of “Yesterday” fully formed in his mind, as if his sleeping brain had handed him a Beatles hit on a silver platter​.

Across disciplines, we can point to any number of innovators who credit dreams for their epiphanies: the scientist Otto Loewi famously had a dream that led to the discovery of neurotransmitters, and mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan said that Hindu goddesses whispered mathematical formulas to him in his sleep​. If that sounds far-fetched, consider that even in sports, a champion like golfer Jack Nicklaus once solved a swing problem after a vivid dream lesson​.

In my creative home of Hollywood, the industry loves the fantastical side of dreaming. Nolan’s Inception turned lucid dreaming into a high-stakes heist, blurring dream and reality until audiences weren’t sure which was which. Horror franchises like A Nightmare on Elm Street imagine that what happens in your nightmares could literally kill you. And in countless novels and TV shows, the “it was all a dream” twist has been both used and overused, precisely because dreams feel like such powerful, mysterious experiences that anything can happen within them. We casually reference our aspirations as “dreams” in everyday speech (“dream job,” “American dream”), a reminder of how deeply this nightly phenomenon is woven into our language and psyche. Underneath the pop fascination is a serious question science is still trying to answer: Are dreams just entertainment, or do they serve some crucial function?

It wasn’t until the late 19th century that dreams got a formal scientific spotlight, thanks to a much-debated Viennese doctor armed with a notebook and a very bold theory. In 1899, Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, arguing that our dreams are essentially a form of wish-fulfillment in coded messages​. To Freud, every dream – no matter how trivial or terrifying – boiled down to hidden desires. You dream about missing the train? Perhaps you secretly wanted to miss it. A ridiculous example he loved to cite was his own daughter dreaming of strawberries and cake after being denied dessert​. Case closed: she was hungry, so she dreamed of eating. Freud delighted in deciphering the “manifest content” (the literal storyline of the dream) to uncover the “latent content” (the subconscious wish beneath it). Sometimes a cigar was not just a cigar, especially in Freud’s view, and a dream about, say, flying could symbolize all sorts of repressed urges. His idea that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious caught on like wildfire, defining psychotherapy for decades. But not everyone bought into the notion that every dream is a cleverly disguised Freudian fantasy. Freud’s onetime protégé, Carl Jung, broke away and offered a different take: dreams weren’t just personal wish-fulfillments, but rather windows into a collective unconscious filled with archetypal symbols​. Where Freud saw a dark basement of repressed desires, Jung saw a deep lake (maybe even a mystical ocean) in which universal images – the wise old man, the shadow, the mother – swim around and occasionally surface in our dreams​. If you dreamed of a great flood or a serpent, Jung might point out how that symbol echoes across cultures and time, suggesting your mind tapped into something bigger than your own life story. In Jung’s world, a dream could be a message from your soul, nudging you toward growth or balance (what he called individuation). The two early titans of dream theory disagreed on almost everything – sex, spirituality, the meaning of symbols – but they shared a core belief that dreams mean something, and if you can decode them, you gain insight into the human mind.

Then science stepped in with some wires and electrodes to both illuminate and complicate the picture. In the 1950s, researchers using EEG discovered the curious phenomenon of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, when the brain is almost as active as when we’re awake and the eyes dart around under the lids. People awakened from REM sleep often reported vivid dreaming, which led scientists to nickname this stage “paradoxical sleep” and declare it the prime time for dreams. Suddenly, dreams were not just a psychological curiosity but a physiological process that could be measured. By the 1970s, sleep labs were beeping and whirring each night as volunteers dozed off with electrodes glued to their scalps. The new tools of neuroscience allowed researchers to quantify and categorize dreams in a way Freud and Jung never could. Sleep scientist Rosalind Cartwright, sometimes dubbed the “Queen of Dreams,” brought volunteers into the lab to study how dreams might help us handle emotional stress. In one study, she tracked people going through heartbreak (divorces, specifically) and found that those who dreamed more about their exes tended to cope better and move on faster.

Cartwright saw this as evidence that dreams reflect our waking concerns – essentially, that dreaming is a therapeutic nightly workshop where our brain grapples with the feelings and problems we’ve been preoccupied with by day. Around the same time, at Harvard, Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley were peering inside the brain with a very different attitude. They hatched the “activation-synthesis” hypothesis, which all but called dreams an accidental sideshow​. In their view, the brainstem fires off random signals during REM sleep and higher brain regions desperately try to weave a story out of this nonsense – resulting in the weird movies we call dreams. To Hobson, a pioneer of neurophysiology, dreaming was biologically interesting but psychologically meaningless. “Dreams are just the brain entertaining itself,” he essentially argued, implying that all that Freudian symbol-hunting was as misguided as trying to read tea leaves​. Many other scientists in the late 20th century took up this skeptical chorus. If dreams were just neuron firings, why bother extracting meaning from them? One article from that era dryly noted that according to the prevailing neuroscience, dreams were “motivationally neutral, meaningless” phenomena – and with a sigh of relief, some thought we’d finally “gotten rid of the Freudian nonsense” entirely​. In academic psychology, dream interpretation became almost a taboo topic for a while, lumped in with mysticism or, worse, charlatanism. How ironic, then, that even as Western science tried to dismiss dreams as noise, people around the world continued to consult dreams for guidance, healing, and creative spark, as they always had.

Dream research is swinging back around to a more nuanced position. It turns out the pendulum may have swung too far toward “dreams mean nothing.” New findings in neuroscience have poked holes in the idea that dreaming is just random static. South African neuroscientist Mark Solms – one of those rare researchers who embraces Freud as well as fMRI – discovered something intriguing: patients with damage to specific regions of the brain can completely lose the ability to dream, even though their sleep cycles (including REM) remain normal​. Those regions, it turns out, are linked to the brain’s motivation and reward circuitry (the dopamine-fueled networks that make us desire and strive). In other words, when the “wanting” part of the brain was injured, dreams disappeared. To Solms, this was a eureka moment suggesting that Freud might have been onto something after all. He quipped that neuroscience “owed Freud an apology,” since if any part of the brain embodies our “wishes,” it’s exactly the part needed to generate dreams​. Dreams, from this perspective, are not just pointless hallucinations – they’re deeply tied to what we crave, fear, and feel.

Other researchers like Kelly Bulkeley have integrated cultural and spiritual angles, suggesting that our dream content is heavily influenced by our life experiences, beliefs, and even the stories we absorb from society​. Bulkeley has gone so far as to enlist artificial intelligence to sift through dream reports in bulk, looking for patterns (for example, do people in different countries dream differently? Do global events like a pandemic show up in our collective dream life?). He and others have found that AI can detect subtle trends – say, an uptick in anxiety-related symbols during turbulent times – but they also warn that no algorithm will be replacing your therapist anytime soon​. The meaning of a dream, if there is one, still seems intimately personal. Yet the process of dreaming appears to serve some important functions: regulating emotions, consolidating memories, maybe even rehearsing survival skills. Yes, survival – one evolutionary theory, proposed by Finnish psychologist Antti Revonsuo, is that we evolved to dream as a virtual reality simulator for threats​. In the safety of sleep, our ancestors could practice encountering saber-toothed tigers or hostile tribes and fine-tune their fight-or-flight responses. Even though most of us don’t face big cats in our modern bedrooms, this threat simulation theory says that the weirdly common theme of being chased or attacked in dreams isn’t accidental at all – it helped our forebears sharpen their reflexes​. Not everyone is convinced by this, but it underscores how current science is willing to grant dreams some purpose beyond mere randomness. Far from a uniform consensus, the landscape of dream research now includes staunch materialists who see the brain as a storyteller with a chemistry set, psychoanalysts who see a direct line to the soul, and a growing cohort of interdisciplinary scholars who are happy to say dreams can be both: biological and meaningful.

Meanwhile, technology is catching up with our wildest dream imaginings – sometimes literally straight out of sci-fi. In recent years, neuroscientists have made eerie progress in “reading” dreams. A team in Japan used fMRI brain scans and machine learning to identify simple dream images with around 60% accuracy, essentially eavesdropping on the sleeping brain​. They would wake volunteers, ask what they’d just seen in their dream, and match that to the scan data – eventually training algorithms to predict when a dream contained, say, a man or a car or a piece of furniture. It’s not exactly a replay of your dreams on a TV (we’re far from that, and perhaps thankfully so), but it’s a step toward a genuine dream recorder. Across the globe, other researchers have taught lucid dreamers – people who become self-aware in the middle of a dream – to communicate outwards while asleep. In one stunning experiment, scientists established two-way contact with lucid dreamers, essentially having a Q&A while the person was still in REM sleep. The dreamers could answer yes/no questions or even do simple math by moving their eyes in specific patterns as signals​. A startup here in California claims to have facilitated a shared dreaming experience, where two people in separate REM sleeps exchanged information using a pre-arranged “dream language” of signals​. It sounds like Inception-for-real and is still in early experimental stages, but the mere fact it’s on the table shows how far we’ve come from just scribbling dream diaries at the breakfast table. For the rest of us not wired up in labs, consumer tech has also joined the fray. There are wearable headbands and apps that promise to induce lucid dreams or modulate your sleep stages with sounds and vibrations. The jury is out on how effective these gadgets truly are, but it’s an intriguing attempt to influence our dreams – to maybe steer the nightmare away or cue up a pleasant scenario. Some sleep scientists caution that we’re entering ethically fuzzy territory: if advertisers ever figured out how to literally put dreams in our head (imagine a subtle jingle for soda playing in your dream background), the sanctity of our inner theater could be at risk. For now, those concerns are mostly hypothetical. What’s real is the therapeutic potential that’s being explored. Clinicians have developed techniques to help trauma survivors re-script their nightmares into less terrifying versions, effectively hacking the dream from within to defang it. Lucid dreaming training is being tested as a tool for people with chronic nightmares or PTSD – if you can become aware you’re dreaming during a nightmare, you might be able to confront or escape the threat and reduce the terror over time. On a lighter note, creativity researchers encourage keeping a dream journal and even “incubating” dreams by thinking about a problem before bed, in hopes your sleeping mind serves up an answer by morning. Psychologist Deirdre Barrett famously had people focus on personal dilemmas at night; a fair number of participants reported dreaming up solutions, some of which actually worked in real life​. It seems that, whether by high-tech fMRI or low-tech notepad on the nightstand, we’re finding new ways to peek under the hood of the dream engine.

At the end of the day (or night), what are we to make of the age-old question of dream meaning? Part of the answer depends on whom you ask. A neuroscientist might say dreams are the brain’s way of cleaning house, consolidating memories, and tossing out mental trash – with some quirky imagery as a side effect. A therapist might say that even if dreams aren’t mystical prophecies, they’re still revealing your worries, hopes, and conflicts in a metaphorical code, well worth reflecting on. A spiritual elder might gently remind you that dismissing dreams as “just neurons” misses the point, because dreams, in their view, connect us to something greater than ourselves – call it the collective unconscious, the spirit world, or the wisdom of our ancestors. And in pop culture, dreams remain as meaningful or meaningless as the storyline requires: one minute fueling a hero’s journey, the next minute played for a laugh about eating weird mushrooms before bed. The critics and dissenters certainly exist. There are scholars who argue that trying to interpret dreams is a fool’s errand, akin to interpreting inkblots – you’ll see whatever you want to see. They caution that many a charlatan has made a career out of over-analyzing dreams, and that one should be wary of assigning too much importance to what could be cognitive noise. But even the harshest skeptics usually concede that the experience of dreaming can feel profound. Meaning or not, dreaming is a real phenomenon that our brains devote a lot of energy to. Evolution didn’t weed it out, so it likely serves some purpose, even if it’s just internally entertaining ourselves or maintaining the circuits of the mind.

In a time where we can track brain waves and even attempt to decode them, the mystery of dreams happily endures. Maybe that’s for the best. Our dreams remain one of the most intimate, democratic experiences around – every human who sleeps has them, yet no two people’s dreams are exactly alike. In a single night you might travel from a childhood home to a futuristic city to a fantastic realm not found on any map. You might speak with the dead, face your fears in symbolic form, or receive a flash of inspiration that changes your waking life. Or, let’s be honest, you might just have a nonsensical mishmash starring your boss, a giant platypus, and the cast of a sitcom you hardly even watch. But even then, when you open your eyes and laugh at the absurdity, you’ve got a unique story no one else will ever experience in quite the same way. As we look to the future, our approach to dreaming can become more thoughtful and optimistic. We can take advantage of the science – use smart alarms that wake us gently from REM, try out lucid dream techniques to explore our inner worlds, apply dream analysis as one tool (not the only tool) for self-reflection – without losing the wonder that has always surrounded dreams. We can respect the diverse cultural perspectives, realizing that what seems “just a dream” in one worldview might be a key insight in another. Ultimately, dreaming is a reminder that life isn’t just about the concrete and the logical. There’s a part of us that dances every night in the realm of imagination, unbound by physical laws or social rules. Embracing that fact can be oddly freeing. So the next time you wake up from a wild dream, instead of immediately shrugging it off, you might give it a moment of appreciation (and yes, maybe jot it down before it fades). It’s a free, built-in experience that we all get to share in different ways, a nightly brainstorming session by that strange genius in our head. We may never fully decipher the riddle of why we dream, but perhaps the journey of trying – the intersection of mythology, psychology, and cutting-edge science – is its own reward. In a world increasingly obsessed with productivity and tangible results, dreams invite us to treasure the enigmatic and the personal. They remind us that being human means seeing meaning and magic in the strangest of places – even in the flickering images behind our eyelids in the dark. And if nothing else, they make for some fantastic stories to swap, connecting us, one sleepy storyteller to another, across cultures and across time​.