88. The psychology of dreams

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Speaker 1: Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. New listeners, old listeners, wherever you are in the world, Thanks for tuning in. It's so great to have you here. Today. We're going to cover a topic that's a little bit different from our usual content on this show, less relatable to our twenties, more of the psychology. But I know that you all enjoy some of my more science based episodes, so if you are one of those people, this one is for you. We're going to be talking about the psychology of dreams and daydreaming, where our mind tends to go when we are both asleep and awake and really dig deep into what exactly goes on inside our brains when we enter this nice, cozy fantasy space. Dreams are like this massive metaphor, I think, and this massive concept in our lives. They show up in music, in literature, in art, in movies all the time as this incredible imaginative landscape and symbol and metaphor, but surprisingly very little is actually known. Very little is known about dreams, and this topic has been on my list for a while, but it just kind of keeps getting buried amongst some of the more relevant things that have been going on in my life. However, today is the day that we get into it and we give it its time in the sun. Dreams are a really interesting concept to me, but also a really interesting concept in psycholog because a not much is known, but b there are so many schools of thought. Some say that dreams are our brain's way of sorting through information, of consolidating our memories. Others say that it's our subconscious coming to the surface. And there are some other really weird pseudoscientific theories about future telling about what our dreams can tell us about what we're thinking about and our repressed desires and what's going to happen to us. Ancient civilizations, they used to think that dreams contained like certain prophecies, and it was Freud who came up with the idea that they are really our repressed desires coming to the surface. So some of these theories are obviously more valid than others. But what's also fascinating is how scientists and researchers have learned to study our dreams. We obviously cannot peer into someone's unconscious mind and watch their dreams from a computer screen, at least not yet anyways, So a huge amount of this research is based on subjective reporting from basically asking people what do you remember? And then people have slowly begun using things like MRI machines and tracking our I movements and eeg. But even then, there are so many unanswered questions, and they have found that everyone dreams, which is why this topic I think will be universally accepted and loved and interesting and a few different things kind of go on in our brain when this happens, which I really want to touch on today. Some of those big questions still remain unanswered. We're going to do our best to answer them today. Why do we dream? Why are everyone's dreams different? Why are they so illogical? What can they tell us about reality? And what is the deal with nightmares and lucid dreaming. We are going to explore all of that today, starting in the brain, working our way into our subconscious and out towards some of the major theories. We are also going to cover the role of daydreaming as a little kind of side quest, a little bit of a bonus bonus episode within an episode. And although daydreaming isn't technically dreaming because we are awake, it's still incredibly important to cover and I think equally fascinating. I'm going to pop a little study in here, but there have been particular studies that have shown that we spend up to forty seven percent of our time awake daydreaming, So let's try and account for what actually goes on during that time, because it's a massive portion of our waking hours, So what's going on there. I've also been seeing this idea of maladaptive daydreaming all over my for you pages recently, and I'm so fascinated by it. It's definitely something I've succumbed to in the past, so why not talk about it, particularly the role of daydreaming as a form of escapism without further ado, let's jump into the psychology and the science behind why we dream, including the unknown role and interesting role of daydreaming. Even if you don't remember your dreams or you think that you don't dream, the chances are that at some stage, whilst you're asleep, your brain has fallen into this imaginative fantasy state at least three or more times, and most of these distinct dreams last for like five to twenty minutes. And the reason behind why this occurs has a lot to do with both our psychology and our neurology. Dreams they are essentially an involuntary hallucination that occurs when our brains are recharging and resting, and they of course exist on a spectrum. Some of our dreams can be incredibly pleasant and sweet, and on the other hand, we have people who are haunted by constant nightmares. Regardless of the content of your dreams, the same process actually occurs. So in general, our brain goes through four main stages of sleep, and the main distinction between the first three stages and the final stage, which is when dreaming occurs, is actually determined by what our eyes are doing. That may seem a little bit strange that our eyes have something to do with this, but let me explain it a little bit further. So stage one to three of sleep they are all characterized by no eye movement. So beginning at stage one, this only lasts like five to ten minutes. It's that like weird transition period between wakefulness and sleep, and then we move into stage two, where I think sleep like technically begins. Our brains begin to slow down, our heart rate slows down, our body temperature drops, and our brain starts to produce these really short bursts of rapid activity as it shuts down. And the next stage, stage three. This is where our deepest sleep occurs. This is where our body repairs itself and it is the most crucial component of our sleep when we talk and we think about the body repairing itself and the mind regenerating itself. But stage four is where all the action is really going on. This is the show stopper. Our eyes they begin to move rapidly, which is why it's also known as rapid eye movement. Sleep rem for short, and our brain activity most close resembles our activity during waking hours because of course, this is where our dreams occur. So we've gone through this, these previous stages of our brain and our body shutting down, but then when we reach stage four rem sleep, everything fires back up, except for our muscles actually, which become entirely paralyzed, which I didn't know that. But there we go, and we begin to have our most vivid dreams. You are most likely to remember your dreams if you are woken up during this period. And interestingly, a study conducted at Harvard Medical School proposed that REM sleep and dreaming during that time can be viewed as almost like a virtual reality that's been created by our brain. In other words, we sense, we act, and we feel what we are dreaming. The rapid movement of our eyes, which is now used to identify when someone is dreaming, It used to confuse people because they used to think back in the day, back in even as early and recent as the nineteen hundreds, that when people were dreaming they were actually partially seeing our dreams on the back of our eyelids because our eyes were moving, as you know, as if we were scanning our environment, which we now know is not true, but we still do undertake a lot of visualization. So although our eyes aren't getting direct input, meaning that we're not technically seeing anything, we are almost vividly visualizing what our brain is creating. For us, scientists, they use REM to track dream like states, and then essentially the only thing they can do is ask people what did you dream about? And that's one of the major reasons why our knowledge of dreaming and dreams is so limited because we cannot directly observe them in an experimental setting. But of course, there have been some recent advances in our technology, including the emergence of EEG machines and magnetic resonance imaging, which allows us to kind of take a deeper look into what exact parts of our brains are lighting up when we enter this kind of fantasy slumber. And they've found that actually all of our brain is active, from the brain stem to most of the major areas of the cortex, with the exception of the frontal lobe, which is the least active area during our dream like state. So the frontal lobe front it's at the very front it's the biggest lobe in the brain, and its relative inactivity actually makes a lot of sense. So our frontal lobe, it controls things like judgment, logic, rational thinking, abstract thought, and self control. It's kind of what allows us to make sense of things in a rational way. So when this part of our brain switches off, things get really weird, and so do our dreams, and it's why our dreams can be so implausible and strange and they can defy everyday principles like continuity, like gravity, like linear storytelling. You know, in our dreams we can do things we could never do in everyday life, like fly or pass through walls, because our frontal lobe is not as active in suppressing these thoughts, letting our creativity and our imagination kind of run wild with no real supervisor on board. So we might think that dreams like this are not really anything to write home about, you know, they're just funny, entertaining stories to tell our friends or to forget about the next morning. But the truth is that dreaming is actually incredibly valuable for our brains and our minds, particularly how memories are stored and how we process our emotions. So I'm going to go through a couple of the major theories that are well respected and accepted before we jump into our friend Freud's ideas about what dreams meant, because I think that those are the most well known, but also the most complicated and a little bit confusing and somewhat pseudoscientific. So the first major school of thought is that dreams they exist to help us sort through the information that we have encountered throughout the day and consolidate those memories that we've made, so dreaming is almost like mental spring cleaning. Each night. We pick up on so much information during the day that we actually don't process at all because our brain is so busy and it's so selective and it only has limited capacity. However, that information still exists, so when we're sleeping, our brain has to sort out what information it wants to keep and what it wants to kind of disregard, and dreams are a byproduct of that activity because this unconscious visualization aids in consolidating our memories by creating images and stories attached to them. So dreams are often a reflection of things that we have experienced whilst awake, and they help with the consolidation of those memories. This is why you may have heard these suggestions that every face we see in a dream is actually someone we saw during the day, and whilst it is very hard to prove that, it is actually possible based on this theory, another theory that is probably my favorite is that dreams are essential for processing our emotions. Now, I really love this theory as someone who has really vivid dreams that often reflect things I've been going through in my life. It makes a lot of sense for me. So storytime, i have really bad claustrophobia, and I'm catching a flight to London in like a few weeks, which from Australia is like two thirteen hour flights, or like a fourteen hour and an eight hour flight, and I'm actually I'm terrified. I'm petrified. The last few weeks, like every night I have been dreaming about being stuck on an airplane, or a friend of mine promising me that they're going to catch a flight with me, and then they get lost, so I'm all alone and the plane's taking off. Like even talking about it right now, my stomach is like twisting and turning. And so the idea that our dreams are a way of confronting the emotional chaos on or you know, fears in our life, especially those that we may be suppressing, makes a lot of sense. Anecdotally from mis active research also shows that negative emotions are more commonly manifested in dreams than our positive emotions because our negative emotions our uncomfortable emotions. These are normally the ones that we refuse to kind of confront when we're awake, causing them to surface when we are in an unconscious state because our brains cannot or our minds. I guess our conscious mind cannot intercept those bad thoughts from happening. That's the explanation I guess for the existence of nightmares. There are a few other ideas, though, such as that dreaming helps us problem solve and rehearse certain situations. Although I had a dream the other night that I was Spider Man, and I really don't think that is ever going to happen. There's no need to rehearse that situation. But they're also good for creativity, and some theories even suggest that they There isn't an explanation. They're just really random. It's just a byproduct of different neurons being fired in our brain and our brain just being active during sleep. And they have no purpose, they have no meaning. But before we move on to this next idea of why everyone dreams differently and some of the more interesting concepts like nightmares, we cannot do an episode on dreams without talking about Freud and his theory, I think is perhaps one of the most well known theories about dreams, but the least accepted. So in the nineteen hundreds, Freud introduced this idea of dream interpretation, so he argued that dreams are really just I guess, our repressed subconscious desires being given an outlet when our brain isn't active enough to control or monitor our thought patterns. It's like letting the intrusive thoughts win. And by examining the private content of these dreams, we can identify our true desires, but also what's really bothering us. And this has created a lot of secondary theories, mainly to do with interpreting certain symbols that show up in our dreams. For example, you will find hundreds, if not thousands, of articles from people who are professional dream analysts, and they'll tell you that if you dream about snakes, you're thinking about a toxic person in your life. Roses symbolized romance, even some really bizarre ones like fiomen symbolizing chaos, or aliens symbolizing that you feel abducted from your life. It's all very weird, and I'll be honest, not true. There is very little science backing this up. It's simply that these symbols are common archetypes that we use in our everyday life to kind of interpret our surroundings. And Freud said, it's really not that complicated, Like, you don't need a dictionary to interpret your dreams. If you dream about your mother, you're thinking about your mother. If you're dreaming about a funeral, you're dealing with grief. When very detached abstract symbols like firemin and aliens come into play, we probably shouldn't read much into it. This brings me to my next idea that I am so fascinated by, and that is why do people dream differently? Well, I think, to start off, we are all innately different people. Personality and perspective have a big role to play. In the same way that we see the world differently when we're awake, we're going to dream differently as well. But environmental factors are also really important to consider. There are certain medications that make our dreams incredibly vivid because they change the chemicals in our brain, which will ultimately change how our neurons and our brains interpret information, consolidate memories, and process our motions. So the main offender is SSRIs, otherwise known as antidepressants, which are known to cause especially vivid dreams or even nightmares because they make more serotonin available to the brain, which whilst it may improve your mood, also causes your dreams to be more intense. Now the exact link isn't known, but the observation has been made. Alcohol is another one. We all know that alcohol can shut down brain functioning, particularly memories, hence why we use the term blackout. It's not like you are physically blind when you drink too much alcohol, or that you're not experiencing those things when you're really drunk, just that alcohol intercepts how our brains are able to store the memories that we've made during that time, which is why if you've had a particularly big night, you're less likely to remember what you've dreamt about. And of course there is Stress has its fingers in literally everything when it comes to psychology, even our subconscious and unconscious states. When we are highly stressed, this affects the areas of our brain that are highly active during rem sleep, and it also makes our emotions much more heightened, which is why it's massively correlated with having nightmares. So people with anxiety or depression, they tend to be more more likely to report having intense nightmares or bad dreams. So in twenty eighteen, this journal reported that people who were more at peace in their life, and who reported lower emotional distress, they had better dreams, Whereas those who had anxiety, those who were reporting that they were really anxious that something was going on in their life that was bothering them, they were more likely to have dreams that contained negative emotions or reactions like being fearful or scared or upset. So nightmares are essentially disturbing dreams and they result in feelings of terror, feelings of fear, and can affect like The estimates are strange, but around six percent of the population, although I think that we've all had a nightmare, so I would put that into question. And here's our second fun fact for the day, which is that children are actually more likely to have nightmares compared to adults. And there has been suggestions that this is evolutionary. So children, they are smaller, they are more vulnerable to more threats than adults, so nightmares may partially reflect this vulnerability. They say that children like somewhere in the forty percent range of children have nightmares that are ongoing or occur more than once. Alongside age as a factor, trauma is also a big contributor. And we know this because people with PTSD, unfortunately, are much more likely to experience nightmares. There was a study conducted by Harvard on veterans who had served in Vietnam, and they found that fifty two percent of them experienced repeated nightmares, compared to that six percent of the civilian and normal civilian population. The thing is, though, I will say, you don't need to have gone to war to still have frequent nightmares. Trauma is subjective. We say that all the time. And if you've ever experienced something that has activated the regions of your brain involved in fear behaviors, you are going to be particularly sensitive. And I think it just goes to show how our brain, and more importantly, our subconscious is really out of our control at times, except for in the case of lucid dreaming. I'll be honest, I didn't know much about this. I was actually quite skeptical whether this was even a real thing at first, But according to the National Institute of Health, it is real. It's essentially the experience of achieving conscious awareness whilst dreaming and being asleep, and people can be trained to experience this to the point where they can actually guide everything that's happening to them whilst they're dreaming, so I did a little bit of digging. It has its origins in Buddhism and Greek philosophy. There are all of these accounts of these people who are able to direct their unconscious imagination. If you're a lucid dreamer, can you like send me a DM? I would love to hear your experience, because I don't think I've ever had a lucid dream like I don't know. The thing is that sometimes you can't even tell, So if you are someone who lucid dreams or has taught themselves how to lucid dream, I really want to hear your story. That sounds so fascinating. You know. All I can get from this is people's reports. They say that it's not scary, and the only thing that kind of happens is that you can feel trapped in your subconscious where time is slower and sometimes things are super strange, almost like a bad trip. But apparently it won't last for long, and some people do not even remember it when they wake up, which is so fascinating to me. That you can literally be guiding yourself like you're in a video game and then have no recollection of it. Okay, we've spent a lot of time focused on the science behind dreaming, but for a bit of a bonus segment, I really want to discuss daydreaming, because although it's a little bit more nuanced, there are some really surprising links to not only our unconscious dream states, but also our well being. So all of that and more in just a second. Daydreaming obviously has one main difference to normal dreaming. It says in the name day. It occurs when we're awake, and it essentially involves a dissociation from reality by entering into some imagined scenario or some past event or experience, almost spontaneously. And it's a form of imagination or a stream of consciousness that actually allows us to take a break from reality for just a brief period. So daydreaming is normally fairly relaxing. It's actually quite pleasant, and that's because it allows our brain to shut off and entertain itself for a moment without needing external stimulation. We get to create these nice stories, We get to comfort ourselves with our day dreams, think about our future, and it can be for five seconds or five minutes. But the reason that research is bela if it takes up so much of our time, roughly forty seven percent. Like we said before, don't know where they got that number, but forty seven percent sounds I don't know about right. The reason is because a most of the time we don't even consciously recognize when it's happening. You know, it's five seconds. We just are suddenly thinking about our trip a few weeks ago, or something that's happening in the future, and b it gives our brain a chance to pause, restore, recharge, and refocus. We cannot spend hours and hours focused on only one thing. Our brain just doesn't have the resources. So when it's mentally fatigued or the brain becomes bored, it uses daydreaming to break things up, which I thought was really interesting. It doesn't mean that the brain is necessarily idle. Actually, neuroimaging techniques have shown that the brain is really alive when we're daydreaming. It's just that we're temporarily resting from the task at hand, so breaking up our days making them more interesting and nuanced. It may also explain why we daydream a lot more when we're bored. I remember in one of the first jobs I had, when we would have slow days. I would literally just sit near the counter and daydream like all day because I couldn't use my phone, which is normally what we use to entertain ourselves. Because the manager would like check the CCTV every five minutes, and I would look up at the clock and like twenty minutes had gone by, because my brain wanted to be entertained, so it kind of dropped me into this fantasy landscape where I could entertain myself. Findings from neuroscience Research Australia has also found that most of the time we are daydreaming, we are thinking about the future. This process helps orientate our towards our goals, towards our intentions. It's more fun than thinking about the past because we don't know what's going to happen. But it also helps us rehearse certain instances that are coming up. You know, there is no timeline for how far into the future we can be thinking. We can be thinking about, you know, a date that we're going on tomorrow, to what our grandkids are going to look like. It's all very nuanced, but it's a rehearsal mechanism. It kind of plays a role in priming us for what to expect in the future or what we may be anticipating or desiring. Another explanation is that daydreaming is a coping mechanism for dealing with anxiety by allowing our brain to relax and escape. If your brain is going a million miles a minute about an upcoming decision or something that is stressing you out at work or in your relationship, a nice cozy daydream about your next holiday or whatever you're thinking about it gives our brain the chance to switch off. And this is where we get the idea of maladaptive daydreaming. I know we've teased it a few times, but this concept is definitely worth the weight, because not only is it fascinating, but I promise there are I think at least a few of us out there who are going to see ourselves in this description. Maladaptive daydreaming is essentially a form of escapism, whereby a person spends an excessive amount of time daydreaming, often becoming immersed in their imagination in a manner that is at times deliberate and voluntary, as opposed to our usual daydreams that are spontaneous, and sometimes it even occurs without our conscious awareness. So When I say a form of escapism, what I mean is that maladaptive daydreaming is kind of a mental distraction from the unpleasant aspects of our life, whereby we allow ourselves to be engulfed in our fantasies, where it is safe, where we are in control, and it's normally quite peaceful. So this behavior, it's especially common as a coping mechanism amongst people who have mental health conditions like anxiety. People who repeatedly engage in maladaptive daydreaming, they tend to almost lose themselves in detailed and vivid daydreams, almost like reading a book, and they can often pause their daydream and come back to it where they left off because of how compulsive this behavior is. Another thing is that the links to anxiety, right, and the links to depression. If you are not happy with your life, if something is bothering you, if you wish things were different, there's a really easy way to create that reality, and that's by just imagining it. So if you're having a hard time and you find that you're spending hours lying in bed daydreaming, it's a coping mechanism, not just because it distracts you, but it allows you to escape and think about this better version of your life. Now, let's not get confused here. Daydreaming it is a normal part of our cognitive functioning and at times it's helpful. But when we use it to ignore confronting experiences or events, or we allow it to interrupt the things that we need to prioritize, this is when psychologists begin to see it as a problem. So although the term is relatively new, it only came about in the early two thousands and there is limited research, of course, but some initial studies have suggested that about four percent of people engage in maladaptive daydreaming, but that increases for adults with anxiety or ADHD and it rises to about twenty percent of these people. So one of the theories is that maladaptive daydreaming can actually be a subtle symptom of ADHD, especially amongst girls and women, because we know that symptoms are expressed differently amongst this group of people. And the reason why is because people with ADHD often have hyperfocus, they are more easily distracted, and their ability to self regulate is sometimes impaired. So it doesn't mean that if you are a big daydreamer you can self diagnose yourself here and now. It's just one of the less well known symptoms. And I found that explanation to make a lot of sense right when we think about it logically, that makes a lot of sense why maladaptive daydreaming and conditions like ADHD or anxiety would be linked. There is no official way to diagnose this condition or this behavior, because it's not even yet recognized in the DSM, so it is for now just a term that is used as a descriptor rather than as a diagnosis. However, you can do this test. It's called the Maladaptive Daydreaming Scale, very original name. It's only fourteen questions and it's designed to essentially help you identify if this is a problem and if you have this propensity to disengage. I think you can take it online, but always be skeptical of self reporting tests that are not administered by a professional. We often have a tendency to answer questions so that we get the answer that we wanted to hear, either that you do have maladaptive daydreaming or that you don't. So if you're interested, have a look into it. But I will say again, the research is very new it's very fresh. It definitely needs a lot more look into both dreaming and daydreaming. They are such fascinating topics to me. Because there is some cool research, I will say that, but there is so much that is unknown. I think with most areas of psychology, we tend to have somewhat of a good grasp about why things happen, how they happen, what these mental phenomena look like. But with dreams, we are so limited because they are entirely internal and private in nature. And I think it's the fact that they occur when we're unconscious that means that we can't observe them how we would normal behavior. But it's also really beautiful that our brains have been able to create a way for us to build these entirely private worlds and storylines and characters just for our enjoyment. I think that's just so remarkable that we have evolved to be able to dream, and that our brain can be so creative even without our conscious input. Like I just I think that's incredible. I think that's so beautiful that we fall asleep and we have a whole new universe, a whole new story, a whole new world. Waiting for us there. Anyways, I think that is all we have time for today, but I'm going to finish with one more fun fact that I found really interesting. I didn't know this, but blind people can actually see images in their dreams, which is insane to me because well, they have no point of reference. You know. If I could make one scientific discovery in my life, I think it would be being able to see other people's dreams because I would love to see the kind of world that it's created in the mind of someone who is blind. That is so fascinating and I think it really goes to show how much of it is really our brain rather than us actually like seeing these images that it's created. So so many fun facts today, so many interesting findings. I love doing some of these more science based episodes. I know there wasn't much in terms of its relationship to our twenties, but there was so much fascinating psychology behind this, and I just had to do it justice. I had to cover this. I just think it is so incredibly fascinating, and you know, everyone in their twenties dreams. So there we go. There's the link that we needed today. So I really hope that you enjoyed this episode. I hope you learned something. I hope it's going to lead to fun dinner table conversations or fun workplace conversations. Dreams are just so cool. I said it before, but it's just the most beautiful thing that our brain allows us to do that. So thank you for joining me on this fun little ride that we had. As always, if you enjoyed this episode, please feel free to leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Heart, wherever you are listening right now. It really does help the show to grow and reach new people. If you have an episode suggestion, please follow me at that Psychology podcast and send me a DM. Tell me what you want to hear. I love when people have had something going on in their lives and they want to know the psychology behind it. That's the whole purpose. So follow me over there if you feel cold to do so, and we will be back on Tuesday for another episode.