Neat article about the meaning of dreams

More idease are in this article then indicated in the title

Mind - Dreams as Anticipation for the State of Being Awake - NYTimes.com

In a paper published last month in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Dr. J. Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist and longtime sleep researcher at Harvard, argues that the main function of rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM, when most dreaming occurs, is physiological. The brain is warming its circuits, anticipating the sights and sounds and emotions of waking.

“It helps explain a lot of things, like why people forget so many dreams,” Dr. Hobson said in an interview. “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.”

Drawing on work of his own and others, Dr. Hobson argues that dreaming is a parallel state of consciousness that is continually running but normally suppressed during waking. The idea is a prominent example of how neuroscience is altering assumptions about everyday (or every-night) brain functions.

Comments

[Marcia Dream]

There may be a physiological reason for why we dream at all, but the reason why different people dream different things has to be based on something more. Dreams are complex stories - so complex that philosophers can argue that waking life may just be a dream. There is a reason why you transform a physiological reaction into one story while I take the same physiological reaction and turh it into a completely different story.