Sleep Facts

Dreams involve three amazing evolutionary adaptations - suspension of disbelief, long term memory suppression and inhibition of motor control. Each one of these adaptations is essential in order for dreams not to make us feel completely crazy either during or after dreams take place.

Suspension of disbelief

In life when things take a turn for the truly weird you second guess things. Everyone, no matter how naive, has some level of skepticism. In dreams even the most skeptical of people accept what they see as real. Without this suspension of disbelief, the flow of dreams would be brought to a halt and possibly hijacked. This happens for some people in the form of lucid dreams. Somehow during lucid dreaming suspension of disbelief is interrupted and the dreamer can often control the aspects of their dream. If we did not suspend disbelief during dreams - everyone’s dreams would always be lucid. They would be immediately aware they were dreaming. This “night-time naivety” is in contrast to our natural way of looking at things and is an adaption that makes us go through the exercises presented to us by our dreams without questioning them.

Long Term Memory Suppression

If we forgot entire fragments of our recent lives without reason, most of us would be very concerned. Normal people have a reasonable account of the things they have been doing and thinking in the recent past. This is another strange and novel twist of dreams. For some reason our long term memories have been suppressed with respect to dreams. Given the often bizarre content of our dreams this frees us from having to think about them during our waking hours. It seems as though our brains have developed a specific mechanism to forget the strange thoughts we have at night.

Inhibition of Motor Control

Sleep itself seems to inhibit motor activities. Dreams, however, in most cases completely inhibit motor control. This keeps us from acting out the content of our dreams. When this doesn’t work properly we sleepwalk. If we didn’t inhibit motor control during our dreams - everyone would sleepwalk as they slept at night. This would be as strange as it would be disruptive. Nature has built in a protective adaptation for the dreamer that keeps us in one place - safe and sound.

Are dreams beneficial?

No one knows why we dream, but it seems as though somehow it benefits us to do so as we have evolved so many different processes to keep dreams “in working order”. Occam’s razor would tell us that not dreaming at all would be far simpler than dreaming and going into a special state where we suspend disbelief, stop forming long term memories and inhibit our motor control. Given the evolutionary time and cost of these adaptations it would seem as though quite possibly dreams do give us a beneficial edge - even if we don’t know what it is.