I’m a Sleep Psychologist—Here’s What Your Dreams and Nightmares Really Mean (And the Truth Behind THAT Vision of Your Teeth Falling Out)

Whether it’s terrifyingly realistic visions of our teeth falling out or our partner cheating on us with a co-worker they insisted we didn’t have to worry about, we all have strange dreams that we can’t seem to make sense of.

Well, now a top sleep expert has shared a fascinating insight into why we can have such vivid experiences during our sleep.

Professor Mark Blagrove, director of Swansea University’s Sleep Laboratory, thinks the reason our dreams can be so ‘complex’, littered with ‘characters, emotions and plots’, is that they are designed so that we can share them with others to share.

Some psychologists instead believe that dreams are just the brain’s way of processing memories, understanding emotions, and processing arguments.

Others say that there is absolutely nothing behind our visions, claiming that they are just a meaningless set of thoughts.

“There’s a lot of debate about why we dream,” Professor Blagrove told the British Psychological Society’s PsychCrunch podcast.

‘But most researchers will accept that dreams are meaningful and refer to the individual’s waking life, even if in a metaphorical sense.

“They do not copy waking life, but often provide plots or scenes that relate to some extent to the person’s waking life.”

Although many dreams contain “fictional” scenes, most people can usually identify with the emotions they experience, he explains. But why?

One explanation comes from an evolutionary theory that posits that a virtual reality takes place in our minds as we toss and turn in bed, and we practice overcoming threats.

Professor Blagrove said: ‘We dream of threats that happen to us.

“We simulate these threats that appear in our dreams, to simulate the practice of overcoming these threats.”

Sometimes these threats are not of a physical, but of a mental nature, aimed at our self-esteem, causing us to process arguments and ways of arguing with people.

Dreams are also thought to help consolidate our memories and make them more permanent, Professor Blagrove said. Some believe that this process can cause such lucid dreams.

“During sleep we consolidate our memories and emotional memories and make the memories more permanent and also link them to previous memories in our long-term memory,” he said.

“One theory says that as the brain does that, we actually experience the consolidation, and the experience of the consolidation is our dream.”

However, not all scientists agree with this.

“There is also the theory that many scientists will hold that dreams are epiphenomenal and that they simply happen,” Professor Blagrove said.

‘During waking life our daydreams happen, which has a function because we can follow our daydreams and build on them and think about them, and the theory just says that the processing power is transferred in our sleep. But there is no purpose behind that, it just hasn’t disappeared through evolution.’

Professor Blagrove believes that sharing dreams with others is the way we can reap the benefits of our real-life visions.

That’s because sharing dreams gives one insight into the dreamer’s life and helps build bonds, he said.

“Maybe the function of dreaming doesn’t happen while we sleep,” he said.

‘What has happened instead is that dreams have evolved and the content of dreams has evolved so that when we tell the dreams to other people when we are awake, you are revealing yourself to other people at that moment.

“The reason why dreams are so complex and have these characters and emotions and plots and scenes and scenarios is because that complexity is necessary to allow the person to express themselves metaphorically to other people.”

He suggests that because the art of storytelling has been historically important in humans, dreaming serves this purpose.

A experiment Led by Professor Blagrove, published in Frontiers in 2019, people were involved in opening up their dreams to others.

Fascinatingly, listening and telling dreams increased empathy.

But it should come as no surprise that this benefit of dreaming is only possible if you can remember the dream.

While all sleep is important, REM sleep is especially important because it plays a role in dreaming, memory, and emotional processing.

The majority of our dreams occur during this phase (which makes up about a quarter of our sleep) and, according to Sleep Foundation, tend to be more vivid.

You are also more likely to remember a dream if you wake up during your REM sleep period.

If you continue to sleep during that cycle, dreams just seem to “disappear” and have no lasting effect, Professor Blagrove said.

He explains that some psychologists believe that the dreams before your REM cycle are just a preparation for the last dream of the night.

“The other dreams that occur during the night that we may continue to sleep in are just part of practicing that function and preparing for the big long dream that happens at the end of the night,” Professor Blagrove said.

It is also common for people to remember nightmares when they wake up.

Professor Blagrove describes a nightmare as a ‘disturbing dream with negative emotions’ and explains that some experts believe that nightmares are the brain’s way of overcoming fears and threats and that they are in fact more functional than dreams.

An example of this is that if someone has experienced a traumatic event such as an earthquake, they are more likely to have nightmares about it than people who have not experienced one.

But others say nightmares are a failure of the dream function.

If you have a dream and are processing memories and emotions, but instead have a nightmare, that’s a “failure of that function,” he said.

“Trying to process something that is so disturbing that it wakes you up,” he added.