Dreams are a mixture of past experiences and anticipation of future events. Sometimes our brain can therefore predict what will happen in the next few days.
- Our brain could imagine and thus predict events taking place in the coming days.
- This is because dreams anticipate likely future events based on memories of past situations.
An average person dreams 100 minutes per night, or 1 hour and 40 minutes. And these dreams are not trivial. According to a study published in the scientific journal sleepingour brain could predict events taking place in the next few days.
Dreams of anticipation, a mixture of past and future experiences
The basis of the researchers’ work was the so-called “episodic simulation of the future” theory, according to which, in our daily lives, we imagine very frequently how different future events or situations could occur. Thus, we mentally simulate what will happen in the future. This is particularly the case when we think of our future holidays or a pleasant evening to come. For this, we use past elements – for example the memories of the last evening with such friends – that we project into the future.
“We wondered if this model from the cognitive neurosciences of wakefulness could be useful for understanding the function of sleep and dreaming, explain the authors. We hypothesized that participants generally identified future events as the source of a dream. Moreover, we expected that anticipatory dreams would rely on different waking memories, as well as fragments of past experiences mixed with new relevant scenarios to imagine future events”.
More than half of the dreams were based on past experiences
To reach their conclusions, the scientists studied the brains of 48 college students. They spent the night in a laboratory to assess the physiology of their sleep by polysomnography, a medical examination. During the night, the participants were woken up thirteen times by the researchers in order to explain what they remembered about the different phases – early, REM and light – of their sleep. Finally, the next morning, the participants had to describe each of their dreams. A total of 481 reports were analyzed. According to the results, more than half of their dreams were based on past memories. 25.7% related to specific and imminent future events and 37.4% related to future episodic sources related to particular past situations.
“We confirm previous reports that dreams not only reflect past memory, but also anticipate likely future events, note the authors. Furthermore, these data provide a new description of how anticipatory dreams draw on both elements of waking life and past experiences to construct new scenarios anticipating future events.”. Moreover, according to the authors, the proportional increase in future-oriented dreams at the end of the night may be due to the temporal proximity of upcoming events. Although these dreams rarely depict future events realistically, the brain would sometimes be able to accurately predict what is going to happen in the next few days.
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