“Are our dreams from God?”
There are all kinds of theories about what dreams are, what
they mean, and the purpose they serve for human beings. One theory is that dreams
are our brains attempting to derive meaning from meaningless stimuli,
attempting to create order out of chaos. Sigmund Freud saw them as a window
into the unconscious. Psychologist Rosalind Cartwright says dreams “help
us process new, emotionally important information and add it to our conceptual
memory system”. Sleep scientist Robert Stickgold says there is “precious little
on which dream researchers agree”.
That about sums it up. From a scientific
perspective, the answer is that we don’t know what purpose dreams serve, or if
they mean anything at all. Where dreams are concerned, we cannot be certain
about much of anything.
