In my previous post, I talked about how mental imagery (illustrated by but certainly not limited to vision) ultimately derives from memories, modified by the pink noise that all of us have in our brains. This is why malleability of memories is so useful (unlike the pixel-perfect digital storage): it allows creativity.
The same applies to dreams, but with a twist. Again, the contents of our dreams derive from memories (we wouldn’t dream an apple if we never saw one in our lives), but the modification of the images (and other sensory modalities) is more extreme. What’s going on?
Ernest Hartmann proposed an explanation of dreams as the internal psychotherapy of mind. Much like our body produces its internal painkillers (the endorphins), so our mind makes us dream to solve our psychological issues (well, to attempt to, anyway—endorphins, too, don’t always fully work).
When awake and actively interacting with the world around us, we’re potentially exposed to all sorts of dangers (our ancestors may have, for example, been attacked by a predator, like a tiger). So it’s important for our fixed action patterns, whether you fight or flee, to work impeccably. Accordingly, certain neurotransmitters reduce the mental malleability to an extent in wakeful states of mind. If, figuratively speaking, you picture neuronal pathways as “channels” running over some sort of landscape, then their banks are very steep in a wakeful state, so that the “water” in them (again, figuratively speaking) doesn’t spill over along a god-knows-what new path.
But when we dream, those particular neurotransmitters are almost absent in the brain (they’re still present during the dreamless stages of sleep). This allows the “currents” in those channels to spill over and thus explore new paths, find potential new connections that may help you solve the problems bothering you, whether you’re consciously aware of them or not. The dreams are hyper-connective, according to Ernest Hartmann, and their flow is guided by emotions evoked by the problems that weigh on the mind.
This is very different from Freud’s idea of dreams as wish fulfilment—and helps to explain why many more dreams have negative emotional content, compared to happy dreams. This also explains why we sometimes obtain some nifty ideas from dreams.
This malleability turns dreams not only into an internal psychotherapy of mind but also into a font of creativity—in which they’re similar to mental imagery. Both ultimately have a source in memory. And the driver of malleability (or if you want to put in in terms of the evolutionary principle, of mutability)—the link between creativity and memory—is, as explained in my previous blog post, the evolutionary process in the brain.