Reasons for Dreaming

Since the beginning of the semester, I've always notice people consistently asking the same question over and over: What is a dream? Why do we dream? What's going on in our brain when we dream? Unfortunately, the answer is very anti-climactic: we honestly don't know. However, that hasn't stopped us from theorising what a dream is and why we dream. We've basically narrowed it down to 5 possible answers: 1. According to Sigmund Freud, dreams are forms of wish-fulfillment. His explanation of dreams are that they provide ways of expressing what would otherwise be unacceptable feelings and that what you see in a dream--the manifest content--really has a layer of latent content, or the hidden meaning of the dream. 2. According to the information-processing theory, dreams help us sort out the day's events and consolidate our memories. The example we gave in class is just like a business person might clean up his or her desk and office and store everything away neatly, our brain takes the information processed from the day and stores them neatly in different parts of the brain. We see this mental process through our dreams. 3. Dreams are a physiological function that help to preserve neural pathways through regular brain stimulation from REM sleep, and what we see in our dreams are the results of neural pathways being fired. 4. The activation-synthesis theory sort of combines the last two theories. It claims that REM sleep triggers neural activity that evokes random visual memories, which our sleeping brain weaves into stories. In other words, the neural activity helps our brain make sense of visual memories, and the dreams are results of this neural activity. 5. Although it doesn't address the neuroscience of dreams, the cognitive development theory suggests hat dream content reflects the dreamers' cognitive development, or their knowledge and understanding. So which theory would you say is true? These theories really can't be tested, so it's up to the individual to try to understand dreams. I personally think that the activation-synthesis theory makes the most sense, but then again, that's just me.