what do dreams mean?
I don't mean this in the sense of "if I have a sex dream that involves my mother, does that mean I am attracted to my mother?", I know that dreams aren't a literal representation of our desires in that sense.
What I mean more is, is there any study or anything that has been done to see if a dream's content indicates anything about what problem the brain is trying to work out?
Like does a dream about sex indicate that a certain lobe in the brain is particularly active at that moment?
Or like I have had negative dreams that cause me to feel anxiety when I wake up that involve my family or where I was in the middle of an ICE raid recently, does that indicate anything in particular about what my brain was doing while I was asleep that caused me to feel anxiety and that happened to manifest as ICE raids?
not sure if this was the right sub for this question.
I doubt there is much correlation. The mind is mostly compressing information and re-organizing. Dreams are a byproduct of sleep but not a reason for it. I doubt there is much of a relationship between what we experience as dreams and what the brain is actively doing at a physical level.
I feel it is likely ideation separate from the purpose of sleep that we've somehow evolved to do with the excess of nighttime processing capacity OR dreams are an emergent property of what is happening during sleep.
I found these:
And here are a few that possibly contradict my view:
It will be exciting to see if we'll ever get concrete answers here--via neuralink, etc.
lol