Why Dreams Mean Less Than We Think

According to the study, 74% of Indians, 65% of South Koreans and 56% of Americans hold an old-fashioned Freudian view of dreams: that they are portals into the unconscious.

But after so many years of brain research showing that most of our everyday cognitions result from a complex but observable interaction of proteins and neurons and other mostly uncontrolled cellular activity, how can so many otherwise rational people think dreams should be taken seriously? After all, brain activity isn't mystical but — for the most part — highly predictable.

The authors of the study — psychologists Carey Morewedge of Carnegie Mellon University and Michael Norton of Harvard — offer a few theories. For one, dreams often feature familiar people and locations, which means we are less willing to dismiss them outright. Also, because we can't trace the content of dreams to an external source — because that content seems to arise spontaneously and from within — we can't explain it the way we can explain random thoughts that occur to us during waking hours. If you find yourself sitting at your desk and thinking about a bomb exploding in your office, you might say to yourself, "Oh, I watched 24 last night, so I'm just remembering that episode." But people have a harder time making sense of dreams. Maybe 24 caused the dream, we think — or maybe we're having a premonition of an attack. We love to interpret dreams widely, and those acts of interpretation give dreams meaning. 

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