Why do we dream documentary watch

The others either rest quietly or are awakened before entering REM sleep. Then everyone plays a new word game. I definitely thought we'd be able to find it. I was surprised by the magnitude. But quiet rest or non-REM sleep produced no benefit whatsoever. Sometimes your brain can even be more active than during waking. And you actually have these different areas of the brain that are speaking to each other. So it's actually able to start to free associate amongst its own ideas and memories.

They're very fanciful. They're clearly the brain having a period of loose associations, where you are able to put connections together, between new and old ideas, finding new solutions to new problems. It seems that with a little REM sleep, many of us can also do it. And about half will get an answer that is really gratifying to whatever the issue is. But these may be the most valuable ones of all. There's, like, this kind of spaceship With these huge chains was this big stone tablet, all inscribed with hieroglyphics.

I want to run into my parent's bedroom. There's a long hallway I have to go through to get there. And then, just at that moment, this hand and arm and body reaches for me; this is the giant made of shadows. But could it be we need them? Antti Revonsuo is convinced of it. He's a Finnish scientist who collects nightmares.

He has concluded that many of the bad dreams we have today are the same as those experienced by our ancient ancestors. And we know that our ancestors lived in an environment which was full of all sorts of fatal dangers. And he started chasing me, and I ran and ran and ran. And afterwards he, he stopped for a minute and barked, and then another wolf came and another and another and another.

And then, in the end, there was a whole pack of wolves with big long teeth, and they were very, very hairy and big and scary, and they started chasing me. ANTII REVONSUO: The nature of bad dreams and nightmares is that they contain threatening events and they force us to go through those simulated threatening events in order that in the waking world we encounter similar or different kinds of threatening events, and then we are more prepared to survive those when we have been training for them in our dreams.

NARRATOR: Revonsuo believes this mechanism for rehearsing stressful events stays with us for all our lives, but as we grow up, dreams about wild animals are replaced by modern horrors.

And on my way to the class, I opened the door of the elevator, and I hit a little girl, and she died. So it seems our brain is capable of adjusting itself and including more modern threats.

They force us to be prepared for similar events in the waking world. Without nightmares and bad dreams, there is a good chance that humanity wouldn't be here. Would we lose our capacity to learn, prepare, anticipate? And then it's in the following days—because they are now paying attention to their dreams—that they report to me with increasing confidence that they are no longer dreaming.

But Mark Solms is convinced that the rare individuals he studies really have nothing to remember. After my stroke it was just, literally, going to sleep was like going into a blankness. It's almost as if you're just absent for a while.

There was just not that same sense in the sleep or when I was waking up that I'd been dreaming. There was no memory of dreams and no sense of having been dreaming. That's because the parietal lobe serves the purpose of combining our different senses. Hearing and vision and touch all come together there. And the imaginary space that we are living in during our dreams is generated in that part of the brain. So if it's damaged you can't dream. Apparently, though they don't seem particularly dire.

I wasn't having what I would call good quality sleep at night, probably waking several times through the night. So I wasn't getting a continued sort of period of sleep.

Our preliminary findings suggest that at least non-dreaming patients fall asleep perfectly easily, but then they keep on waking up throughout the night, in fact, particularly during REM sleep.

It's almost as if when, when you might have expected that they would be dreaming, they wake up. And I took it up to this pyramid, and it had a severe drop at one end, and I put it together.

And then I jumped down off the pyramid in the box and hit the pavement. But the strange thing was it didn't actually hurt. People are endlessly fascinated by dreams. Deep in the forests of Northern Canada live the Atikamekw people. Interpreting their dreams is part of the tribe's daily life. Each morning, members of the community gather in dream circles like this one.

The dreamers speak; the elders draw on folklore to interpret what they hear. It rose and rose. And I saw my son up high. I saw my son again at the low water level. He was waving goodbye. I screamed, "Ivan! But do they? Can science find meaning in dreams?

Here, he has collected over 6, REM and non-REM dreams, breaking down each one into its basic elements, and turning each element into a number. Who are the characters, the emotions, the settings, things of that nature? And then we entered these quantifications, these resulting numbers in our spreadsheet. Zadra can tell us how often we dream about sex and whether this involves our partner or a celebrity. He can even tell us how often we have unpleasant dreams.

But his database is most revealing when telling us about the dreams of an individual. ANTONIO ZADRA: What we want to see is a whole series of dreams so that we can then detect patterns that recur over that entire dream series and thus get a better idea of what this person's dream life is generally like. This is a series of dreams from a year-old professional man. He calls his wife "B. I was also brewing some coffee, but when I looked over at the coffee maker it was There was coffee all over the counter and coffee just kept pouring out.

It's loud and I try to defend myself. I wake up. I got out again and everything seemed okay. Yet Zadra's research reveals that the average occurrence of misfortune in the dreams of middle-aged men is only 34 percent.

ANTONIO ZADRA: The other thing that really stands out with his dream series is that almost all of the other dream characters in his dreams are women—there's an, almost an absence of male figures—and the interactions he has with these women is almost invariably negative.

ANTONIO ZADRA: If I were to make an educated guess about what is going on in this particular man's life, is that there seems to be concerns about relationship issues, and also he is definitely overwhelmed by factors which are impacting him negatively but which he feels he has no control over. Zadra has worked out the norm for many dream events.

Only 20 percent of women's dreams about sex, for example, involve their partners, but dreaming men are worse, coupling faithfully just one out of seven times. Thirty-three percent of our dreams involve unhappy events. And while some dreams are outlandish, most are more a reflection of our waking concerns.

In a series of cutting-edge experiments and personal stories, we go in search of the science behind this most enduring mystery and ask: where do dreams come from?

Do they have meaning? And ultimately, why do we dream? What the film What the film reveals is that much of what we thought we knew no longer stands true.

Dreams are not sim Read all. Sign In. Episode aired Feb 10, Director Charles Colville. Top credits Director Charles Colville. Why Do We Dream? Horizon Show more. Show less. Last on. Mon 26 Jan BBC Four. More episodes Previous.