The Feeling of "Meaning" in Dreams

Robert Stickgold, director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Harvard Medical School was interviewed by Charles Choi for Scientific American, April 11, 2011, on the question "How do we have this feeling of "meaning in dreams"?

Stickgold answered that "Dreams often feel profoundly meaningful, bizarre experiences often interpreted over the centuries as messages from the gods or as windows into the unconscious. However, maybe our brains are just randomly stringing experiences together during sleep and investing the result with a feeling of profundity."

"When people learn about what I do, they often tell me about their dreams without me asking, and I can't tell you how many times people told me they had the most amazing dreams, and they're almost never amazing — they're almost always somehow embarrassingly uninteresting," Stickgold says. "But this happens to me, too."

Why do dreams FEEL profound? Stickgold notes that during REM sleep, when dreaming typically occurs, the release of the neurotransmitter serotonin is shut off in the brain. The only other time that happens is because of LSD, "when people seem to have these totally uninteresting experiences they describe as profoundly meaningful called 'acid insights.'"

This sense of meaning may be a physical phenomenon "just like hunger or thirst...the excitement we feel upon a great insight, that 'Aha!' feeling," Stickgold says. "Who knows why, for instance, fireworks often seem to trigger it — maybe there's something about the geometric patterns that evokes this sense of awesomeness, the feeling that we can almost understand something amazing but not quite that drives us to seek a better understanding of things. It's like what you feel during a religious experience — you sense the oneness of mankind."

During dreams, the brain may be associating disjointed experiences together to create potentially valuable combinations of thoughts, "...making you focus your attention on material that was only weakly associated before and investing this ...with this feeling of profundity to help it mine these connections for something not immediately obvious but potentially important," Stickgold says. "It makes sense that the sensation would be a positive and reinforcing one."

Experiments with drugs that suppress or boost serotonin levels could explore any connections between the neurotransmitter and the feeling of meaning.

Although most dreaming occurs in REM sleep, it also occurs in non-REM sleep. An approach would be to ask folk if dreams during non-REM sleep, when serotonin levels aren't suppressed, "feel as intense and bizarre and emotional as ones during REM sleep," Stickgold says, or gave "...serotonin-influencing drugs to people as they sleep and dream".

Stickgold notes. "What is it about the dream process that so frequently and universally across people generates this very strong perception of something like importance or significance or deepness, a feeling we find hard to define, and one that's often totally wrong, in that when you tell others about your dreams, you find they don't have any obvious significance?"