The brain is a sophisticated learning machine. From my experience with my own dreams as well as with stories of dreams told by other people I came up with a theory about the meaning and purpose of dreams. I did not try to carry out any experiments to try to further develop this theory but I can try to suggest such experiments for anyone interested to follow up with this idea.
Speed of a purposeful reaction can mean the difference between life-and-death. Also socially we are constantly judged by our reactions to events. There is a definite advantage to people with the ability to instantaneously react rather then freeze.
I initially thought that dreams are simulators that train the brain with potential events and create preferred decision patterns that serve as reaction templates when awake. Although this may seem as a good idea, it does not represent the content of my dreams as I remember them.
Most of the dreams that I remember are not technical drills such as fixing a car. Nor do they lend themselves as useful for recording steps to some template in my brain. Also, many dreams are invoking deep emotions that are not necessary and even counterproductive for skill training.
The brain is not a computer. A computer is running in a constant and predictable environment. Deviation from ideal conditions will not only reduce performance but might bring a shutdown and potential destruction.
The brain has to perform in unpredictable conditions, especially when hormones are involved. How can the brain manage if at one time 1 + 1 = 2 and at other times 1 + 1 = 5. The brain often is like an archer. It tries to hit a moving target with an arrow but keep missing the mark because of wind. How can this imaginary archer learn to compensate for the wind and hit closer to the target? The answer is experience. Not experience shooting arrows as I first thought but rather experience dealing with the wind.
So my theory is the brain seeks experience with various hormonal and emotional states to learn how to compensate for them in real-life scenarios. This is important in danger where miss-judgment can bring paralysis by a chemical miss-calculation.
The brain uses various images and sounds to provoke hormones and then activates the decision making process, noting the needed corrections. The brain then records the results and creates another experiment after the current hormonal “drugs” have been absorbed. This can explain the dream cycle and the fact that the body paralyzed during dreams to prevent unwanted movement.
Many people have reported lurid dreams after using drugs or hormones such as melatonin and marijuana. This can be explained as the brain realizing there is a change in the hormonal environment and is caching up with its adjustments to better handle decision making in real life under these conditions. The real life effect is that these substances will have less effect on our decision making which will result in some people taking larger doses to maintain the effect of the drug.
I believe that dreaming is the most basic and most primitive training mechanism. As it has low dependency on external stimulation it can be safely carried out in sleep or even in the womb before birth.
