Why Do People Dream?
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This is But Why, a podcast for curious kids from Vermont Public Radio. I'm Jane Lindholm. When you're asleep, sometimes strange things happen. You fly through the air like a bird, but you don't have wings. But then, all of a sudden, you do have wings, and you go all the way to Antarctica and float over the ice, watching penguins waddle over the edge and into the water, and seals swim just below the surface.

Sometimes, after you've gone to sleep, you travel to a magical place. Sometimes scary things happen. All your teeth fall out, or you're lost, or you see a monster. And then you wake up, and you're right back in your bed, safe and sound. I'm talking, of course, about dreams. Everyone dreams. And dreams play an important role in the way our brains function. But we don't always remember what we dream, and we certainly don't always know what those dreams mean.

Today on the show, we're going to answer questions you've sent us about dreams. If you're new to But Why, that's how this show works. We take questions from curious kids all over the world, and we help you get answers. I'll tell you how to send in your question at the end of the episode. Our last episode was all about sleep, how our bodies know when to go to sleep and when to wake up, why we need sleep, and how it actually works. But today, we're moving on to dreams, the dreams you have when you are asleep.

My name is Charlotte and I am six years old and I live in Burlington, Vermont. My question is, why do people have dreams when they're sleeping? My name is Piper. I am seven years old. I live in Washington, D.C. Why do you have dreams? Hi, my name is Lachlan. I am eight years old. I live in Toowoomba, Australia. My question is, how do dreams occur and why do we have them? I'm Elise. Hi, I'm three. Okay.

I live in Ohio. My question is dreams. What do dreams do in the middle of the night? Today, we're going to get answers from... Dr. David Kahn. I'm on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School in the Department of Psychiatry.

A psychiatrist is a doctor who studies the way our brains make us feel and think and behave. And a psychiatrist helps make sure your brain is keeping your mood stable and your emotions healthy. That's often called mental health. Dr. Khan got interested in medicine partly because, like so many of you, he was really interested in dreams. I dream. And I said, oh my God, I dream a lot.

And what is that all about? Why are my dreams so different than when I think during the day? Let's see if I can learn something about it. I'm a physicist by training, and so I decided that's a really good new area to investigate, and it's very personal. Sometimes physics can be impersonal,

dreaming is very personal. So I decided to learn more about it. Here are a few more of your questions for Dr. Khan. Hi, my name is Colin. I'm seven years old. I live in Phoenix, Arizona. And my question is, why do people have dreams and nightmares? My name is Luca. I'm a seven-year-old girl, and I live in New York City.

My question is, why do you have bad thoughts and nightmares, and why do you have good thoughts and good dreams? Dreaming is thinking when we're asleep. When we're awake, our brain is active and we're able to think. But when we go to sleep, the brain doesn't stop being active. It's just as active and sometimes more active than when we are awake. So dreaming is the way the brain thinks.

So if dreaming is the way the brain thinks when we're asleep, why does it seem so different from the way we think when we're awake? I mean, I don't know about you, but even when I play pretend, it's not quite the same as the magical worlds I live in when I'm dreaming. Dreams can be very strange because parts of the brain change compared to the way the brain is when we are thinking and awake. What happens?

The emotional parts of the brain are very active when we are asleep and dreaming. Often our dreams, therefore, will be scary or joyful or affectionate or even nightmarish because the emotional areas of the brain become highly active when we go to sleep and start to dream.

However, why don't we say, okay, this is a nightmare. I don't want to have a nightmare. I'm going to stop it. We can't because another part of the brain when we go to sleep and dream, the logical part is

stops working. It's offline. So in other words, I can't tell my brain to stop having a dream, whether it's bad or good, because that part of my brain is shut down while I'm sleeping. The part of the brain that's logical and rational and tells you, you should do this, you should do that, checks out when you go to sleep and you're dreaming. So right now, you're

You're listening, and you can decide, I'm going to listen or I'm not going to listen to Dr. Kahn, or I'm going to go and get an apple from the refrigerator or a cookie. You decide. But when you go to sleep and you dream dreams,

You don't decide. The dream just goes on as if you weren't there. Of course, you are there. But the part of the brain that lets you decide to do this or not to do this is offline, checks out, is not working. That might sound a little frightening. A part of your brain isn't working? But think back to our last episode all about sleep.

Sleep is an important time for your brain and body to recover from all the hard work you do all day while you're awake. And it's also a time for your brain to reorganize itself. So some parts of your brain need a little time to go offline, as Dr. Kahn calls it, to get a chance to recover and clean up.

But those other parts of your brain, the emotional parts, are still very active, and so your dream continues. And Dr. Kahn points out that's actually pretty cool. Anything can happen, which is not bad because you get experiences that you wouldn't have if you were awake because your logical mind would say, oh, this can't be, I can't fly. Sometimes people fly in their dreams because they don't know that they can't fly.

When you're awake, you know you can't fly. So essentially, when I'm dreaming, if I'm flying in my dream or if I am a lion in my dream, my brain actually thinks that I am that thing or can do that thing because there's no part of my brain that's telling me it's wrong? When you're dreaming, the part of the brain that knows you're not a lion or you're not a tiger or you can't fly, that part of the brain goes to sleep, so to speak.

meaning it's not working the way it works when you're awake. When you're awake, if you imagine you're a lion, you can imagine that, but you know that you're not a lion. You can imagine you're flying like Superman flying

but you know that you're not. When you go to sleep and dreaming, that part of the brain isn't working the same way, and so you believe you're flying, you believe you're Superman or a tiger. It's great to have all these interesting experiences when your dreams are good, but if you've ever had a bad dream, you know that they're not always fun. Hi, my name is Bridie. I'm five years old. I live in Dover, Massachusetts, and I want to know...

Why do we have scary dreams? Hi, I'm Mac. I'm four years old. I live in Michigan. My question is, why do people have bad dreams? When I was a baby, I'm four years old. I live in Pennsylvania, and I'm wondering why we get nightmares.

Why do we have bad dreams that make us feel terrible and sometimes wake us up scared or crying, Dr. Kahn? When we are asleep and dreaming, the emotional areas, the areas of the brain that make us feel, feel good, feel bad, they're highly active. And since we can't control what the dream is going to be like,

Sometimes it's very joyful and we're very happy. Yay! Sometimes it's scary. Sometimes a monster might be there or a bad person is chasing us, but we don't have the brain that tells us, no, there is no bad person, like we do when we're awake. We look around when we're awake. Oh, there's no bad person. But when you're asleep and dreaming...

All the feelings that can possibly come up might come up, and there's very little you can do about it except wake up. Often when we have a nightmare, it's so scary, and we can't change it, we wake up.

That's how we get rid of the nightmare. I used to have a nightmare when I was young, and it involved monsters. And I had an adult friend who said, next time you have that dream, make sure you have a fire stick with you because monsters are afraid of fire. And if you have the fire stick, the monsters will go away. And I thought, oh, I can't wait to try to have this dream again so I can see if that works. And I never had the dream again. Are there ways that you can...

help yourself if you do get bad dreams to either change the bad dream or not have it, even if that part of your brain is shut down? That's a great question. And the answer is yes. Even though the part of the brain isn't working like it does when you are awake, it's not completely silent.

Second, you can influence what happens when you are dreaming before you go to sleep. Sometimes it works better than other times. So it is definitely possible to say before you go to sleep, oh, I am going to make sure that the monster turns into a wimp. Sometimes that suggestion works.

So yes, you can influence what occurs in the dream, like you can influence when you wake up by giving yourself a suggestion before you go to sleep.

That's kind of cool. Maybe give that a try before you fall asleep tonight. Give yourself a suggestion of what you want to dream about and see if it works. You might have to try a few times to really test that theory, but it will be interesting to see if you can influence your own dreams. Coming up, do blind people see visions when they dream? And why do we forget so much of what we dream? Can we do better at remembering them?

I'm Jane Lindholm, and this is But Why, a podcast for curious kids. In this episode, we're learning all about dreams with Dr. David Kahn, a psychiatrist who studies them. Lots of you have wondered not just why we dream, but how. Like Remy, who lives in Seattle, Washington. How does dreams get in your brain? Hello, my name is Lily. I am eight years old.

I live in Pennsylvania. How do you make dreams in your head? My name is Isabel. I live in Montclair, New Jersey. I am seven years old, and my question is, how do dreams happen? Hi, my name is Evan. I'm six years old.

I live in San Marcos, California, and my question is, how do dreams happen? To be honest, there are a lot of unknowns about dreams. Remember when Dr. Kahn said your brain is very active while you're sleeping, but some parts are less active? The parts related to reason that allow you to say, I know I can't breathe underwater, so I know I'm not a fish, are not the same.

Those parts of your brain are quieter while you're asleep and dreaming. But the parts of your brain related to emotion and feeling and experience, they are very active at some points while you're asleep.

If you think back to our last episode where we talked about sleep, that when you're in a stage of sleep called REM, rapid eye movement, your arms and legs are sort of paralyzed and you don't move very much. Well, that's the stage where we do most of our dreaming. So one of the theories behind why your body stops moving is so you don't act out your dreams.

At any rate, there are a lot of unknowns about dreams and dreaming and why we dream at all. Sometimes people say the things you dream about are your brain's way of trying to resolve or figure out some problem you're having in real life. But is that really true? Dr. Kahn says a lot of scientists are trying to figure out if there's a purpose, a meaning to our dreams. They have done studies to show that.

that dreams sometimes have a very important purpose. The stage of sleep when dreams occur is called rapid eye movement sleep. The studies have shown that when you are in this rapid eye movement REM stage of sleep, your memory improves. You're able to clear out old memories and put in new memories.

And what about the content of the dream during this REM stage? They've done studies to show that, yes, the content of the dream can help people dealing with bad emotions that may have happened to them during the day. So I'm saying two things here.

When you are in the rapid eye movement stage of sleep, which happens four or five times every night, mostly in the morning, this is going to help you to learn, clear out the old memories that you don't want and put in what you're trying to learn. And the dream itself, the content, also has been shown in some studies to help you

Navigate things that are difficult to navigate, to understand things that are difficult to understand, and to help you dealing with emotions, with feelings that you may have that you don't want to have. Can you give me an example of how I could think about that in my dreams? Because let's say I dream that my teeth are falling out.

It might be because I'm nervous that I might be losing my teeth if I'm, you know, six or seven or eight. Or it might just be a random thing. And sometimes people say, if you're dreaming about your teeth falling out, it means this. It means that. So how do we interpret our own dreams? The person who is dreaming that the teeth are falling out, that might mean one thing to the person who's dreaming it.

and something else to another person who's dreaming his or her teeth are falling out. The person who has the dream is the best interpreter of his or her dream because only the dreamer knows the history of teeth falling out, not being present to take a test, being late,

But the falling out of teeth or the being late can mean different things to different people. There is no general interpretation for it applies to everybody.

Hello, I'm Chaska. I'm from Kissimmee, Florida, and I'm nine. My question is, why do we forget most of our dreams? Hi, my name is Alina. I'm ten years old. I live in New Jersey, and I have two questions. One, how do we dream dreams? And two, how is it that sometimes I forget my dream in the morning, and then sometimes when I'm dreaming, I think that it's happening in real life?

It's so easy to forget something that we dreamt about when we were asleep, when we finally are awake, because we are in a very different state. If we are going from sleep to being awake...

The whole brain, as we talked about before, has changed. When you go to sleep, the brain has changed and all kinds of thoughts are coming in, your dreams, and now you're getting up and you're awake. You are now in a very different brain way of thinking. Now you're awake and you're thinking like you're awake. Your brain is acting the way it does when it's awake and you're trying to remember in this wake state

what happened when you were asleep and dreaming. The biology change causes us to have an amnesia of what happened when we were asleep. There are ways that you can work on better remembering your dreams if you want to. How do you do that? If you really want to remember your dreams, here's what will help. One, want to remember.

What I mean by that is be motivated to remember. Give yourself a real believable reason why you want to remember. For example, I want to remember because I want to tell my dad my dreams. I want to tell my friend what I dreamt about. And really believe that you want to remember your dreams. So before you go to sleep,

You say to yourself, you're going to really try to remember your dreams when you wake up. Now, when you do wake up and you have a dream, don't move your body. Think about what you just dreamt about it. Mull it over in your brain.

What was that dream? Oh, I dreamt that I was running from a tiger and the tiger turned out to be a nice cat. Just think about the whole dream without moving your body.

Then you should have a paper and pencil or a dictating machine and write out your dream or record your dream. A dictating machine is like a voice recorder. You can find them on smartphones or sometimes there are separate little devices just for recording things. You might not have one of those, but you can keep a pencil and paper near your bed to write down your dreams.

Just make sure you wait a few minutes and get your dream straight in your mind first before you move your body. And then you can write it down or ask an adult or another person where you are to help you record or write down your dream. And that will help make sure that you remember it.

Our last question is from Ty, who's nine and lives in Thetford Center, Vermont. And I am wondering if people that are blind can see in their dreams. Thank you. So, can blind people see in their dreams? Yeah, that's a great question.

People who became blind will have dreams that have all of the visions and visuals, images that a sight person will have because he or she can remember when they were not blind.

However, if you were born blind and never saw anything, you still dream, but your dreams are different. They have more of the sounds because blind people rely on hearing and no visuals because they don't have memories of visuals.

So they dream like you and I, but different than you and I in that if they were born blind, they have never seen anything. Their brain is still working and producing strange thoughts. Their memories, their imagination will produce dreams, but without the visual that you and I have. Dreams are so interesting.

Do you have someone you like to share your dreams with? Maybe a friend or even an adult? Even though dreams can sometimes be scary, Dr. Kahn says we should think of them as an opportunity. Dreams give us the opportunity to do things in our minds that we can't do when we're awake. You have new experiences. Some of them, I agree, are not very pleasant, but some can be a lot of fun.

If we dream that we can fly, we actually experience flying. If we dream that, oh boy, my best friend just gave me his best toy.

It really is an experience that we can't always have when we're awake. So the best thing I can say is be excited that you are being treated to a whole world that is not only in your imagination, but you think that you are actually doing it, experiencing it, feeling it.

When people have those feelings and emotions and experiences that are impossible, it must also sometimes give people ideas of what they can actually do in their real life, that maybe they needed that rational part of their brain to go away for a little while so they could have more imagination, and then maybe things are possible. That's exactly right, Jane. Dreaming is a state of creativity.

We are more creative when we are in the dreaming state than almost any other state. We can think outside of the box, meaning that we'll think of things that we might not think of when we are awake. When we sleep and dream together,

We make associations between non-obvious things. For example, when you're awake, if I say hot, you might say cold. If I say dog, you might say cat. But when we are dreaming, we can make associations that can be very creative. If I say dog, you might say elephant.

Or you might say car. The way that dreams help us be creative is something that is only possible when we are dreaming. That's pretty cool. No matter what you dream, you can think about dreams as an opportunity to let go of the part of you that says you can't do that. Or that would never happen. This is the real world. And just enjoy the magical way your brain can make connections and visions.

Thanks to Dr. David Kahn from Harvard Medical School for helping us explore the world of dreams. If you haven't heard it yet, you might want to go back to our last episode, which was all about how and why we sleep. That's it for this episode. As always, if you have a question about anything, have an adult record it on a smartphone and send the file to questions at butwhykids.org. We'll do our best to get an answer for you.

But Why is produced by Melody Beaudet and me, Jane Lindholm, at VPR. Our theme music is by Luke Reynolds. We had extra music in this episode from Blue Dot Sessions and Pottington Bear. If you like But Why, please consider making a donation to Vermont Public Radio so we can continue to bring you this show. Go to butwhykids.org slash donate. That's butwhykids.org slash donate.

We'll be back in two weeks with an all-new episode about humor. Until then, stay curious. From PR.