Many cultures in this world have come up with very similar ideas of where dreams come from, starting with supernatural explanations involving gods and spirits and the ghosts of ancestors or dead friends or enemies using our sleeping hours to contact us, for good purposes or ill. It is still common in the modern world among tribal people to ascribe a nightmare to the evil intentions of a witch doctor or a person who seeks to harm the dreamer using some form of magic to invade one’s dreams with fearsome images and threats.
In highly industrialized countries permeated by the empirical thought patterns and ideas of advanced science, many people still consider their own most impressive and memorable dreams to have some supernatural origin outside of accepted science, such as a message of love and hope from a beloved but long-dead grandmother or a warning from one’s “guardian angel” or even directly from God. But where scientific inquiry has created so much visible power and advancement, scientists themselves have naturally turned toward the study of dreams in order to discover their origin and their nature.
Freud and Jung each came up with imaginative ideas of how the sleeping mind creates these vivid, fragmentary stories while we sleep, the former grounding dreams in base impulses that the sleeping mind twists and disguises out of shame, the latter positing a group unconscious mind from which the dreamer borrows common images and ideas, but both of these early attempts have been largely discredited by the work of scientists examining the content of thousands of dream-accounts. Similarly, the crude notion that bad dreams, in particular, are the work of troubled digestion (Scrooge dismissing Marley’s ghost as due to “a bit of underdone potato”) isn’t considered seriously any more.
Not that science has come up with completely convincing explanations.
One theory, that dreams are merely the mind flushing itself of the previous day’s mental garbage, simply doesn’t hold up in light of the amazing variety and coherence of many dreams. Another, that we use dreams to help remember the day’s events, is just as lame, as are all scientific notions that try to reduce dreams to a single point or method of origin (dreams come from random firings of brain neurons during sleep; dreams are a method for the sleeping mind to try to solve real-world problems while by-passing rational, critical thinking in search of more unfettered, creative solutions). And no theory yet proposed takes account of the purely playful nature of some dreams, which must also be accounted for.
In fact, no one knows yet where our dreams come from, only that we use fragments of waking experience to form dreams. Given that even sleeping dogs and cats can be observed twitching and vocalizing in response to dreams, we can say that wherever dreams come from, they do some to come *with* physical sleep in mammals, at least, as something designed into the organism and therefore part of our basic requirements for life (whether we recall our dreams or not, since scientists do seem to agree that all people do, in fact, dream).
It is quite possible that our dreams may come from any or all of the sources so far suggested, and that the mind in sleep is capable of drawing upon many different sources for the components and formation of dreams. After all, the human brain is so complex that we still don’t understand its waking functions very well, so it is rather naive to expect simple but comprehensive explanations of the source of a universal mind-activity as vivid and varied and unforgettable as dreaming.
