A dream is a succession of images, dynamic scenes and situations, ideas, emotions, and sensations that usually occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. Humans spend more than two hours dreaming per night, and each dream lasts around 5–20 minutes. The content and function of dreams have been topics of scientific, philosophical and religious interest throughout recorded history. Dream interpretation, practiced by the Babylonians in the third millennium BCE and even earlier by the ancient Sumerians, figures prominently in religious texts in several traditions, and has played a lead role in psychotherapy. Dreamwork is similar, but does not seek to conclude with definite meaning. The scientific study of dreams is called oneirology. Most modern dream study focuses on the neurophysiology of dreams and on proposing and testing hypotheses regarding dream function. It is not known where in the brain dreams originate, if there is a single origin for dreams or if multiple regions of the brain are involved, or what the purpose of dreaming is for the body (or brain or mind). The human dream experience and what to make of it has undergone sizable shifts over the course of history. Long ago, according to writings from Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt, dreams dictated post-dream behaviors to an extent that was sharply reduced in later millennia. These ancient writings about dreams highlight visitation dreams, where a dream figure, usually a deity or a prominent forebear, commands the dreamer to take specific actions, and which may predict future events. Framing the dream experience varies across cultures as well as through time. Dreaming and sleep are intertwined. Dreams occur mainly in the rapid-eye movement (REM) stage of sleep—when brain activity is high and resembles that of being awake. Because REM sleep is detectable in many species, and because research suggests that all mammals experience REM, linking dreams to REM sleep has led to conjectures that animals dream. However, humans dream during non-REM sleep, also, and not all REM awakenings elicit dream reports. To be studied, a dream must first be reduced to a verbal report, which is an account of the subject's memory of the dream, not the subject's dream experience itself. Therefore, dreaming by non-humans is currently unprovable, as is dreaming by human fetuses and pre-verbal infants.
Etymology In Old English, the word drēam was used to describe "noise", "joy", or "music", but not related to the sleep-induced brain activity. It was only in the 13th century that the word dream was used to describe "a series of thoughts, images or emotions occurring during sleep". Etymologists believe that this change was influenced due to the Old Norse draumr, which had the same meaning as the word dream nowadays.
Subjective experience and content
Preserved writings from early Mediterranean civilizations indicate a relatively abrupt change in subjective dream experience between Bronze Age antiquity and the beginnings of the classical era. In visitation dreams reported in ancient writings, dreamers were largely passive in their dreams, and visual content served primarily to frame authoritative auditory messaging. Gudea, the king of the Sumerian city-state of Lagash (reigned c. 2144–2124 BCE), rebuilt the temple of Ningirsu as the result of a dream in which he was told to do so. After antiquity, the passive hearing of visitation dreams essentially gave way to visualized narratives in which the dreamer becomes a character who actively participates. From the 1940s to 1985, Calvin S. Hall collected more than 50,000 dream reports at Western Reserve University. In 1966, Hall and Robert Van de Castle published The Content Analysis of Dreams, outlining a coding system to study 1,000 dream reports from college students. Results indicated that participants from varying parts of the world demonstrated similarity in their dream content. The only residue of antiquity's authoritative dream figure in the Hall and Van de Castle listing of dream characters is the inclusion of God in the category of prominent persons. Hall's complete dream reports were made publicly available in the mid-1990s by his protégé William Domhoff. More recent studies of dream reports, while providing more detail, continue to cite the Hall study favorably.
In the Hall study, the most common emotion experienced in dreams was anxiety. Other emotions included abandonment, anger, fear, joy, and happiness. Negative emotions were much more common than positive ones. The Hall data analysis showed that sexual dreams occur no more than 10% of the time and are more prevalent in young to mid-teens. Another study showed that 8% of both men's and women's dreams have sexual content. In some cases, sexual dreams may result in orgasms or nocturnal emissions. These are colloquially known as "wet dreams". The visual nature of dreams is generally highly phantasmagoric; that is, different locations and objects continuously blend into each other. The visuals (including locations, people, and objects) are generally reflective of a person's memories and experiences, but conversation can take on highly exaggerated and bizarre forms. Some dreams may even tell elaborate stories wherein the dreamer enters entirely new, complex worlds and awakes with ideas, thoughts, and feelings never experienced before the dream. People who are blind from birth do not have visual dreams. Their dream contents are related to other senses, such as hearing, touch, smell, and taste, whichever are present since birth.
Effects of regional or global catastrophes The COVID-19 pandemic also influenced the content of people's dreams, according to a scientific study of over 15,000 dream reports by Deirdre Barrett. This analysis revealed that themes involving fear, illness, and death were two to four times more prevalent in dreams following the onset of the pandemic than they were before.
Neurophysiology
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