<ul>
<li>what are dreams?
<ul>
<li>dreams are our conscious experience while asleep. just like how we perceive, feel, and think during wakeful states, this continues while we sleep, but just in a different form</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>what are dreams for?
<ul>
<li>some freudian idea that we process emotions in our sleep,  specially the things we suppress while awake</li>
<li>dreams can act as a simulation. with a combination of imagination and recollection, we can simulate new scenarios of situations we might face in the future. our brains are somewhat doing RL</li>
<li>promoting creativity-eqsue things since REM promotes connections between concepts that don’t normally connect in wakeful states</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>why do we forget dreams?
<ul>
<li>for some reason most dreams just don’t get encoded. if you wake people up throughout the night and in various sleep stages, ~70% of the time they report that they were dreaming. so it seems that most of the dreams you have throughout the night get wiped before you wake up. this tracks with my own personal experience of only really being able to recall the dream i was happening right before i wake up.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>why are dreams so incoherent?</li>
<li>we dream in every sleep stage, though REM is the most vivid</li>
<li>dream themes common across cultures/ages
<ul>
<li>teeth falling out</li>
<li>falling</li>
<li>flying</li>
<li>paralysis</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
