Night Vision

Your brain constantly sends you messages through dreams. Once you know how to decipher them, you'll learn a lot about yourself.

- Jackie Lam

In a recurring dream of mine, I'm driving a car when I suddenly remember I don't know how. It's always at that moment when I realize my dad asked me to find parking. Like many dreams, it makes very little sense. Surely my dad would never let me get behind the wheel in the first place. And I would certainly not be bold enough to operate a vehicle with zero experience. So, could this dream possibly have anything to do with me IRL? Research says yes.

Dreams are far from random. Looking at multiple dreams and when they occur in a person's life, you can see how the dreams embody ongoing concerns, how someone views themselves, and the dreamer's relationship with the world, says Antonio Zadra, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of Montreal and coauthor of When Brains Dream. One recent example: During lockdown in 2020, people dreamed about social distancing, PPE, and other pandemic themes, according to one study. Not exactly surprising, but it does show that our dreaming and waking minds are closely linked.

So if dreams imitate life, why do some of them defy common sense, like my driving dream? The answer is found in neuroscience. Most recalled dreams happen during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. In this phase, your secondary visual cortex, which forms images from your memory and imagination, is way more active than when you're awake. The prefrontal cortex, where logic and censorship lie, is significantly tamped down, and so are the language areas of your brain, says Deirdre Barrett, PhD, author of The Committee of Sleep and a lecturer on psychology at Harvard. The result? "We have our usual thoughts, concerns, hopes, and fears, but they're being expressed in a visual story format rather than a logical, verbal-reasoning way," she says.