DREAMS ARE BIZARRE, SO WHY DO THEY SEEM NORMAL WHEN WE'RE ASLEEP?

Our sleeping brains weave a patchwork out of our memories in complex, baffling ways

Dreams are weird. Utterly impossible events happen in them, then immediately flow into completely different ones, with no obvious rhyme or reason. Contexts, behaviours, individuals... they all shift around randomly during our dreams, with no care for coherent narrative or the laws of physics. It’s all very strange. Except it doesn’t feel strange while it’s happening. We can be dreaming about floating upside down in a cavern of milk, sat alongside someone who is both our mother and co-worker, and our dreaming self will still think, Yep, this is all to be expected. Typical Tuesday occurrence.” Why is this? Why would our sleeping brain be so blasé about unusual, reality-bending experiences? A big part of this is down to the reason we dream in the first place. A growing body of research suggests that dreaming is a vital part of memory consolidation. Our brains don’t just create all of the memories we accumulate while we’re awake and leave them sat there purposelessly, like most of the photos on the typical smartphone. No, our newly acquired memories need to be effectively integrated into the brain’s stores and networks of existing memories that are the basis of our identity, our very minds, and more. This is what memory consolidation is, and a lot of it takes place during our dreams.