You know that kind of morning. The coffee goes cold while you are still standing in a room from your dream. You can no longer recall the scene exactly. The feeling stays, sometimes all day.
For a long time, dreams were thought to be noise. At night the brain tidies up, and we stitch stories out of the leftovers. Research of recent years keeps loosening that picture and suggests that dreams do something to us. The story that follows came together from several directions at once: from neuroscience, from Jungian psychology and from the philosophy of consciousness.
Jung was right, at least half right
Freud believed that dreams protect sleep and disguise their meaning. Jung saw in them a picture of the psyche's current state, one that balances the one-sidedness of the waking ego. For him dreams were a path to wholeness, a conversation between the ego and the Self.
In 2021 the Italian researchers Andrea Scalabrini, Rosy Esposito and Clara Mucci placed this old debate beside modern neuroscience. Dreams are linked above all to the limbic system and to the emotional circuits of the right hemisphere. In REM sleep the brain processes images that arise from within and refer to ourselves. The authors also distinguish two layers of the unconscious. The repressed they connect with the left hemisphere, the non-repressed, which arises from a split in experience, with the right.
To be fair, the role of the right hemisphere in dreaming is a well-supported hypothesis, but it is not yet widely accepted.
What remains is interesting enough. Jung claimed that dreams speak in symbols about emotional complexes. Neuroscience now suggests that dreams happen exactly where the brain processes emotions and the image of the self.
Dreams as a rehearsal for the world
In 2023 Michael Koslowski and colleagues connected three worlds that rarely talk to each other: Freud, predictive processing and psychedelic research. In this model the brain is constantly building predictions about the world and correcting them when it gets them wrong. In dreams that model keeps running, only without senses and without movement. Thinking becomes associative and pictorial, much as it does after psychedelics. Patterns you push away by day take on an image at night.
Erin Wamsley took the question into the laboratory. In 2022 she published a study in which 48 students spent a night under electrodes and submitted 469 dream reports. In the morning they themselves searched for where individual dreams had come from. A good half linked to a specific past event, a quarter to something still ahead of them. Often both at once: fragments of the past assembled into a scene that looked forward.
These scenes were almost never realistic. A participant who was moving with her family to another state the following month dreamed of a wagon from an old television series about pioneers. The move was real; the costume was borrowed.
Dreams that stay
You forget most dreams by lunchtime. Some stay for years. The Canadian psychologist Don Kuiken has studied them for decades and calls them impactful dreams. He counts nightmares, existential dreams and transcendent dreams among them.
In a 2024 article he describes what the last two types have in common. The dreamer experiences two truths at once: “this is it” and “this is not it”. Metaphor and literal meaning jostle, and the person watches from outside. From this tension grows a feeling of the sublime. In existential dreams it is unsettled, in transcendent ones, rapt. After such dreams a person looks more deeply inward.
Jung spoke of “big dreams”. Kuiken showed that they can be described and researched.
Dreams have a shared side too. In 2023 a group of Jungian analysts, among them Ronnie Landau, published a study of dreams during the COVID-19 pandemic called Dreaming for the World. The title already says where it aims: in times of crisis, an individual's dreams carry the community as well.
Where Faggin comes in
Federico Faggin is a physicist and the inventor of the microprocessor. The man who gave the world a machine for processing signals. In his 2024 book Irreducible he argues that consciousness cannot be derived from signals. In his view consciousness is a fundamental property of nature, present already in the building blocks from which space and matter arose. The taste of wine, the scent of a rose, love for a child: Faggin holds that no electrical impulse explains these.
Important: Faggin does not write about dreams. The connection is mine.
If consciousness is the foundation, dreams are more than the night shift of the brain. They are consciousness experiencing, when the outer world falls silent. Qualia without senses.
Closest to this thought is the religion scholar Lee Irwin. In 2020 he wrote about so-called supernal dreams, in which the dreamer is a participant and the dream reveals something. Irwin writes from transpersonal theory and from decades of his own dream journal. This is philosophy and personal experience. There is no measurement here.
Noise or signal
So what do we know? Dreams process memory and emotion. They rehearse the future from fragments of the past. Some of them permanently shift how a person looks at themselves. That much science can show today.
Whether dreams are also a window into a consciousness larger than ourselves, science neither confirms nor refutes. There measurement ends and observation begins.
If you want to try, the recipe is simple. Write the dream down before you get up. Do not look for the meaning in a dictionary right away. Write down the feeling that stayed with you on waking. During the day, notice where that feeling returns.
If you would like to look at your own dreams up close, open the door to Dreams. The trace is free.
Sources
- Scalabrini, A., Esposito, R. & Mucci, C. (2021). What kind of dreams for which unconscious? The role of dreams in psychoanalysis and neuroscience and their relationship with the self. Research in Psychotherapy: Psychopathology, Process and Outcome, 24(2), 545. doi:10.4081/ripppo.2021.545
- Koslowski, M., de Haas, M.-P. & Fischmann, T. (2023). Converging theories on dreaming: Between Freud, predictive processing, and psychedelic research. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 17, 1080177. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2023.1080177
- Wamsley, E. J. (2022). Constructive episodic simulation in dreams. PLoS ONE, 17(3), e0264574. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0264574
- Kuiken, D. (2024). The Epistemic Limits of Impactful Dreams: Metacognition, Metaphoricity, and Sublime Feeling. Brain Sciences, 14(6), 528. doi:10.3390/brainsci14060528
- Landau, R., Brooke, R., Lampe, A., Stich, B., Martin, N., Semikolwnnykh, N. & Serebrennikova, N. (2023). Dreaming for the World: A Jungian Study of Dreams During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 68, 348–368.
- Irwin, L. (2020). Supernal Dreaming: On Myth and Metaphysics. Religions, 11(11), 552. doi:10.3390/rel11110552
- Faggin, F. (2024). Irreducible: Consciousness, Life, Computers, and Human Nature. Essentia Books.