The purpose of dreams

It is widely believed that the purpose of dreams is not well understood yet.
Here's a uncommon possible explanation that may make sense to the reader (or not). >br>

In just two words dreams are the consequence of our brain doing data compression.

When active on daytime there is no time for the brain to conjure up stuff that is deeply buried down in long time memory. Stuff that most likely has nothing whatsoever to do with the current situation at hand. Stuff that would just make one unable to make decisions fast enough.

All the new experiences of the day that just passed lie just slightly below short term memory in a very labile and ephemeral state. They must urgently be analyzed for deeper integration into the existing mental world-view. For deeper integration the importance of new information must be ascertained in more depth. Only at nighttime (where we in the past couldn't do anything else anyway because we can't see in the dark) there is the time to do that deeper analysis (beside some physiological body & brain cleanup).

To ascertain importance the brain needs to check if links can be made to older memories that already have been integrated deeper down into the "memory stack". The more links can be established the faster and deeper the memory integration. Links to strong emotions play a important role too, naturally.

New experiences that come with strong emotions need less links to be integrated as new memories and will be faster integrated. Long time memories may be associated with strong emotions or not. There relevance has already been proven.

Pattern matching for mental link creation at different levels

So dreams may match memories on different time scales.

• just below short term to mid-term
• just below short term to long-term
• maybe also mid-term to long-term

(Whether the dream depth levels correspond to sleep phases is an interesting question.)

Since (at the deepest dream level) the brain wants to establish entirely new connections it conjures up some completely "random" long term memory and tries to match the newly made short term memories to it. This perfectly explains the absolute ridiculous absurdness of dreams that we sometimes experience.

At the deepest dream level the randomness maybe even be derived from the effect of thermal noise amplified by chaotic systems. (in computer science terms a true random number generator TRNG)

Successful unexpected random matches could be considered a form of in mind serendipity.

At less deep dream levels the brain may conjure up semi-randomly mid term memories from a few days ago.

Proper dream interpretation

One can even test this. At least for the less deep dream levels

• One needs to be good at remembering dreams
  (Note that this can be learned in case one has some freedom to manage ones time - which most adult people don't - sorry)
• One needs to resists the temptation of prematurely interpreting ones dreams. On instead needs to records the nonsense as is without criticism - relaxed and instantly after waking up with no other short term thought overwriting what is still left in memory.

Only later one should come back to look at ones dream for interpretation. Premature interpretation attempts load short time stuff that overwrites valuable remnant memories. Human psychology tends to conveniently interpret away inconvenient problems that dreams want to show oneself.

If successful one will uncover and recover new subconscious deep links between last-day-memories and a-few-days-ago-memories that ones brain has made while dreaming.

Since dreams are based on ones individual memories and thus are highly individual, it is clear that the dream interpretation schemes cannot possibly work. Well except maybe for the most primal things maybe like e.g. primal fears of the dark in young age or dreams directly induced by physical health problem. But those most basic primal things are usually not the topic of these books. Dream interpretation schemes (aka oneriomancy/oneirocriticism schemes) are as accurate as tea leaf reading done by oneself for oneself. Pure fantasy with not even psychological help.

Dream interpretation needs to be done tailored to the individual (by the individual). It could be considered an advanced self reflection method. It maybe even help to overcome traumata, but those are often difficult to repair, (In case the reader suffers from such, please consider consulting a doctor and don't hold the author responsible for any actions taken based on these lines.)

Effects of exposing parts of one owns subconscious

It's interesting to think about the effect of this activity of consciously retracing the processes that ones brain does in the semi-conscious dreaming state.

• One may find connections that ones brain didn't find worth to strongly integrate in "dream mode" but now in "wake mode" one values them.
• One may find connections that ones brain did find worth to strongly integrate in "dream mode" but now in "wake mode" one does not see any value in them and wonders why.
• ...

Consequence of no opportunities to dream

All humans dream, its Just that many do not remember their dreams. (Side-note: The purpose of the capability of remembering dreams is an interesting question too. It may well be an evolutionary accident.)

Loosing the opportunity to dream is only possible via a lack of sleep (or some severe neurological illness).

The consequence alack of dreams (including lack of dreams that are not memorized over to daytime) is basically similar to never cleaning up the data on your computer one gets a big bucket unsorted mess of data in which one can't find anything anymore and once all the memory is full you can't delete just the most useless stuff because you just do not know what actually is the most useless stuff. As dreams cannot anchor new experiences properly to deeper levels and memory space is still needed more valuable information will get tossed ot (sacrificed). In short one gets forgetful.

The Epiphany phenomenon

An epiphany is a realization of some "higher truth". An epiphany is a brand new very unexpected and surprising discovery. An epiphany is often obtained via a dream or via "pure thinking" possibly initiated by an inspiring dream

Epiphanies are often associated with religious or supernatural phenomena. Some may consider these explanations a psychological avoidance phenomenon "shifting of the problem" to answers that conveniently explain everything.

How ununexplainability of epiphanies does not necessarily quench undemystifiability of human consciousness

There will always always be parts of reality that cannot be explained. Those can only be ignored or shifted to the aforementioned supernatural or religious. Actually the more one knows the more areas one knows in which one misses knowledge. And that to an non-proportionally faster growing degree! In math there is this fundamental theorem of Gödel. Making even math a religion believing on axioms. A very practical and successful religion at that. In physics there is this quantum random mystery where we currently have no explanation for. This plays into and mixes with the fundamentally unpredictable thermal motions. Thermal motions which could (as mentioned before) maybe be used by our brains as true random number generators to decide which long time memory to conjure up next for trying to pattern match it with recently encountered experiences.

So, no worries, deeper understanding of our consciousness likely will not degrade the human mind to a fully deterministic clockwork (see: the something). There's this potential source of "true randomness". But note that "true randomness" does not actually mean "random". What it actually means is:

• we do not yet have any clue how it came to be
• we do not yet have any clue whether or when we will have a clue
• we do not yet know if we fundamentally can have a clue how it came to be

In summary even without reliance on the supernatural and religion as an explanation for epiphanies the deep mysteries of our consciousness are not necessarily demystified. They just switch to coinciding with the deepest mysteries of our hole universe itself. (Side-note: Clarifying structure and workings of the brain in the process of AI research likewise won't demystify consciousness at this "universal level".)

The origin of Epiphanies

Structures information like complex ideas cannot originate from nothing. In the end the brain alone (fully isolated from any information providing environment) cannot get to know some new wisdom when the basic crude information that is absolutely necessary to gain that wisdom is simply not present.

Another maybe less intelligible but more abstract formulation would be:

Dreaming is a process that can only convert ones personal subconscious unknown-knowns into known-knowns of the wake-state. If all this (un)known (un)knowns is confusing, then check out the page about the knowledge matrix.

Side-note: Unknown knowns would in this context be the (subconscious) presence of all the needed parts of a not yet solved mental puzzle and the presence of the knowledge to put the pieces together. An "epiphanic dream" is then only the process of putting the subconsciously existing pieces together with the subconscious existing knowledge how to do it.

Side-note: Before becoming conscious known-knowns the subconscious unknown-knowns can be both conscious unknown-unknowns and conscious known-unknowns.

The Déjà-vu phenomemnon

A very strong similarity to some (potentially emotionally laden) deeply subconscious almost completely faded long term memory. may activates the dream functionality of conjuring up this remnants of that long term memory (that would normally never be conjured up because it is pretty out of context without any obvious and clear relations to the current wake life situation)

That spontaneous day dream burst like effect manifests itself as this ominous vague feeling of repetition. A Déjà-vu. Especially if the long term memory is more emotion than information the likelihood of a Déjà-vu may be higher.

Disclaimer

Its possible that the discussion of mind related ideas here in the context of data compression gets a bit lopsided. The "when you have a hammer every problem starts to look like a nail" phenomenon.

Misc

• search for deep links for data compression
• dynamic inceptionism - pareidolia - misguided auto completion
• lucid dreaming
• in mind serendipity (mentioned in text now)
• dreaming and learning