The Night Cinema Nobody Invited You To
Here is a fact that should stop you: you dream three to four times every single night [1]. If you slept seven hours last night, you probably spent about two of them dreaming. You remember almost none of it.
Around 20% of people claim they never dream [2]. They are wrong. In a sleep laboratory study of 534 people, 6.5% initially said they did not dream. After detailed interviews, only 0.38% maintained they had truly never experienced a dream in their lives [3]. The rest simply had no memory of it.
So the first thing to understand about dreams is that the absence of memory is not the absence of experience. You are running a cinema every night. You just keep losing the film on the way out.
But here is the stranger question: why does the brain bother? And does any of it mean anything?
What Freud Got Right, What He Got Catastrophically Wrong
In 1899, Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams and declared that dreams are "the royal road to the unconscious," wish fulfillment in disguise, repressed sexual desires parading as symbols [4]. A train entering a tunnel, you understand.
Modern dream science has been fairly brutal about this. A review of contemporary dream research concluded that Freud's model "turns out to have been erroneous on every point" [5]. In the judgment of contemporary dream investigators, only a minority of dreams express wishes of any kind, let alone infantile sexual ones [5]. Brain imaging shows dream phenomenology links to specific neural activation patterns. Freud's constructs have no neural correlates and no mechanistic detail [6].
But here is the part that is genuinely interesting: he got one thing right. A 2004 experiment by psychologist Daniel Wegner found that participants who were specifically instructed not to think about a person before bed dreamt of them significantly more than those who were told to think about them [7]. We dream of things we are trying our hardest not to think about. The very act of suppression feeds the dream.
So Freud was right that the unconscious has its own agenda at night. He was just wrong about what that agenda is, and spectacularly wrong about the cigar.
What Dreams Actually Do
The honest answer from current neuroscience is: we are not entirely sure, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
What is not contested is that the dreaming brain is extraordinarily active. PET and fMRI studies show that during REM sleep, the limbic system, the amygdala, the hippocampus, and the anterior cingulate cortex are all significantly activated [8]. These are the structures responsible for emotional memory encoding and consolidation. The prefrontal cortex, which handles rational judgment, largely goes offline. This is why dreams are emotionally intense and logically absurd at the same time.
The leading theories each capture something real. The memory consolidation theory: rats who ran mazes during the day showed the same pattern of brain cell firing during subsequent REM sleep as when they were awake learning the maze [9]. Dreaming may be the brain replaying and organizing daily experiences into long-term memory. One neuroscientist quipped: "Dreaming is the opposite of forgetting" [9].
The threat simulation theory suggests dreams are rehearsals. The brain runs simulations of threatening or socially complex situations so you can navigate them better when awake [10]. This would explain why dreams are disproportionately negative: most people dream of being chased, failing, losing someone, or arriving somewhere unprepared. Not because your mind is punishing you. Because rehearsal requires resistance.
And then there is the most startling theory of all: the defensive activation theory, published in Frontiers in Neuroscience in 2023, proposes that dreams exist primarily to prevent the visual cortex from being taken over by other senses during the long darkness of sleep [11]. Your brain generates visual experience at night simply to protect the territory. The content of the dream, what you are dreaming about, may be largely incidental to the maintenance of the visual system's real estate.
If that theory is right, then the movie you experienced last night was not a message from your unconscious. It was your brain keeping the projector warm.
What It Means That You Forgot
When someone says "I never dream," what they almost always mean is "I never remember dreaming" [3]. These are completely different things.
Dream recall and dream generation are separate processes. You enter a dreaming state four to six times a night, once every 90 minutes [3]. Whether you wake up with any memory of it depends on when you wake up, how active your temporoparietal junction is, and, fascinatingly, what kind of person you are.
Research found that people who are more imaginative, reflective, and psychologically open tend to remember more dreams [12]. People who are more concrete, compartmentalized, and outward-focused recall fewer. People who consider dreams meaningful and interesting are more likely to remember them, not because they dream more, but because their brains treat the content as worth encoding [12].
The researchers who discovered this described it as the difference between "thin boundaries" and "thick boundaries" between waking and sleeping experience [12]. If you never remember your dreams, it does not mean your inner life is impoverished. It means your brain classifies what happens at night as not requiring retrieval. The filing system is just different.
But there is one genuinely alarming exception. Neuropsychologist Mark Solms found that individuals with specific brain lesions in the white matter of the medial prefrontal cortex stopped dreaming altogether [13]. And when dreaming is pathologically lost through brain injury, the same systems that handle memory consolidation are disrupted. The sleep continues. The restorative work does not.
Which suggests that when the cinema goes dark, the loss is not just aesthetic.
A Note From Me
If you made it this far, thank you.
I find dreams unsettling in the best way. The idea that your brain is running complex emotional simulations every night, filing memories, keeping your visual cortex from being colonized by sound, dreaming of the people you are trying hardest not to think about, and then quietly deleting most of the evidence before you wake up: that is one of the stranger things about being a person.
You do not need to interpret your dreams to find them meaningful. The fact that they happen at all is already remarkable.
Sleep well. And notice, just once, what you were thinking about when you wake up at 3am.
Find me here:
If this made you think, the next one might too. Drop your email below.
Subscribe to my Newsletter.
See you in the next one.
Saral
References
Purple.com. Why Don't I Dream? 8 Reasons + How to Remember Dreams. April 2026. purple.com
Dual Traits in Probabilistic Reasoning Study. Studies of Dreaming: 80% Report Dreaming, 20% Do Not Remember. arXiv, December 2024. arxiv.org
ScienceInsights. Is It Possible to Not Dream or Just Forget Them? March 2026. scienceinsights.org
Freud, S. The Interpretation of Dreams. Franz Deuticke, Vienna, 1899.
Crews, F. Freud: The Making of an Illusion. Metropolitan Books, 2017. Referenced in: Goodreads Quotes. goodreads.com
Quora. What is the main criticism of Freud's theory of dreams? Modern dream research critique. quora.com
Wegner, D.M. Dream Rebound: The Return of Suppressed Thoughts in Dreams. Psychological Science, Vol. 15, No. 4, 2004. Referenced in: Was Freud Right About Dreams After All? The Conversation. theconversation.com
PMC NIH. Investigation on Neurobiological Mechanisms of Dreaming. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Sleep Physician Substack. What Freud Got Right (and Wrong): A Sleep Physician's Modern Look. December 2025. sleepphysician.substack.com
Revonsuo, A. The Reinterpretation of Dreams: An Evolutionary Hypothesis of the Function of Dreaming. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Vol. 23, No. 6, 2000. Referenced in Mutti et al., Journal of Sleep Research, 2024. onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Eagleman, D.M. & Vaughn, D.A. The Defensive Activation Theory: REM Sleep as a Mechanism to Prevent Takeover of the Visual Cortex. Frontiers in Neuroscience, Vol. 17, April 2023. frontiersin.org
ScienceInsights. Why Do Some People Not Dream or Remember Them? May 2026. scienceinsights.org
Discover Magazine. Why Some of Us Remember Dreams While Others Rarely Do. discovermagazine.com
