Dreams are memories

The argument

If dreams are made of memory, then what they contain is information about what has already happened. On this account dreaming is the mind working over material it has taken in — recent experience, older experience, things attended to and things only half-noticed — and reassembling it. What surfaces in a dream is therefore evidence about the dreamer, and specifically about the dreamer's past. That makes interpretation worthwhile, within limits. A dream can show which experiences are still being processed and which have been left unresolved, and it registers how the body and mind responded to them rather than how the dreamer later chose to describe them. This is why dreams can help detect trauma: material that someone cannot or will not approach while awake recurs in sleep, and its recurrence is itself informative. Read this way, dreams give access to a person's own mind that waking introspection does not reliably provide, and attending to them can deepen self-understanding. What the same account rules out is prediction. A process that works on stored experience has no source of information beyond that experience. It cannot report on events the dreamer has never encountered, and it cannot report on events that have not yet occurred, because there is nothing about them in the material being reassembled. Apparent predictions are better explained as the mind recombining what it already holds, with the occasional coincidence noticed and the many misses forgotten. The position therefore splits the usual question in two. Asked whether dream interpretation is accurate, proponents answer that it depends entirely on what is being claimed of it. As a reading of the dreamer's past and present state, interpretation can be accurate and useful. As a window onto the external world or the future, it has nothing to work with. Dreams are informative, but they are not predictive.

Context

Dreams are often rooted in past experiences, places, people and events.

Premises

Counter-arguments

They are memories but the random nature of dreaming means that it is impossible to extract any meaningful or accurate information from them. Dreaming is essentially the process of memory consolidation. While your body is asleep, your memories stored in the hippocampus become semantic memories, which are stored in the temporal lobe. As the hippocampus sends experiences and memories to the temporal lobe, it interacts with other parts of the brain. These seemingly random interactions with semi-conscious parts of the brain cause us to have dreams. This explanation for the functionality and purpose of dreaming is rooted in science. A 2007 study found that even when mice are asleep, the neocortex continues to remain active and communicates with the hippocampus. The neocortex then decides what memories must be preserved and stored as long-term memories and what must be discarded. The random nature of these interactions means that even though our dreams are affected by our waking experiences and our memories, they cannot tell us anything informative. Trying to interpret someone's past from their dreams would be like trying to understand mathematics by looking at an endless sequence of random numbers. Just because memories are the building-blocks of dreams, as numbers are for mathematics, does not mean they are interpretable. As a result, no dream interpretation can contain any accuracy.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] The random nature of dreams means that we cannot interpret this information.