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An interesting look at dreams, including the most common ones all human beings share.
Barrett’s preferred evolutionary explanation for dreaming, and the one she’s best known for, is that dreamscapes provided our ancestors (and therefore us) with a sort of creative canvas for solving real-world problems. In support of this, Barrett describes the work of Stanford University psychologist William Dement, who in the early 1970s instructed hundreds of undergraduate students to work on a set of challenging brainteasers before bedtime, so that they’d fall asleep with the problems still on their mind. For example, “The letters O, T, T, F, F … form the beginnings of an infinite sequence. Find a simple rule for determining any or all successive letters.” [The correct sequence is the first letter of each number, so the next one would be “S” for “six.”] One participant who went to bed frustrated by this brainteaser dreamed:
