Why do we dream — and do our dreams really mean anything?

From flying through the air to your teeth falling out, dreams can feel intensely real, even when they make no logical sense.

In this episode, Grace is joined by Chartered Psychologist Dr Jo Kandola to explore the psychology behind our dreams. They examine what happens in the brain during sleep and why dreams can be so strange.

Drawing on Freud’s influential ideas alongside contemporary dream research, they explore the role of REM sleep, where dreams come from, and whether these strange nighttime stories reveal anything about our waking lives.

Are dreams meaningless brain noise, hidden messages from the unconscious, or something in between?

Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast platforms.

References:

• Freud, S. (1900). The Interpretation of Dreams.
• Hobson, J. A., & McCarley, R. W. (1977). The Brain as a Dream State Generator: An Activation-Synthesis Hypothesis of the Dream Process. American Journal of Psychiatry, 134(12), 1335–1348.
• Horikawa, T., Tamaki, M., Miyawaki, Y. and Kamitani, Y. (2013) ‘Neural decoding of visual imagery during sleep’, Science, 340(6132), pp. 639–642.
• Leckie, L., Bershad, A.K., Heppler, J., McClay, M., Rappe, S. and Foster, J.G. (2024) The content and structure of dreams are coupled to affect.