Chapter Thirteen – The Function of Dreams

A Dream Story

Dreams serve important functions for our emotional and psychological well-being. Over the years, researchers and dreamers alike have proposed different ways of understanding what dreams “do” for us. While no single theory explains everything, together these theories provide valuable insight into how dreams support health, creativity, and identity.

A middle-aged man shared the following dream:
“The church congregation is in a supermarket restaurant. There is a lot of conversation and engagement. I get eggs and two salads. The pastor is fun-loving, tall, dark hair and set the NBA record for vertical jump (seemed unlikely). Most people left. I didn’t know how to check out. Apparently if you were savvy on social media you could just walk out and your purchases would be posted. I wasn’t.”

One theory of how dreams function is that they rehash previous experiences. This man had no experience of a congregation meeting in a supermarket restaurant. So that part of the dream doesn’t align with the theory. However, he acknowledges his ineptitude with social media. The dream could be processing his experiences of not being able to navigate social media very well.

Another theory is that dreams rehearse emotions and concerns that are related to the future. So if the dreamer is fearful that technology will leave him unable to navigate his future vocational or social life, then this dream may be playing out such a scenario, giving him a chance to process and mediate those associated emotions.

A third theory is that dreams help us resolve problems. This gentleman served as a member of his church board. The church was wrestling with how to have church during the worst days of the Covid crisis. How do church people get their spiritual “food” when church gatherings were no longer possible? Social media was certainly an option that many congregations chose. Becoming more adept at social media was a solution he thought was viable for the church where he held a leadership position.

Another theory is that dreams recalibrate our emotional capacity every night. By processing our emotions from previous days, we free up emotional space for the coming day. Anxiety, stress, fear, anticipation, social engagement, and uncertainty are all emotions found in the dream and likely experienced in the previous days of the dreamer’s life. The dream provides the dreamer with safe space to process those emotions.

Finally, dreams can reveal the inner workings of our personality. This theory would look at all the components of the dream as reflections of the dreamer’s inner life: the fun-loving pastor, the vertical jump, the checking out, the supermarket restaurant. All of these, and the associated emotions, are projections of the dreamer’s inner life.

All of these theories are likely true. Dreams are both simple and complex. These various theories help us navigate our dreams. We may find that a dream is doing all five things at once, leading us in a holistic way to health.

In this chapter, we’ll look at all five functions that capture the essence of how dreams work: Rehash, Rehearse, Resolve, Recalibrate, and Reveal.

Rehash

Dreams take the emotional experiences of the previous few days and play them again during REM sleep. Often we don’t have the time to process the emotional weight of an experience, or our defenses push the emotional weight aside while we attend to the demands of our waking life. At night those defenses drop and the emotion gets processed by replaying the event (or a scene that would carry the same type of emotional weight as the event).

Sometimes this looks literal. For instance, if you nearly tripped on a sidewalk earlier in the day, you might dream about falling or stumbling. Other times, it shows up symbolically, like a dream about running late for a train. Either way, the dream is giving your emotions space to be felt and sorted.

Research shows that this rehashing process helps peel away some of the raw emotional weight so that the facts of the experience can be stored in long-term memory. This way, the brain is better equipped to handle similar challenges in the future.

But there’s a complication: trauma. When the emotional weight of an experience is too heavy, dreams can wake us up mid-process. This is why trauma survivors often struggle with nightmares. Instead of gently reducing the emotional charge, the dream floods the system, making sleep difficult. Yet even here, understanding the process can help. Knowing that dreams are working hard—even in nightmares—can remind us that the body and psyche are pushing toward healing.

Rehearse

Dreams also help us practice survival by generalizing lessons from past experiences. If you burn your hand on a stove, your brain doesn’t just store that one stove as dangerous—it uses dreams to imagine similar scenarios, teaching you caution in a wider range of situations.

It’s not always about physical danger. If you felt embarrassed giving a class presentation, your dreams might place you in different but equally vulnerable situations—forgetting your lines in a play, being caught unprepared for a test, or even showing up to work in pajamas. In each case, the rehearsal is giving your brain a way to practice responses to emotional stress.

This nighttime training ground allows us to develop resilience. Dreams give us a “simulation lab” where we can experiment without real-world consequences.

Resolve

There’s a long tradition of breakthroughs arriving in dreams. Scientists, inventors, and artists often describe dreams that helped them solve problems they couldn’t crack while awake.

Why? During dreaming, the executive network of the brain—especially the prefrontal cortex—goes offline. That part of the brain is excellent for navigating daily life but also tends to keep us stuck in linear, rule-bound thinking. Dreams operate differently. They bend time and space, suspend gravity, and shuffle events out of order.

In this freer environment, new connections can form. The brain isn’t confined to ordinary categories, so creative insights can emerge.

And it’s not just about outward achievements. Many of the problems we most need to resolve are internal: fears, wounds, and self-limiting beliefs. Dreams can help reframe those struggles, opening a path toward a truer, freer self.

Recalibrate

Dreams don’t just rehash and resolve—they also recalibrate our emotional system. There is a process, not yet fully understood, that moves experiences from short-term memory to long-term memory. Some believe that those memories which are retained relate to our survival by contributing to our navigation of future circumstances. And because they are retained, they contribute to the formation of our identity. Many things, seemingly designated as “unimportant,” are not retained.

One of the ways by which we might measure importance is by the emotional significance (or emotional weight) associated with an experience. Experiences of great fear, joy, anger, sadness, success or safety are more likely to move to long-term memory than those experiences which have no such emotional investment.

When we sleep, dreams recalibrate the emotions by processing them and freeing up capacity for the new day. That’s why people who miss REM sleep often say, “I don’t have the bandwidth for this.” In a sense, they’re right: without the nightly recalibration, the brain has less room to handle stress.

This function is especially important for early experiences and repressed memories. Some memories never rise to conscious awareness—those from before age three-and-a-half, or those we’ve pushed down because they were too painful. Yet dreams can still carry their emotional residue, surfacing in disguised but meaningful ways. For adoptees and others with early-life disruptions, paying attention to dreams can be an essential part of healing.

Reveal

Finally, dreams reveal. They expose hidden truths about ourselves and bring unconscious material into view.

Sometimes this feels simple, like suddenly remembering the name of someone you couldn’t place earlier. Other times it feels disruptive: you act in a way that surprises even you, and a loved one says, “That didn’t seem like you.” Those moments are often the unconscious breaking through.

Dreams stage these revelations in dramatic ways. They put our inner conflicts, hidden emotions, and forgotten parts of ourselves onto a theater stage where we can’t ignore them. The characters and plots may seem strange, but they’re telling the story of our inner life.

This is where the shadow often shows up—frightening, confusing, or embarrassing parts of ourselves stepping out of the dark. Yet rather than seeing this as threatening, we can treat it as an invitation. The dream is offering us a script, asking us to pay attention to the deeper story of who we are becoming.

Dreams provide a theater stage where the curtain is pulled back on the drama of the unconscious. Emotions take on character form. Parts of ourselves, which have found a home in the unconscious, speak their truth and clamor for attention. They reveal how our outward experiences are often a consequence of our inward drama. In dreams the shadow side of our life steps out of the shadows and gives voice to the unconscious. Here we are invited not to merely watch the dream drama unfold on stage, but to realize that we are on the stage in every character, every prop and every plot line. It is the story of the true self, and its push for liberation, integration and wholeness.

Closing Thought

The functions of dreams—rehash, rehearse, resolve, recalibrate, and reveal—give us a map for understanding how dreams support our growth. They remind us that dreams aren’t just random static; they are active, purposeful, and profoundly personal.

By paying attention, we can work with our dreams rather than dismissing them, learning to see them as trusted companions in our journey toward health and wholeness.

References

Walker, M. (2017). Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. Scribner.

Revonsuo, A. (2000). The reinterpretation of dreams: An evolutionary hypothesis of the function of dreaming. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23(6), 877–901.

Barrett, D. (2001). The Committee of Sleep: How Artists, Scientists, and Athletes Use Their Dreams for Creative Problem Solving—and How You Can Too. Crown.

Cartwright, R. (2010). The Twenty-four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives. Oxford University Press.

Jung, C. G. (1964). Man and His Symbols. Dell.