sounds like it could be true. i don't know how it would work, but i don't know who my cat learned to "bury" his food from either.

I had a dream last night about a choir of people singing about dead tomatoes. I'm glad that I'm now prepared for when this event arises in the future.

Welcome to the wonderful world of evolutionary biology! Even though just about everything done in the discipline lacks the fundamental characteristic of real science -- falsifiability -- you can still sell books, get tenure, and get treated like a real scientist for doing it.

i thought dreams were linked to memory consolidation a few years ago. or is the jury still out?

When I was a kid, I used to imagine that the dreams I didn't remember were teaching me to sword-fight and use kung fu and generally prepare me to fight dragons as at some point I inevitably would. It really clicked with my sense of my own mysterious purpose and destiny.

Hey, let's "Start!" up a Slog columnJam, Mssr. Golob.
Ask around the office for a dream every morning, post it conjunction with the dreamer to verify wording, and i'll analyze it. Of course I won't be paid for my efforts, so I'll probably end up being sincere and humble about it. Aren't I a cocky fuck?
naturally, opinion bashing will follow, and i'll probably goof up and print L-O-V-E backwards trying to type revolver or some other Beetle album. Worth a try, if the birdy flu cuckoo isn't scared.

This theory gets floated frequently. I think there's a lot of truth to it, especially if you consider dreaming a vestigial "appendage". Back in the day when our primary concern was falling out of a tree, our dreams were probably mostly tree-related. One could argue that the act of dreaming can't keep up with the rapid information overload of modern living.

We use lots of stuff that is buried just below the conscious level. Check Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink" for a top level summary, or Gerg Gigerenzer's Gut Feelings.

I'm having unsettling dreams about some of the Democrat Presidential Candidates at the Iowa primaries. One candidate tricked me into sitting in for their spouse at a banquet table, when I was just a guest called in at the last minute. Another didn't do as well (read: win) at the primary as hoped and they wore this giant apple head and screamed "I'm a loser! I can't do anything right! I'm pathetic!" and hit their head repeatedly on a wall in the auditorium. The crowd, including the other candidates, were as far back as they could, giving each other the "we're all in this together being darned uncomfortable at this emotional outburst" look.

So maybe I knew ahead of time who among the Dems would win Iowa.

Sounds better than any other theory I've heard. "Mental rehearsal" has been shown in at least one study to improve the performance of physical tasks. Regardless of whether or not we remember the rehearsal, those neurological pathways are being reinforced, right?

So, I'm really well prepared to fight it out with my ex. . .this is great.

Why can't dreams just be a largely irrelevant side effect of the architecture of the brain, as one of the scientists said? You have a big network of neurons firing away, and during sleep the links between portions of the network get severed from each other, but nothing in particular is there to stop them from firing away within their own little subnetwork. Your dream could be nothing more than the incoherent, fragmented sum of these communications. Not every aspect of human existence is necessarily going to have some clever evolutionary explanation for why it is how it is.

I liked the memory consolidation/"defragmenting" analogy that was floating around awhile back.

Most of my negative dreams are about (1) running from something or (2) not being prepared for something that I am supposed to do (e.g., act in a play, give a speech). So, I don't see them as preparing for a scenario as much as reflecting that I'm anxious about something.

It was my understanding that dreams were generally considered "rehashings" of previous conscious activities, that is, a sort of subconscious refiling of recent experiences, which makes more sense to me than this "theory", which seems to posit that dreams are an anticipatory, rather than a reassessive mechanism.

Granted, we do frequently dream about situations seemingly in the future (e.g. test anxiety dreams and their variants). However, it's been my experience that these types of dreams manifest themselves in the subconscious not so much as a matter of contemplating a future situation, but instead as a response to the preparation one has undergone in advance; the dreams don't appear because one is in dread anticipation of the test itself, but as a response to the fact that one has recently expended a great deal of conscious mental effort in preparing for it.

This could be a useful model for understanding some dreams, but it certainly does not cover them all. It should also mention that anticipatory dreams commonly reflect conscious anticipation, as COMTE said.

"Nighttime theater." Is that like the magic theater?

Anyway, if my dreams have been preparing me for the future, then I'm all set whenever I happen to leave my apartment having forgotten to put any clothes on.

Yeah--and I'm all prepared to have to go back to High School and make up missing band credits.

Blargh.

@11:

You bring up a good point, but the reality is that we don't understand how and why we have a conscious experience of our own neurological activities (aka "consciousness"), so it's a bit difficult to dismiss dreams as just our unconsciously conscious experience of our neurology. Not that the theory you outline is wrong. Just that it's unhelpful, because it relies on a phenomenon that we don't understand.

Sleep researchers point out that people deprived of the REM stage, where we do most of our dreaming, suffer more ill effects than those whose sleep is disrupted during other cycles. Dreaming is biologically necessary, likely as a way to sort out our memory process. Most dreams are immediately forgotten as soon as we wake up; the ones we remember are usually the ones associated with strong feelings such as anxiety. So we dream because we need to, but the specific content of our dreams is related to whatever happens to be on our minds at the time.

When I feel deprived of REM, I put on "Reckoning."

I guess I'm all set then when I escape the graveyard full of zombies by trying to fly.