We are made of dreams

This article is published in number 17 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until April 26, 2022

We do not know if the ability to dream was born together with man and we do not even know what function dreams really have in our life. What we know for sure, however, is that in that fraction of time in which the sleeping mind is reactivated and transports us to the dream universe, we free ourselves from the constraints of logic, from the need for control, from the dictates of rationality. The dream is our moment of maximum expressive freedom, of pure imagination lived in a dimension cloaked in mystery and fantasy, where everything becomes possible.

Even those artists who sought the utmost inspiration in dream reality were aware of this: from Hieronymus Bosch to René Magritte, to Salvador Dalí, through William Blake and Vincent Van Gogh, who affirming «I dream my paintings and then I paint my dreams »made concrete the close relationship that exists between dreams and the creative process.

Yet, the possibility of exploiting the phase of falling asleep as a space of high creativity does not have a real response on a physiological level. “There is no specific brain region of creativity”, explains neuroscientist Giulio Bernardi, 39, researcher at the IMT Alti Studi School of Lucca and project director TweakDreams, which studies the profound mechanisms that regulate sleep and dreams. “It is rather thought that this ability is linked to the” shutdown “system of the frontal region of the brain, the one that supervises everything and that, once offline, leaves other areas free to reinterpret reality and create new connections without a logical reasoning to set limits. Our dreams are the fruit of associations that are generated free and without rules ».

But exactly where do dreams come from?
«We know that every dream comes from a sort of re-ignition of some parts of the brain, which during sleep remains active, but with a slowed down dynamism. When certain brain regions “start again”, it is thought that this corresponds to the appearance of a certain content. If it is the part of the brain intended for the processing of faces that rekindles, a person’s face will most likely appear in the dream. What we still don’t know, however, is why and by what criteria some parts of the mind awaken during the night. At the moment we only know that our dream experience depends on the set of these small awakenings that take place in different parts of the brain ».

Which areas can be reactivated when we dream?
“There are those areas that process faces, those that determine movement, those that process color or emotions. The brain has all these specializations. What we experience in reality and in dreams depends on the combination of these activations. Sometimes we have complex dreams and this happens when the brain enters a particularly active state, even if there are areas that remain equally off and which characterize the very fact that we are asleep. I am referring to the front part of the brain, the one intended for reasoning, supervision of behavior and decisions. It generally remains inactive during sleep and for this reason we do not realize that we are dreaming nor are we able to do complex reasoning, but we follow a bit of the story that presents itself to us ».

What is the use of dreaming?
“We don’t have a certain answer yet, but there are three hypotheses about it. The first is that dreams are useless: they are random products of our brain, whose areas are reactivated in an unpredictable way during sleep, generating these associations. This hypothesis, however, is starting to lose value. The second is that dreams serve no specific purpose but are a reflection of something that happens in the brain: we know, for example, that sleep re-processes memories, reorganizes them and preserves them better, makes them more usable and more efficient and this process passes precisely through the reactivation mechanism of certain parts of the brain. An increasingly accredited hypothesis, for which the dream could therefore not play a role in itself, but be the reflection of a memory processing mechanism ».