Why We Dream Quotes

“teeth”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“Whether story-like or absurd, whether obviously relevant or not, dreams remind artists that, even when they feel blocked, the ability to create fictional worlds still resides within them.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“Exceptionally creative people may be naturally prone to vivid dreaming; high dream recall is correlated with habits and personality traits often shared by artists, such as “openness to experience,” “tolerance of ambiguity,” an inclination toward fantasy, and a tendency to daydream. People who remember their dreams every night tend to have an easier time of losing themselves in projects and are likelier to agree with statements like “I am full of ideas” and “I am interested in abstractions.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“Matt Wilson predicts that researchers will continue to rely on rats. “I think the answers will come from rodent models,” he said. He’s most excited about the possibility of manipulating memories through dreams, as Gaetan de Lavilléon found was possible among mice. “We’re interested in trying to influence dream content at a very detailed level—to create potentially new content during dreams. And there’s this idea of selective learning—that is, pairing manipulations of reward signaling.” In theory, “you could control the learning process if you could get rats to learn specific things by either manipulating dream content or by selectively reinforcing certain dream content.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“On apps like DreamSphere, Dreamboard, and Dreamwall, users log on to share their dreams with strangers and friends, “liking” and commenting on one another’s dreams as though they were status updates on Facebook. An interest that can seem supremely individual, even solipsistic, becomes social, life-affirming—a reminder that even the oddness of dreams is universal. Something that made you laugh alone in the morning can make others laugh too.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“After liberation, many of the inmates were embarrassed to remember their one-time faith in dreams; the extreme stress of camp life had allowed them to suspend their disbelief. “It is hard to tell why we were all so naïve,” one survivor wrote. “Nowadays, we see them [the dream interpretations] as immature or even silly, but back then they were simply necessary,” said another.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“because dreams were thought to contain prophecies pertinent not only to the dreamer but to other prisoners and the community at large, dissecting them was a legitimate group activity. Throughout the day, people could look for signs that an omen from another inmate’s dream had been fulfilled. “When the dream did not come true for the dreamer, it came true for his friend,” one prisoner said.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“In a vacuum of outside news, prisoners looked to dreams for clues to life-or-death questions like whether their relatives were still alive and whether the war would ever end.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“Every morning we would start the day by sharing and interpreting the dreams we had during the night,” one Auschwitz survivor wrote years after liberation. Dreams were a source of distraction in an environment sorely lacking in it; the dreaming mind was a self-reliant fount of entertainment.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“(Hill suggested that “the verbal sharing that was requested in the couples dream interpretation session may have appealed more to the women than the men.”)”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“talking about dreams—whether casually recounting them to friends, analyzing them in structured groups, or even sharing them with strangers on the internet—can amplify their benefits. The more we integrate our dreams into our days, the more easily we remember them. And the act of discussing dreams can bring people together; just as dreams open up conversations on sensitive or embarrassing issues in a therapeutic setting, they can also facilitate intimate conversations among friends.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“it’s hard to feel invested in another person’s dream. You don’t have any stake in it—you know from the outset that the story ends with the dreamer waking up in bed, unscathed.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“in dreams, “just about any event can occur, which means that the ordinary/ extraordinary distinction relevant to stories of non-dream experiences no longer applies, which makes tellability more murky.” Another problem is that dreams don’t follow the type of logic we expect of a good yarn, Phelan said. “Often tellers will try to recount faithfully the sequence of the dream events. But such faithfulness typically means no cause-and-effect logic, and that absence typically means no coherence to the story, and no coherence means a bad story.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“Dreams are invaluable in diagnostic terms because they let patients off the hook. It can be easier to admit to something that happened in a dream, which can always be sourced to the murky pits of the unconscious or even blamed on a random physical stimulus, than to broach an embarrassing fear or voice an irrational anxiety.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“therapy is predicated on honesty: on confessing weird symptoms and self-destructive habits, dredging up distant memories and old traumas. The expensive, time-consuming irony is that patients lie. In a survey of more than five hundred people undergoing therapy, almost everyone—an astonishing 93 percent—admitted to having lied in session. (They most often hid suicidal thoughts, drug use, and disappointment in the therapeutic process.) No matter how much patients trust therapists to suspend judgment, to keep their secrets, to take their side, they can’t help but lie to elicit the response that they want; to elude censure or punishment; to save face or shield the doctor from discomfort.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“Romanian psychologist Ioana Cosman interviewed twenty-two Holocaust survivors and found a sharp contrast in their dream lives during and after the war. While they were in the camps, their dreams “presented . . . brighter and happier scenes.” It was only after they had been released—physically if not mentally—that their dreams took on “a darker and horrific form,” replaying gruesome scenes from the war or tormenting them with visions of family members who had been killed. Their dreams were adaptive, colluding in their self-preservation—postponing the nightmares until they were ready to confront their worst memories.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“Except in the case of PTSD, dreams almost never replay real memories exactly—but they draw heavily from our waking lives, spinning the threads of personal experience into a tangled web of present and past.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“Why would our minds subject us to something so consistently unpleasant? If our ancestors could practice dealing with dangerous situations as they slept, he reasoned, they might have an advantage when it came time to confront them in the day.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“According to the threat-simulation hypothesis, dreams evolved to serve an important psychological function: they let us work through our anxieties in a low-risk environment, helping us practice for stressful events and cope with grief and trauma. Most of the emotions we experience in dreams, as Finnish scientist Antti Revonsuo noted in the 1990s, are negative; the most common ones are fear, helplessness, anxiety, and guilt.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“dreams as a meeting place for the muses.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“In dreams, as in creation or free association, we indulge irrational thinking and briefly transcend the logic we follow in the day.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“Both dreaming and imaginative thinking involve a kind of abandon, a letting-go.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“Beethoven and Paul McCartney cited dreams as the spark behind some of their musical compositions (including McCartney’s famous “Yesterday”). Some of the most recognizable sequences in film—sections of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, Fellini’s 8 ½, Richard Linklater’s Waking Life—are translations of the directors’ dreams. Mary Shelley credited dreams with inspiring Frankenstein; E. B. White with Stuart Little.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“Psychologist Ernest Schachtel compared the challenges of recalling dreams to the difficulty of remembering childhood memories.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“Dreams, by their nature, are difficult to hold on to. They often lack any kind of cohesion or narrative structure, and a chaotic series of images will always be harder to reconstruct than a tidy story (just as it’s harder to remember a string of random letters than a word). Memories tend to be encoded through repetition, but each dream is unique.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“The cognitive state of dream sleep is a perfect breeding ground for trying out new connections. Our frontal lobes—the brain’s logic centers—go dark, and at the same time, we lose access to the hippocampus, where new memories are stored. Instead of just replaying recent experiences, the dreaming brain reaches back into the memory storage system, where it’s apt to land on far-flung files.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“One of the most important functions of dreaming is to facilitate outside-the-box thinking. Dreams bombard us with plenty of unintelligible scraps, but the odd gem is buried among the junk. “I sometimes say that when we’re dreaming, we become venture capitalists,” Stickgold said.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“When a team of Harvard neurophysiologists compared descriptions of their students’ dreams and waking fantasies, they found that both were bizarre but that dreams had about twice as many bizarre elements, like inexplicable appearances of new characters or abrupt shifts in the story line. On a neural level, dreaming and mind-wandering rely on many of the same mechanisms.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“The default-mode network has since been implicated in modes of thought like mind-wandering, creative thinking, and dreaming. “As you’re falling asleep, your brain is falling into that default mode where it’s reviewing events from the day,” Stickgold explained. “It’s reviewing everything that has a tag on it that says, ‘You’re not done with this.’” That could be anything new, vague or intense—a game of Tetris or a hike up a steep mountain, a confusing conversation or nerve-racking project.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey

“It turns out that when you’re doing nothing, your brain is always working,” Stickgold said. “You’re driving along, you’re walking down the street, you’re waiting for your waitress to bring you your food.” You aren’t focusing on anything in particular, but your brain is turning over lingering ambiguities, ruminating on unfinished business.”
― Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey