Social Functions of Dreaming

Why are we interested in dreams?

        There is something unique to the human consciousness that provides us the capacity to be self-reflective. We have personal experiences and private knowledge that we know is not accessible to other people. We are motivated to understand the inner lives of ourselves and other people, and to integrate all of our experiences into a whole, coherent narrative. Dreams are weird and illogical and it is human nature to make sense out of our world; we give it meaning whether it makes sense or not. Sometimes dreams are dismissed from having any purpose or are completely ignored, but they are usually entered into the individual's personal narrative in a way that makes sense to him or her. They are a way of "investing current experiences with deep meaning derived from associations with past experiences and tendencies. (Moffitt 1993) Freud's concept behind his theory of dream interpretation was that "to interpret a dream is to make a relatively meaningless psychological event more meaningful, to take an unconnected phenomenon and give it a place in the mental activities of waking life." (Natterson, 1980) Something very important to the development of dream function is the use of cultural and personal symbols to express and communicate amongst ourselves public and private knowledge through language and pictures. (Hallowell, 1976) There may be no way to objectively test a functional theory for dreaming, but dreams are definitely able to serve valuable roles on an individual level, an interpersonal level, and a broad social level.