Dreaming serves as a form of nocturnal therapy that takes the sharp edges off painful memories to help people feel better about them the next day.

“Dreaming provides a form of overnight therapy. Dreaming is emotional first aid and it's during dreaming at night when we take difficult sometimes painful experiences and dreaming acts like a nocturnal soothing balm and it just takes the sharp edges off those painful difficult um memories so that you”

REM sleep dreams allow for experiencing and processing events without the presence of fear-inducing chemicals.

“So we have this incredible period of sleep in which our experience of emotionally laden events is dissociated. It's chemically blocked from us having the actual emotion.”

Dreaming functions as an evolutionary mechanism to protect the visual cortex from being repurposed by other sensory systems during the hours of darkness.

“we hypothesize is that dreams are the brain's way of defending the visual cortex against takeover from the other senses.”

Dreaming is an essential function that allows the brain to maintain emotional and creative complexity by allowing specific networks to be liberated while the executive network is dampened.

“I think the what we dream to maintain our emotional and creative complexity as a systematic process where the brain takes turns in a 24-hour cycle being executive network dominant and imagination network dominant.”