10 Things Absolutely Nobody Knows The Answer To

6. The Purpose Of Dreaming

Actually, before we even get to dreaming, did you know that nobody is quite sure why we even sleep in the first place? Straight up, there's a bunch of theories - some of which tie into why we dream - but nobody can quite agree on one, and there's plenty of holes in each one that comes along. Even more mysterious in that process is what use dreaming is, other than making you feel guilty about friends you've cut out of your life by reminding you of them, making you aware of some bizarre sexual fetishes buried deep in your subconscious, and causing you to wake up with a terrible pop song in your head.

One theory of sleep and dreaming posits that both processes give the opportunity for the brain to deal with all the stuff that's happened in the day. When it's building new pathways in your memory, the resting period helps the brain sort the important info learned over a day from the rubbish. That's one idea. Another is that dreams let you rehearse events that might occur in your future, making sure you make the right choices when they happen in real life. We've yet to actually get into a knife fight with David Hasselhoff but thanks, brain, we guess?

Sigmund Freud - notorious cokehead - reckoned we lived out our repressed sexual desires in our dreams, but he would say that. Dude fancied his mum. In fact the best evidence we have of what dreams and sleep are all about are not sorting memories, or pointing out weird fetishes, but are a way of improving your memory by recounting the day's activities. That's still just spitballing though. We may never really know why we dream, which means Inception is probs never gonna happen. Sorry pals.