The utility of dreams

I'm going to reveal something very important. This is something that has caused me distress over the years, a suffering that could have been easily avoided if only I had known better. Suffering of a psychological nature, the type that you don't seek help for and you don't talk about, but torments you inside.

Have you ever been troubled by a dream? Most people have. And in different ways. Sometimes you dream about something you lost, and the dream takes you back to that loss and it's terrible. Sometimes you can experience something bad in the dream, like a loved one betraying you, or a physical assault by a stranger; that can also cause you suffering. Or maybe people dream of something too weird to handle, like participating in an extravagant sexual endeavor. Or maybe you commit a crime or harm someone in a dream, and it makes you question your own morality.

Those things happen all the time and they torment people. And it's very weird. You don't want to dream any of those things. And yet you do. And it's not like you do it. Is like the dream happens to you. And what the hell is that? How can that be? That's a mystery. I've read around 200 scientific papers on that topic, and I'm not closer to an answer.

We know through science that if you don't sleep you become crazy; your brain malfunctions in many ways. But we know nothing about dreams per se. We do know that dreams are not random, because random things can't torment you, and you cannot remember a set of random things. And you do remember dreams. So they are not random.

By the way, the reason I'm telling you about this is that I think that watching One Piece is like watching a dream. It's a dreamlike experience. Most stories are, but especially One Piece carries many of the landmarks that are indicative of a dream. So maybe understanding what dreams are, and what purpose they serve, we may understand what One Piece is doing for us in a practical way.

Okay, so I told you that I did learn something about the nature of dreams that, if I had known sooner, it would have saved me a lot of suffering. And I'm going to tell you what it is, not only so you can avoid being tormented by dreams, but also because it's relevant to understanding One Piece.

Two pathological explanations of the purpose of dreaming

When you ask people, and this was also my point of view, what is the purpose of dreams, they usually give one of two answers. And both are very wrong. And it took me a long time to figure this out.

People usually say that dreams are either an expression of hidden desires, or some sort of premonitions about things that will happen. They are not. Let me explain.

1. Dreams are NOT an expression of hidden desires

People often say that dreams are some sort of expression of deep desires, hidden impulses, or even repressed emotions that one has. The idea is basically that you go on with your life and you ignore some of your deep desires; but in dreams, you don't have control and suddenly you let go and encounter the things you repress.

According to this theory, if you have a dream of sexual nature with a person of your same sex, and if you are not homosexual, it indicates that maybe you are gay. Or if you dream that you kill someone, it indicates that you want to murder people.

This is very, very wrong, and yet it's what most people believe. This is not what dreams are, at all. And it makes no sense if you think about it. We are the outcome of a process of evolution thought selection, and there is zero adaptive or reproductive advantage to having a brain that represses fundamental uncomfortable facts just to throw them at you while you are trying to rest.

This line of thinking derives from Freud's work, like many many of the things we take for granted in psychology. I have no beef with Freud, we owe a lot to him, but this specific idea was wrong and it causes more harm than good. Then Jung, who was his student, corrected Freud's theory of dreams and fixed it, but for some reason, Jung's ideas did not popularise themselves that much.

So no, your dreams are not the sincere expression of the deep desires that you hide from yourself. The idea that you are lying to yourself in your wake, and being honest at sleep, has no scientific backing and there's no reason why that trait would have evolved. It sounds logical, but it's really not logical and it is definitely not biological.

2. Dreams are NOT supernatural premonitions

There is a second theory about dreams, which is also wrong. This is the second most common thing people tell me when I ask them what is the purpose of dreaming. Some believe that dreams are premonitions, like if you had supernatural powers to look into the future, but for some inexplicable reason, only at night.

This is even less scientific than the previous explanation, but at least it causes less suffering to people who believe in it. Anyhow: no, that's not what dreams do.

The idea here is that, if you dream that you die from falling off a building, you are going to die this way. If you dream that your spouse betrays you, she is going to betray you, or she already has. Because your supernatural ability to dream about the future is revealing something that is determined to happen.

No, it's not that. There is no proof for that. No one dreamt of the lottery numbers and won. That's not how it works.

However, there is one reason why these theories sound true. Because people do dream things that they don't know. Or at least they dream about things that they don't know that they know. And this sounds weird, right? If you know everything that you know, and you create your dreams, how on earth can a dream reveal something new to you? These theories tell you that it's either because you are hiding things from yourself, or because you are attaining new knowledge through some magical superpower.

But those two explanations are wrong, for the reasons I explained, and lead to suffering and confusion.

I'm about to tell you what dreams are, what is their purpose, and why we evolved into animals who do this.

Two things that dreams actually are

Dreams are a survival mechanism that help people be prepared for the contingencies of life and process knowledge that they cannot yet put into words. This is both a logical and a biological explanation.

That's it. That's what dreams are. And let me tell you more about these two things because they shed light not only on what dreams do, but also speak about thought itself, and it shows how cool humans are.

1. Dreams are simulations where you confront situations so that you are more prepared

Firstly, dreams are like simulations where you are confronted with situations, so that you are ready if they happen.

When you dream that you fall off a building, you are confronting that situation. Except you can't die. And that's very useful. Not dying I mean. Not dying is very useful. The dream is also useful, because you attain knowledge about what it would be like to fall of a building. If you ever do fall off a building, and it's your first time, you are going to be unprepared. But if you have dreamed about it, you may be ready to hold on to something or you may even anticipate the fall and avoid it alltogether.

This also explains why you believe your dreams. You may dream the most bizarre thing, and yet it seems perfectly plausible as you dream it. You have to believe it, because that way not only you deal with falling of a building, but also with the emotions it creates. Since you believe it's true, you feel the same feeling you would feel if it happened.

So when you dream that your spouse betrays you, what you are doing is preparing yourself so that, if it happened, you wouldn't be blind-sighted and unprepared. You would already know, to some extent, how it would feel.

Or if you dream that you betray your spouse, and then you dream about them finding out, you confront that situation. So it's a simulation of what would happen if you did cheat on your wife. And maybe that simulation makes you think twice before cheating on your spouse because you know how terrible the outcome would be. You know how guilty and ashamed you would feel. You know, because you experienced it in a simulation.

Dreams are simulations of scenarios. Dreaming makes you prepared. That is why we dream. Because the people who dreamed more became more prepared, they survived more, and that's how the trait evolved and became part of who we are. It's a tool.

This can be said also about thought itself. There's this great concept, that says that odeas are the things that die so that you don't have to. It was Karl Popper who said something like this in a speech:

(...) While an uncritical animal may be eliminated together with its dogmatically held hypotheses, we may formulate our hypotheses, and criticize them. Let our conjectures, our theories, die in our stead!

— Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind, Delivered at Darwin College, Cambridge, November 8, 1977.

I'll give you an example. Sometimes, when you are driving, you think about overtaking another car. This is specially tricky on a single-lane road. You look at the road and, in your mind, you imagine yourself doing it. You calculate the speed you would need and the risk you would take. And many times, in your imagination, the vision of you overtaking the car has an accident, so you don't do it. The idea died, so that you didn't have to.

And a cool way of thinking about this is that each of your ideas of you, in your mind, is a version of you. Like a clone. Imagine this: you create versions of you that implement a specific strategy. Then, in your mind, you act them out. And what do you do? You dispense of the versions of you that die. That's what evolution does. So by doing only the things that worked out, in your imagination, you efectively become the versions of you that had success. This is like natural selection, but in your mind, and during the same lifetime.

So in this sense, human beings have modified the basic laws of evolutionary transformation through the power of abstraction. We can alter our concepts and behaviors faster than other animals or plants. Animals are limited to change produced by mutation, but we can model some of the consequences of those changes, in the dramatic workplace of our imagination. This means that we can allow our ideas to die, in our stead.

In other words, failure of an idea, in imagination, results in disappointment, not death.

And this is what happens in dreams. When you dream, you experience a simulation and a version of you confronts it. And then you wake up, totally unharmed, having learned a bunch of things, or at least having released some simulations that make you more prepared.

2. Dreams are a way of thinking beyond the use of language

The second purpose of dreams is to process things that cannot be put into words.

How is this possible? Or why would this even be necessary? And this is the reason: there are many things that you know, but you know them in a way that is not verbal.

This is not surprising, if you look at your brain you can see that there is a section that's in charge of language. If you remove this part, you can still do things, but you cannot explain them through words. And this section is quite small, it's all located in the left hemisphere and consist on two systems. So it's not like your whole brain is devoted to language. It's quite the opposite.

My point is that many things in your brain don't happen through language. And thus you know things that you can't put into words. These are the things that your dog or your cat know. They do know things: they know who you are, they can trap a mouse, they can walk around your neighbourhood and come back home. Even if they cannot talk about it, they do know and remember this information.

However, I am aware that there's a very important distintion between us and our pets. Cats and dogs don't speak about the things they know because they can not speak. We can speak, so we do. But my poin is that even if we can speak, there are things that we know that are beyong words.

For instance, you don't know a word for everything you see. You don't even know a word for everything you experience. Try to imagine the concept of gravity before that word was incorporated to our vocabulary. Thinking about things that fall was a very different endeavour. Or how about the word simmetry, it's quite difficult to communicate that concept without the word.

But I'm going beyond that and saying that it's not even a matter of naming things. I believe that there are things that are not nameable. Even if we found a word for everything that could possibly be named, there would still be a large portion of information unavailable.

And sometimes you need to think about these things. The things you know that are not languageable. Because they may contain useful information. Maybe there's information that helps you survive a war, get a job or avoid a problem. You need to figure out things.

Now, how would you think about something without language? Trough images. Through visual thinking. That's precisely the format that dreams use. They are like movies, like works of art, with audiovisual elements than convey meaning.

You can also do it during the day, but it's difficult because all your verbal thinking is getting in the way. Most of the time, verbal thinking is constant. You are talking to yourself non-stop, so there's no room for the other parts of the brain. But at night you talk less, so imagistic thinking gets its turn.

And that's why many people have ideas at night. Or they are facing a problem at work and a dream helps them figure it out. It happens to me with coding all the time, I can't figure out how to program something, and suddenly I dream about it and I come up with the solution. Works very well with coding because code is not really language, so the visual or imagistic brain really helps.

And funnily enough, this part of the brain, the imagistic, the nocturnal, is also very good at dealing with the unknown. Language is good to deal with the things you know, or partially know, but it's very limited when dealing with the unknown. Images are less limited than language. You can draw thigs that you can't name.

And this can be said about dreams, but it can also be said about art. So much so that I have arrived at the conclusion that this is what art is for. That's why people, societies, have art. That's why we evolved into animals with that trait. Art helps us think about things that language is not capable of fully managing. And it does so, not only at a personal level, but sometimes also as a collective. In fact, works of art can help a whole society figure out something, collectively.

So next time you have a dream in which you do something that you don't like, such as betraying someone, it does not mean that you secretly are treacherous, and it's definitely not a premonition. It's actually the opposite: because you dream about it, you know that it's better not to do it. Having bad dreams does not make you bad, if anything it's the opposite. It allows you to face the repercusions of doing bad things, and thus learning in advance the unhappiness that it would yeld.

When you dream, even if it's a bad dream, you are doing a good job. Well done. You are thinking and becoming wise. So don't sweat it. Dreams should not torment you, they are just tools you use, simulations that help you be better.

Watching One piece is like dreaming

By now, you may have an idea about why I'm telling you all of this. Turns out that dreams are responsible for very important, and very deep cognitive processes. In this sense, I believe that watching One Piece is like dreaming.

Let me explain that by listing the ways in which watching One Piece is like dreaming.

1. They convey information in a way that's different to words

To begin with, dreams convey thoughts in a format that is not transmitted trough words. They explore reality with the non-verbal parts of the brain.

This sentence that you are hearing right now, this, me saying this, fails at transmitting a lot of information. Because there are many non-verbal toughts. One Piece is giving you information of the kind that words cant reach.

And that's a very distinctive characteristic of anime, because it's part of the format. The writer/artist is thinking more in terms of an image than a script. In written novels, the author is using words as the main output. This is very different to what dreams do. Likewise, anime artists are drawing visions, and then adding dialogue. Son manga uses both output methods, words and images, but mostly images, exactly like dreams do.

2. People are not aware of its utility

The other reason One Piece and dreams are alike is that most people don't know how useful dreams are. And I mean practically useful, as a tool. Watching One Piece is the same. It's not evident, neither if nor how it's helping you through life, but I just explained how we use dreams as simulations, how we detect patterns and how we use them to process nonverbal information.

So there is a whole dimension of useful things that you possibly didn't know about. Useful in the way that only stories, dreams and art are useful. And One Piece, just like dreams, is very useful to you, in ways that are not evident, but that are very important. You see powerful images and inspiring scenarios, where you process information that is beyond words and where you learn about different patterns of behavior.

3. They are both a form of artistic creation

I already told you that Freud was wrong about dreams. He thought that your mind is keeping things from you and that dreams are sort of a sneaky way for the truth to reveal itself.

And Freud thought that dreams were purposely cryptic. They had to be confusing so that your own censorship would fail.

This is wrong. It's not that dreams are purposely being obtuse. In fact dreams are being as straightforward as they can be.

The problem is that the kind of knowledge, of information, that dreams convey cannot be put into words. You see? That's precisely what is happening. When you dream, you are trying your best to expose knowledge, but it's too difficult to understand in a verbal manner. That's why they seem cryptic.

You know much more than you know you know. So a big part of your knowledge is simply not in your mouth, so to speak. It's in your eyes, in your body, in your ears. Maybe even in parts of you that are not you: in your culture, in your religion. But it's there. And sometimes you need to use it to solve a problem.

And how do you use that non-verbal knowledge? Through dreams. And also watching stories like One Piece. That's what your brain is trying to do when you dream. That's also what your brain is doing as it watches One Piece.

In order to do that, dreams use a wide range of resources. They cannot simply say it, because you are not capable of saying it. So dreams show it through all sorts of imagery. And remember, it's not that it's being purposely confusing. It's trying it's best. You are trying your best to get it, but it's just difficult.

And sometimes dreams come up with very good scenes, very communicative images. Other times dreams sort of fail. Just like artists fail, you may produce images that are sleazy, unsavoury, nasty or stupid.

Let me show you something that happens in One Piece that you may recognize in your own dreams.

At the left you see King Choccola, an mascot for a cereal brand. At the right, there is a One Piece character called Foxy.

I'm pretty sure this was not on purpose. Eiichiiro Oda was trying to create a character, and the visual resource of King Chocola was laying around in his mind. So the image decided to pop up and he ended up sort of copying a mascot that is pretty lame to begin with:

That happens sometimes in dreams and once you wake up, if you remember, you are like: wait, what? Because you are the artist, and you are not necessarily a great artist. Sometimes your brain becomes uninspired and uses the visual resources that are readily available.

That happens both in dreams and in One Piece, because both are the creation of an imagistic mind trying to convey knowledge through stories and non-verbal representations.

4. It's not bothered by contradictions

Dreams are full of contradictions.

Dreams are true in a different way.

It's not to understand, it's to learn.