I love this. We should get this produced.

I'm Antelod Duckworth.

I'm Stephen Dubner.

And you're listening to no stupid questions.

Today on the show, is there any significant reason we should pay attention to our dreams?

And then the cake turns out to be made of shards of glass.

Also, what is the connection between music and memory?

Conjunction, junction, let's move on.

Hooking up words and phrases and glasses.

Angela, how much attention should I or anyone pay to their dreams?

I know there's a long literature in psychology about the meaningfulness of dreams and dream interpretation.

But I've also read that the content of dreams is often over value.

That the content itself can be essentially meaningless and it's a waste of time to interpret them per se.

So, where does the truth lie?

Dreams really do have this long and rich history in psychology, most notably beginning with Freud, of course, in his classic work,

the interpretation of dreams, which he wrote just at the dawn of the 20th century.

For Freud, dreams were a matter of wish fulfillment.

This is a way that we play out our unconscious impulses.

We really want to have sex with our mother and we can't say that in polite society.

And we can't even consciously grapple with this unconscious impulse.

But nevertheless, it's there and it comes out in our dreams.

And that's why psychoanalysts spent so much time talking to people about their dreams.

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