I love this. We should get this produced.

I'm Angela 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, what's your function? Hooking up words

and phrases and clauses. Angela, how much attention should I or anyone pay to their dreams?

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

interpretation, but I've also read that the content of dreams is often overvalued, 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. You know, 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. Is there data on the share of,

let's say, men who have dreamed about having sex with their mothers? Because I have not.

And honestly, that's one thing that always made me suspicious whenever I read Freud in dreams.

Yeah, Freud was obsessed with, you know, I should have had the Electra Complex, so I should have been hankering for my dad and you should have been hankering for your mom.

And I also needed to kill my father while having sex with my mother.

Yeah, he got a little carried away.

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