Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, a podcast from the American Psychological Association.

I'm your host, Caitlin Luna.

Our guest for this episode is Dr. Deirdre Barrett, a psychologist and scholar of dreams, who's

on the faculty of Harvard Medical School's Behavioral Medicine Program.

She's the editor of the journal Dreaming and has written several books on the topic, including

the Committee of Sleep.

Thank you for joining us, Dr. Barrett.

Hi, nice to be here.

So dreams are always a fascinating topic, and we all dream, but many people

don't remember them or don't really know what to do with their dreams. And you as a scholar of

dreams know all about dreams and are even a past president of the International Association

for the study of dreams. So I'll start off, I think a simple question with probably a long answer, but why do we dream?

Well, it's not a simple question. It's probably the one where you'd get the most disagreement among

dream psychologists. Personally, I think that we have rapid eye movement sleep, which is the stage in which most dreams occur,

along with all mammals, for a lot of reasons, many of which are very biological,

that certain neurotransmitters are being replenished in the brain during that stage of sleep,

that there's some very physical body

reasons for REM that we share with all mammals.

But I think evolution isn't that simple.

And when something's been around since the dawn of mammals, it tends to have function upon

function layered on top of it.

And I think for humans, there's a lot of problem solving that goes on in that state.

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