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Sharing dreams may serve a purpose. A study finds that describing the content of our dreams or nightmares 鈥� whether boring or truly bizarre 鈥� may function to bond people and groups together, and that listening and responding to the strange content of dreams can increase empathy. It even proposes that dream-sharing helped the process of human self-domestication, where people evolved greater self-control, less aggressive tendencies and a keener sense of empathy for others.

鈥淭he empathy/human self-domestication theory proposes that once dreams started to be told, this would add a new evolutionary pressure to have dreams that involved plots, social life references and bizarreness, that is, dreams that were interesting to others and resulted in the dreamer disclosing their inner life,鈥� says at Swansea University, UK, who developed the concept with co-author at the University of Wales in the UK.

Most of the ideas around the function of dreams have involved processes that occur during sleep, such as memory consolidation, or processing and managing our emotions. Decades of work around the function of dreams have considered the benefits, or drawbacks, they bring the person having the dream, as well as the effect dreams may have on sleep quality. Far less work, if any, has considered the benefit that might accrue between people and groups and after waking up.

Blagrove and Lockheart conducted a study with 54 people, who were paired up, with one of them sharing their dream with the other. Before and after the dream-sharing, the participants answered a survey to determine how much empathy they had for their partner. After listening and discussing the dream, the participants鈥� self-rated empathy increased significantly towards the person sharing their dream. 鈥淔or an overall increase in mutual empathy, both of the pair would need to share dreams,鈥� says Blagrove.

Dreams, the researchers suggest, may have provided some of the first fiction that humans could tell. Other studies have found some evidence that people are motivated to share their dreams, and Blagrove wonders if the weird nature of dreams is partly in order to make them interesting as narratives.

鈥淭his theory is also proposing that there鈥檚 been a selective pressure to make these interesting fictional novel dreams and the pressure has occurred because the dreams have this empathic group-bonding effect,鈥� he says.

at the Dream and Nightmare Laboratory at the University of Montreal, Canada, points out that a phenomenon as complex as dreaming probably evolved under the influence of many and diverse environmental pressures, but says the idea of dream-sharing as part of human self-domestication is 鈥渆ntirely feasible鈥�.

鈥淚f the authors鈥� finding that dream-sharing can facilitate empathy is independently replicated, I think this would be a remarkable advance,鈥� he says.

As for how we might be able to definitively assign a selective pressure to dreaming, Nielsen says we need a procedure that would allow the experimental induction of a specific type of dream content. 鈥淭his would allow us to measure how having that particular dream content modifies waking experience or performance,鈥� he says.

Induced dreams could then be used in a sleep experiment to determine if it helps the person improve at solving a problem or remembering a task, compared with someone who doesn鈥檛 have that dream event.

However, at the University of Sk枚vde, Sweden, raised a serious challenge for the idea that dreams could have an evolutionary role on waking. 鈥淭his post-sleep function is suggested to occur for recalled dreams only, and I doubt our memory would have developed to forget most dreams if recalled dreams were somehow specifically important and provide survival or reproductive value,鈥� says Valli.