What Did Ancient Humans Dream About?
your body will paralyze itself and your brain will start
hallucinating .
Tonight, about ninety minutes after you fall asleep, your body will paralyze itself and your brain will start hallucinating. You'll do it every night for the rest of your life — roughly six years of your life spent inside dreams you'll forget within ten minutes of waking up.
Every single one of your ancestors did the same thing. For 300,000 years, in caves and shelters and around dying fires, human beings closed their eyes and their brains built entire worlds. So what was inside them?
Dreams don't fossilize. But the machine that makes them never changed — only the world around it did. And when researchers finally started collecting dreams from every kind of society on Earth, a pattern appeared that nobody expected.
In this video, we discuss:
The Simulator: Why neuroscientist Antti Revonsuo argued that dreaming is a threat rehearsal system — a flight simulator for staying alive.
Stone Age Fears: Why the enemy in a human dream is almost always a wild animal or an unfamiliar man, even for people who have never faced either.
More Danger, Less Fear: The 2023 study of BaYaka and Hadza foragers whose dreams were the most threatening on Earth — and the least frightening.
The Ending, Not The Monster: The single structural difference between a dream and a nightmare.
Dreams With A Date On Them: The study showing that people raised on black and white television still dream in greyscale decades later.
If you've ever woken at 2AM with your heart pounding for no reason, your body isn't malfunctioning. It's running a program that was written a very long time ago, for a world you no longer live in.
What's the dream you keep having? Let me know in the comments.
Sources:
Threat Simulation Theory: Revonsuo, A. (2000). "The reinterpretation of dreams: An evolutionary hypothesis of the function of dreaming." Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23(6), 877-901.
The 592-dream test: Revonsuo, A. & Valli, K. (2000). "Dreaming and consciousness: Testing the threat simulation theory of the function of dreaming." PSYCHE, 6. Source for the finding that 60-77% of dreams contain threatening events.
Forager dreams: Samson, D.R., Clerget, A., Abbas, N., et al. (2023). "Evidence for an emotional adaptive function of dreams: a cross-cultural study." Scientific Reports, 13, 16530. 896 dreams from 234 participants across BaYaka, Hadza and Global North populations.
Greyscale dreaming: Murzyn, E. (2008). "Do we only dream in colour? A comparison of reported dream colour in younger and older adults with different experiences of black and white media." Consciousness and Cognition, 17(4), 1228-1237.
Biphasic sleep: Ekirch, A.R. (2001). "Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-Industrial Slumber in the British Isles." American Historical Review. Expanded in "At Day's Close: Night in Times Past" (2005).
Darkness experiment: Wehr, T. (1992). "In short photoperiods, human sleep is biphasic." Journal of Sleep Research.
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