Humans have long sought to understand the purpose of dreaming.

Two psychological theories of dreaming paint different pictures of the role of dreams in emotional processing.

The continuity theory suggests that dreams reflect our waking emotions, matching dream mood with waking mood.

The emotion regulation theory sees dreams as a pressure valve that actively helps us process what we feel.

I started my predoctoral psychology internship in a large hospital system when my daughter was only a few months old. I was seeing more patients than ever before, but the biggest adjustment was having to document the majority of my human interactions on a given day. Meanwhile, I had an infant to take care of at home in the evenings. One night, in the midst of one of my daughter’s sleep regressions, I was up multiple times in the middle of the night to feed her. While sleeping in between feedings, I dreamed that I heard her crying. My dream-self thought, “If I get up to feed her, I’m going to have to document it in the medical record afterwards. It’s too much work, let’s just skip it.”

The idea that I would have to update my own daughter’s (nonexistent) medical chart after every nursing session was absurd. But our dreams are often bizarre, particularly when we are stressed, aren’t they?

Daytime Emotions and Nighttime Dreaming

Humans have been trying to understand (and sometimes interpret) our own dreams for much of recorded history. The study of psychology has taken on this curiosity, and Sigmund Freud himself was no stranger to dream theory. There are two primary contemporary theories about the psychological function of dreams in processing emotion: The continuity theory suggests that dreams play a passive role in our emotional processing, and the emotion regulation theory suggests that dreams help us actively regulate emotions.

The Continuity Theory: Dreams as Background Music

The continuity theory suggests that our dreams reflect the types of thoughts and emotions that we are already experiencing while awake. Any role that dreams might play in........

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