Is there much evidence we use dreams to pre-emptively simulate scenarios?
Dreaming seems much more likely to be neurological tidying and emotional reprocessing. Helpful for identifying and surfacing long term subconscious needs but not for planning.
My dreams would be precisely useless for making plans from, unless those plans were to involve being caught in public wrapped only in a towel. And even then, I'm not sure they'd be particularly helpful.
There’s an hypothesis that states we dream so we don’t lose visual processing neural connections. Similar to what happens in blind people: visual processing neurons are recruited to other sensory tasks due to lack of stimulation. My ed. guess is that dreaming probably serves multiple purposes
There was an early visual neural network demonstration — strong feeling it was called "Yorick" or somesuch as it was built in a plaster skull — that had a square grid of red LEDs to show its output state as a simple picture; when its camera was unplugged the neural network appeared to "dream" in the sense that things it had seen would flicker and swirl in the output.
I saw this in a video in the early 90s and cannot remember where.
I agree, for me it dreaming was always reprocessing. The resimulation of scenarios part i mentioned can be over-assumption and it might be wrong. One thing i noticed is that sometimes i reprocess motoric movements after martial arts lessons, that was my main clue.
Right — I mean, I think it's interesting what "dream" means colloquially.
Like, we "dream up" things, or we "have dreams" (underspecified broad ideals for our best life etc.)
I do wonder if sometimes reprocessing dreams has helped me have a better response for something when it reoccurs — like, how to better respond to being slighted or abused or sometimes even complimented.
But I don't know if those could be said to be "plans" on any level. It's a kind of training, though.
Dreaming does help you train for grief and loss, I think.
And sometimes for me it has encapsulated the wisdom or reassurance of someone I have lost; my father appears to be quite involved in my recovery from burnout and my imagining a better life for myself and he died several years ago.