This Is What (Faces In) Dreams Are Made Of

Who do we really see when we’re dreaming?

After reading the article “Who Was That In My Dream?” of Blogs by J, I was inspired to write about the faces we see in our dreams.

I decided to make this a two-part article: the first part (the one you’re reading right now) will focus on the neurophysiological explanations of the faces in our dreams. The second part will explore the same explanations, as seen from a Psychoanalytic perspective.

By doing so, I am hoping to explain why dreams are important sources of information, and how we can learn to understand them better as symbols.

Table of Contents − What happens when we dream? − Who are the people in our dreams? − Do we really see faces when we dream? − Conclusion

What happens when we dream?

When we fall asleep, the brain goes through different cycles of activity. While the body is resting, the brain is making sense of the experiences and information it collected during the day. The cycles of activity help the brain to process the information, divide it in chunks according to its usefulness and store those chunks in our memory cells depending on their classification.

Dreams occur during the REM (Rapid Eye Movement) cycle. The first REM phase starts approximately 70–80 minutes after we fall asleep. In total, we usually have anywhere between 2–4 REM phases, which occur every 90 minutes (source). Each one lasts a bit longer than the other. The first REM phase can be up to 15 minutes, while the final REM phase before we wake up can last up to 25 minutes.

Usually, we forget about 95% of our dreams in every completed dreaming cycle (source). We tend to remember the images we last saw before waking up. Disruptions in the REM phases (such as waking up frequently due to anxiety or having hormonal or neurotransmitter imbalances) affect the quality of our dreams and their retention in our memory. Consequently, the way the brain makes sense of input is affected. It is possible to learn how to remember most of the dreams, as well as to control them, but I’ll leave that for another article.

Forgetting dreams is normal. Many people think that they don’t dream because they can’t remember it. The truth is that most people dream. Those who don’t are either not going deep into the REM cycles (for example, due to a physiological or mental health issue, medication, or substance use), or they don’t reach the REM cycles long enough to create a sequence (for example, if they’re constantly woken up by noise).

During our dreams, the brain presents information that it already has (our stored memories) and combines it with any new information we learned throughout the day. This information could be anything. An image we saw, an article we read, something we smelled or touched… And, the people we’ve seen. Which leads us to the next big question..!

Who are the people in our dreams?

As we said earlier, the brain is trying to make sense of the new information it got during the day by using information that already exists in the memory. Such a piece of information is the faces of all the people we have ever seen in our life.

Our brain has the capacity to store an average of 5000 different faces (source). This means that, right now, your brain has stored not only the faces of the people you know well or have interacted with at one point in your life, but also the faces of people you passed by on a street 15 years ago, people you’ve been together on a flight, even all the people you’ve seen when you were an infant. You’re not aware of it, but your brain has retained all the information.

So far, research shows that the brain cannot create a new face from scratch, in the same way that it cannot imagine a new color (we can only imagine the colors that result from the combinations of the only 3 colors we can see — red, green, and blue).

That is because the brain cannot imagine something that it has never experienced before, or something that would require a brain structure which we lack as humans (source). Therefore, the faces we see in our dreams are composites of all the faces we have ever seen.

Do we really see faces when we dream?

That is still up to debate, but what we know so far is that the brain isn’t very good at showing us all the details when we dream (source). What happens instead is that the brain relies on the stored memories to make us believe that we’re actually seeing something it can’t create.

In my article on High Place Phenomenon (the urge you get to jump when you’re near an edge) I have explained how the brain sometimes fills in the information for us, and makes us believe things. In the case of HPP, it would make us believe that we really wanted to jump.

In the case of seeing faces in dreams, the brain shows us a blurry picture of a face, it tells us “this is your spouse” and our memory cells evoke the stored image of the spouse and project it. So, you end up believing that you’re really seeing the face of your spouse but in reality you’re seeing a blur and your imagination fills in the details through the intel it gets from your memory. Scientists theorize that this is a possible way for the brain to save energy and focus on more important processes.

Conclusion

• The faces we see in our dreams are composites of every face we have ever seen in our life.
• The brain cannot create a new face from scratch.
• We don’t fully see a face in the dream; we mostly fill out the details from memory.

If you’re wondering why the people we see in our dreams are important and what are the symbolisms behind that, stay tuned for part 2 in a couple of days!

Thank you for reading!

You can now find Part 2 here: