Why Do We Animals Dream? The weight of the Real

 

Dreams are the secret work of the mind, a necessary fiction we must tell ourselves to endure the incomprehensible reality of each day. The body is still, yet in the silent theater of the sleeping mind, it does not rest. All animals sleep, but only some of us have words to decipher what we dreamed the next day.

In that fragile space between awakening and forgetting, the body rehearses, remembers, and sometimes reopens old wounds. The question of why we dream is both biological and poetic: the dream belongs at once to neurons and to the myth of being.

The first mammals already carried within them the architecture of dreaming. When a rat runs through a maze, its neurons fire in a pattern that will later repeat during sleep. It is a rehearsal without movement, a silent performance of experience behind the scenes. The dream, then, may be the price we pay for experience. By dreaming, we establish memory, for to preserve its stories, the brain must relive them.

Yet dreaming is not only repetition but condensation: the folding of many experiences into a single image. The primitive animal brain, with very few words, clung to images in order to process desire. In humans, condensation is both linguistic and neural. Within a single dream image, several words, memories, and affects may fuse into a compact metaphor that always, always points toward what is desired. In animals, the same process occurs in a simpler key: the scent of danger, the shadow of flight, the call of a mate, the fleeting hunger. The nervous system learns to associate, compress, and anticipate. The link between sound and image is the seed of language present in many animals. When a sound evokes an image, meaning is born.

Perhaps it was there that the symbolic was born: in the moment when a vibration of air came to represent something absent. With that substitution, life ceased to be immediate and became mediated; perception was transformed into interpretation. And every interpretation opens an interval between what is seen, what is felt, and what is said.

That interval is the space of the Imaginary; the realm of images, identification, and desire. This domain, distinct from the ordered world of language (the Symbolic) and from the impossible core of experience (the Real) carries weight because it is charged with sensation. It is the part of us that trembles when an image of loss appears. It is also the reason why trauma so often returns as image and not as word. A traumatic image is a fragment of the Real that never fully entered the realm of the Symbolic; it erupts through language, speaking in a different dictionary, or installs itself as a vision or sensation.

The Real resists symbolization because it occurs outside the coordinates of meaning. When something happens that cannot be absorbed by the words and structures we use to make sense of the world, it remains a pure event, raw, unspeakable, unresolved. When the Real intrudes upon the Imaginary, the dream fractures. Intrusive memories appear, nightmares, the relentless repetition of an unbearable scene.

The way out is not to silence the image but to return it to speech; to allow the Symbolic to metabolize it. What we call “talk therapy” is precisely that: a process of psychic digestion, a re-symbolization of what had remained stuck, raw, and indigestible in image and affect.

To speak a trauma is to reintroduce time into the timeless. Each well-placed word is a small victory of syntax over chaos, of sequence over simultaneity. Language does not erase the wound, but it allows it to take its place in history, instead of repeating endlessly in the Imaginary.

Why do we animals dream?

Because the Real is too heavy to bear while awake.

The Real is so confusing that it creates echoes of understanding which reproduce themselves in dreams. Perhaps it is interpreted like this: my mother, a house; the mountain, marriage; the sea, death. All are deeply personal interpretations, tied to a unique and individual dictionary. The dream is the way the brain metabolizes the impossible, transforming raw sensation into meaning. The human twist is that we dream not only in images but through a kind of language. There Lacan discovered that the unconscious is always speaking, in a language similar to that of dreams: metaphors and metonymies, displacements and condensations. We translate the silent condensation of the animal brain into the dark grammar of desire.

Each night, the animal we are meets the speaking being we have become. In that encounter, reality is forged anew, half remembered, half invented, always incomplete, yet coherent enough to carry us toward the light of a new day, a little wiser than before.