2024-07-30 15:10:33
Between 2-3% of dreams involve mobile phones. It seems like a small amount, but is it really?
Every so often, some things resurface on the net without knowing very well why. One of the most curious is the idea of “We are in 2024 and no one has come up with a satisfactory explanation as to why mobile phones never appear in dreams if we use them 12 hours a day.”
In my case and in that of half of the Xataka editorial team, it is true. We do not usually dream about mobile phones and, among us, many of us spend more than 12 hours glued to a mobile phone. How is this possible?
But, do we really not dream of mobile phones? Beyond individual experience, it is not easy to verify that this is actually the case: dreams, let’s say, are something that is not very accessible. However, we are in 2024 and, thanks to a string of scientists obsessed with their research topics, we do have some tools that allow us to analyze the content of dreams.
For example, there is Kelly Bulkeley’s Sleep and Dream Database, which contains several tens of thousands of dream reports and gives us a rough idea (albeit with biases) of how mobile phones affect the dream world.
Curiously, the results are quite clear: mobile phones do appear in dreams. A few years ago, in the last analysis on technology that they published, mobile phones appeared in 3.55% of women’s dreams, compared to 2.69% of men’s dreams. It may not seem like much, but in reality, the frequencies are similar to those of movies (3.18%), computers (1.2%) or airplanes (1.49%).
What’s going on here? The explanation often given is that, as Mark Blagrove and his colleagues at Swansea University in the UK have shown, “the emotional strength of our waking experiences” is closely related to “the content and intensity of our dreams”.
What’s more, events that have a greater emotional impact “are more likely to be incorporated into dreams” “than more neutral experiences.” This gives us some clues. Alice Robbauthor of several books on why we dream, calls this the “threat simulation hypothesis.” That is, we use dreams to learn without the risk of experiencing things firsthand.
Makes sense? I tend to be reticent about these ‘functional’ readings of dreams. Above all, because as Linda Hayes has been pointing out for years, the body never disconnects from the environment and, in fact, a good part of the things we dream about are explained because our organism continues to feel its surroundings while we sleep (and those sensations continue to interact with our brain).
However, in this case, even with some nuances, the two explanations are compatible. What is clear is that, whatever the mechanism, we dream about things that impact us on an emotional or experiential level. That explains why we (don’t) dream about mobile phones.