Are the Faces We See in Dreams Borrowed From Real Life?
The idea that every face encountered in our dreams belongs to someone we’ve seen in waking life has long been part of dream theory. It’s an idea that’s both eerie and comforting, suggesting that even our most imaginative dreamt visions have been stitched from familiar memories.
But is there any proof to this theory? Experts say no.
“This is one of those dream ‘facts’ that circulates endlessly online but doesn’t hold up under even light scrutiny. It also doesn’t have the historical pedigree of some older dream myths, like the idea that dying in a dream means you’ll die in real life,” says Deirdre Barrett, a Harvard University lecturer on psychology and author of The Committee of Sleep.
Read More: Is Our Brain Ever Fully Asleep? It May Stay Awake Even as We Dream
Seeing Real Faces in Dreams Could Be Science Fiction
Dylan Selterman, a professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, agrees that the idea is “science fiction.” Selterman heads the Johns Hopkins DREAM Lab, a research institution focused on dream patterns and their relationship to waking life.
Barrett has scrutinized extensive collections of dream reports. She has encountered accounts from dreamers who have seen faces that cannot be drawn from waking memory — faces with multiple eyes, transparent faces, or “configurations that violate basic human anatomy.”
“These are decisive counterexamples. The dreaming brain is not limited to replaying stored photographs; it is perfectly capable of generating novel faces by recombining features or inventing them outright,” says Barrett.
How Could Dream Researchers Test This Theory?
Even if there was a basis to the theory, scientists can’t test it.
“How would scientists even verify this? Would they follow people around and record all the faces that they encounter, and then record every single one of their dreams? Impossible,” says Selterman.
In other words, it would be impossible to determine the proportion of dream faces that correspond to the real people encountered in waking life. No one can catalog every face they’ve ever seen, briefly or peripherally.
“But science doesn’t require exhaustive proof when a single clear counterexample disproves a universal claim. The existence of even a small number of demonstrably impossible faces shows that the statement ‘you only dream faces you’ve seen before’ cannot be true. Beyond that, further testing isn’t essential,” says Barrett.
Understanding What We See in Dreams
A more pertinent question may be why we dream, and the answers are as varied as the dreams themselves. Sigmund Freud framed dreams as wish fulfillment, while neuroscientist Antti Revonsuo suggests that dreams offer us a safe place to play out our worst nightmares — two theories that are at odds with each other. Others, still, propose that dreams are meaningless byproducts of neural activity.
Even so, Barrett suggests these answers may be overly tidy.
“We wouldn’t expect a one-sentence explanation for the purpose of waking thought, and dreaming deserves the same generosity. Dreams reflect the same concerns that occupy us by day — our relationships, fears, hopes, conflicts, ambitions, and work — but they do so in a radically different neurochemical state,” Barrett says.
“I tend to think the question itself invites an overly tidy answer. We wouldn’t expect a one-sentence explanation for the purpose of waking thought, and dreaming deserves the same generosity. Dreams reflect the same concerns that occupy us by day — our relationships, fears, hopes, conflicts, ambitions, and work — but they do so in a radically different neurochemical state,” Barrett adds.
Read More: Do Octopuses Dream? Their Colorful, Skin-Changing Sleep Cycles May Hold the Answer
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