Wait, Why Don't We Have Phones In Our Dreams?

My dreams come in two flavours: Salvador Dali-level surrealism and 2000s mockumentary-style banality. The latter is unfortunately far more common. 

I dream about sending emails, washing pots and even grocery shopping. I’ve even dreamt about filing taxes ― but not once have I seen my phone in my sleep.

It seems I’m not alone. Only 3.5% of women and 2.7% of men envision their screens as they snooze, which is pretty low given how often we use them. 

So what’s going on?

Our minds seem okay with envisioning other tech

Writing for Psychology Today, dream researcher and psychologist Dr Kelly Bulkeley found that some modern inventions like cars appear in people’s dreams often ― especially when compared to phones. 

While he’s “not sure” why that would be, he suggests that “telephones, movies, videos, and computers can be fascinating and absorbing, but they do not directly affect a person’s body with the kind of sensory intensity that people feel during a car ride”. 

Still, we know that the advent of Technicolour television seems to have brought colour into people’s dreams (or perhaps black and white screens took them away).

Speaking to The Cut, Alice Robb, who wrote Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey, chalks it down to what she calls the “threat simulation hypothesis” of dreaming. 

″[This] basically suggests that the reason why we dream is that dreams allow us to work through our anxieties and our fears in a more low-risk environment, so we’re able to practice for stressful events,” she says. 

“People tend not to dream quite as much about reading and writing, which are more recent developments in human history, and more about survival-related things, like fighting, even if that has nothing to do with who you are in real life.”

That feels true ― even in my most frequent stress dreams about failing exams, I never actually see writing on the page.

Any other theories?

In a YouTube Short, Dr Ben Rein, a neuroscientist at Stanford University, shared his theory.

“When we sleep, our brain stores memories. It’s called memory consolidation” he explained.

But we can’t store every single memory, as fans of Inside Out will know. So your brain “pick[s] and choose[s]” what’s most important based on the “emotional intensity of the memory.” 

While we still don’t know what dreaming is, it happens adjacent to the part of your brain that consolidates memory. 

“If sitting on your phone is bland and emotionless, your brain has no reason to consolidate that as you sleep,” he reckons, though the neuroscientist stresses that that’s just his opinion.