Most people dream enthusiastically at night, their dreams seemingly occupying hours, even though most last only a few minutes. Most people also read great meaning into their nocturnal visions. In fact, according to a new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the vast majority of people in three very different countries — India, South Korea and the United States — believe that their dreams reveal meaningful hidden truths.

According to the study, 74% of Indians, 65% of South Koreans and 56% of Americans hold an old-fashioned Freudian view of dreams: that they are portals into the unconscious.

But after so many years of brain research showing that most of our everyday cognitions result from a complex but observable interaction of proteins and neurons and other mostly uncontrolled cellular activity, how can so many otherwise rational people think dreams should be taken seriously? After all, brain activity isn't mystical but — for the most part — highly predictable.

The authors of the study — psychologists Carey Morewedge of Carnegie Mellon University and Michael Norton of Harvard — offer a few theories. For one, dreams often feature familiar people and locations, which means we are less willing to dismiss them outright. Also, because we can't trace the content of dreams to an external source — because that content seems to arise spontaneously and from within — we can't explain it the way we can explain random thoughts that occur to us during waking hours. If you find yourself sitting at your desk and thinking about a bomb exploding in your office, you might say to yourself, "Oh, I watched 24 last night, so I'm just remembering that episode." But people have a harder time making sense of dreams. Maybe 24 caused the dream, we think — or maybe we're having a premonition of an attack. We love to interpret dreams widely, and those acts of interpretation give dreams meaning.

Human beings are irrational about dreams the same way they are irrational about a lot of things. We make dumb choices all the time on the basis of silly information like racial bias or a misunderstanding of statistics — or dreams. Morewedge and Norton quote one of the most famous modern studies to demonstrate our collective folly, from a paper written by psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman that was published in Science in 1974. In that paper, Tversky and Kahneman discuss an experiment in which subjects were asked to estimate the percentage of African countries represented in the U.N. Before they guessed, a researcher spun a wheel of fortune in front of them that landed on a random number between 0 and 100. People tended to pick an answer that wasn't far from the number on the wheel, even though the wheel had nothing to do with African countries.

Countless experiments over the ensuing decades have confirmed that most of us make this so-called anchoring mistake — that is, making a decision based largely on an unrelated piece of information, like a random number that appears on a wheel. Anchoring occurs all the time, like when you're asked to look at your Social Security number before answering a question (you're more likely to pick an answer close to the digits in your SSN). A team of researchers even showed in a 2003 paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economicsthat people will endure more physical discomfort (exposure to an unpleasant noise) for less monetary compensation in a lab setting when they are anchored prior to the experiments to smaller monetary amounts. As I said, we all make dumb choices based on silly information. That's why we invest meaning in dreams.

That being said, dumb choices aren't necessarily bad ones. A final finding from the study: When people have dreams about good things happening to their good friends, they are more likely to say those dreams are meaningful than when they have dreams about bad things happening to their friends. Similarly, we invest more meaning in dreams in which our enemies are punished and less meaning in dreams in which our enemies emerge victorious. In short, our interpretation of dreams may say a lot less about some quixotic search for hidden truth than it does about another enduring human quality: optimistic thinking.

大多數人晚上很愛做夢，人們的夢似乎占據了大部分時間，即使有的只持續幾分鐘。事實上，根據《個性-社會心理月刊》的研究，來自三個迥異國家的大部分人（包括印度，韓國及美國）相信他們的夢揭示了頗具意義的隱匿事實。

  研究表明，74%的印度人，65%的韓國人和56%的美國人對夢的看法仍舊是古老的弗洛伊德式——也就是夢是無意識的入口。

  但這么多年對大腦研究表明，大多數的日常認知都源于復雜且明顯的蛋白質與神經細胞的關系和大多數不受控制的細胞活動。畢竟大腦活動并不神秘——但總的來說——還是可以預測的。

  此項研究的作者——卡內基梅隆大學的心理學家Carey Morewedge和哈佛大學的米歇爾.諾頓，他們提供了一些理論。夢境顯現的都是熟悉的人和場景，也就是會說我們不愿意讓它徹底散去。因為我們并不能從表象探索夢的內容——因為內容似乎是從里到外自發產生的——因而我們不能以清醒時解釋胡亂想法的方式對待它。如果你發現自己坐在桌子上想著辦公室里有一個正爆炸的炸彈，你也許會對自己說：“哦，我昨晚看了《24小時》，所以我只是回憶起了那個情節。”但人們還是很難弄懂夢的含義。我們認為也許《24小時》引起了夢——或許我們只是有了一次非難的預兆。

  人們喜歡廣泛地解釋夢境，那些解釋也給夢賦予了意義。

  人類在許多事情上都很不理性，對待夢也是如此。我們時刻根據諸如種族偏見之類愚蠢的消息，對數據的曲解，以及夢做著無聲的選擇。Morewedge和Norton引述了最著名的研究之一來證明我們共有的愚蠢，那就是心理學家Amos Tversky和Daniel Kahneman于1974年發表的論文。在那篇論文里Tversky和 Kahneman討論了一個實驗，實驗中對象被要求估計聯合國里非洲成員國所占比例。在他們猜測之前，研究員在他們面前轉了命運之輪，它最終會停止在0到100之間的偶然數字上，人們試圖在輪子上就近找一個答案，即使這輪子跟非洲國家沒有關系。

   隨后幾十年中無數的實驗證明我們中大多數人犯了依賴性強的錯誤，那就是太過依靠一個不相關的消息做決定，就像在輪子上偶然出現的數字。希望時時會出現，就像你在回答問題之前被要求查看社會保險號。（你很可能會選一個接近社會保險號的答案）一組研究人員在一篇2003年經濟季刊的論文中向我們顯示，人們在實驗前被固定在小一些的資金范圍內時，進行實驗室調整時為了少繳賠償金，人們會忍受更多身體上的不適（據說是讓人不悅的噪音）我們總是根據愚蠢的消息無言地選擇。這就是我們為什么對夢賦予意義。

  那也就是說，沉默的選擇并不一定是壞事。來自研究的最終結論是，相比于夢到好朋友遭遇壞事，當人們夢到好事降臨到好朋友身上時，他們會更傾向于將之賦予意義。同樣，我們會將敵人受到懲罰的夢境賦予意義，而對敵人勝利的夢境相反處之。簡而言之，我們對夢的解釋會很少空想性地探尋隱匿的事實，而更多的是體現了人類的另一種永久性特質：凡事都往好處想。