Listening to friends tell you about their dreams helps develop empathy

Sharing dreams may serve a purpose. A study finds that describing the content of our dreams or nightmares – whether boring or truly bizarre – may function to bond people and groups together, and that listening and responding to the strange content of dreams can increase empathy. It even proposes that dream-sharing helped the process of human self-domestication, where people evolved greater self-control, less aggressive tendencies and a keener sense of empathy for others.

“The empathy/human self-domestication theory proposes that once dreams started to be told, this would add a new evolutionary…