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.

大多数人晚上很爱做梦，人们的梦似乎占据了大部分时间，即使有的只持续几分钟。事实上，根据《个性-社会心理月刊》的研究，来自三个迥异国家的大部分人（包括印度，韩国及美国）相信他们的梦揭示了颇具意义的隐匿事实。

  研究表明，74%的印度人，65%的韩国人和56%的美国人对梦的看法仍旧是古老的弗洛伊德式——也就是梦是无意识的入口。

  但这么多年对大脑研究表明，大多数的日常认知都源于复杂且明显的蛋白质与神经细胞的关系和大多数不受控制的细胞活动。毕竟大脑活动并不神秘——但总的来说——还是可以预测的。

  此项研究的作者——卡内基梅隆大学的心理学家Carey Morewedge和哈佛大学的米歇尔.诺顿，他们提供了一些理论。梦境显现的都是熟悉的人和场景，也就是会说我们不愿意让它彻底散去。因为我们并不能从表象探索梦的内容——因为内容似乎是从里到外自发产生的——因而我们不能以清醒时解释胡乱想法的方式对待它。如果你发现自己坐在桌子上想着办公室里有一个正爆炸的炸弹，你也许会对自己说：“哦，我昨晚看了《24小时》，所以我只是回忆起了那个情节。”但人们还是很难弄懂梦的含义。我们认为也许《24小时》引起了梦——或许我们只是有了一次非难的预兆。

  人们喜欢广泛地解释梦境，那些解释也给梦赋予了意义。

  人类在许多事情上都很不理性，对待梦也是如此。我们时刻根据诸如种族偏见之类愚蠢的消息，对数据的曲解，以及梦做着无声的选择。Morewedge和Norton引述了最著名的研究之一来证明我们共有的愚蠢，那就是心理学家Amos Tversky和Daniel Kahneman于1974年发表的论文。在那篇论文里Tversky和 Kahneman讨论了一个实验，实验中对象被要求估计联合国里非洲成员国所占比例。在他们猜测之前，研究员在他们面前转了命运之轮，它最终会停止在0到100之间的偶然数字上，人们试图在轮子上就近找一个答案，即使这轮子跟非洲国家没有关系。

   随后几十年中无数的实验证明我们中大多数人犯了依赖性强的错误，那就是太过依靠一个不相关的消息做决定，就像在轮子上偶然出现的数字。希望时时会出现，就像你在回答问题之前被要求查看社会保险号。（你很可能会选一个接近社会保险号的答案）一组研究人员在一篇2003年经济季刊的论文中向我们显示，人们在实验前被固定在小一些的资金范围内时，进行实验室调整时为了少缴赔偿金，人们会忍受更多身体上的不适（据说是让人不悦的噪音）我们总是根据愚蠢的消息无言地选择。这就是我们为什么对梦赋予意义。

  那也就是说，沉默的选择并不一定是坏事。来自研究的最终结论是，相比于梦到好朋友遭遇坏事，当人们梦到好事降临到好朋友身上时，他们会更倾向于将之赋予意义。同样，我们会将敌人受到惩罚的梦境赋予意义，而对敌人胜利的梦境相反处之。简而言之，我们对梦的解释会很少空想性地探寻隐匿的事实，而更多的是体现了人类的另一种永久性特质：凡事都往好处想。