It mightn't be as common as talking about music or media releases, but I thought I'd comment on how satisfying I found it to read an essay by Sue Llewellyn on the role of dreams.
Particularly this bit:
During REM dreaming, our brains are better at identifying the probabilistic patterns that underlie the behaviour of living creatures. These patterns are portrayed in unconscious images, which are retained for the awake state. Whenever fast, instinctive action is required, archetypically in dangerous situations, unconscious images associate past experience to predict the probable significance of, for example, an ambiguous flash of yellow. This gives rise to a somewhat surprising conclusion. In our evolutionary past, we dreamed to survive.
Click on the hypertext quote above to read the full essay at Aeon.co.
