Updated September 11, 2024 at 7:44 p.m.*
HAMBURG — Maybe you were being wrapped up in a roll of chewing gum by schoolchildren, or flying over the Himalayas with a talking camel, or maybe you caught your partner in bed with Harry Styles. You’ve almost certainly found yourself standing naked in front of a packed lecture hall, with no idea what you’re supposed to talk about. But, in all these dreams, where was your smartphone?
On average, we each spend more than two hours every day on our phones: scrolling, typing, posting, liking and sometimes calling people. Even when we aren’t using it, our smartphone is still in our hand, or at least within reach. It has become an extension of our bodies. But smartphones very rarely appear in our dreams.
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Analysis of an English-language database containing almost 16,000 dreams from a variety of people showed that the words phone or smartphone appeared in only 2% of dreams. “No one has ever told me about a dream in which their smartphone played a central role,” says Brigitte Holzinger, psychotherapist and director of the Institute for Consciousness and Dream Research in Vienna, Austria.
Should we find that reassuring, a sign that our smartphones are not having a significant influence on us? Unfortunately not. There are a number of theories as to why we dream and therefore why we so rarely dream about our phones. Some researchers argue that their absence from our dreams actually suggests we are far too dependent on them during the day.
A satisfied addiction
Holzinger argues that dreams are spaces of possibility. As Sigmund Freud once wrote, dreams are where we live out our secret desires. And our smartphones, which we always carry with us and always ready to hand, leaves nothing to be desired.
We are concerned with the content, not the packaging.
If we started to miss our phones, they might feature more prominently in our dreams, Holzinger says, noting that “we dream about our partner more often when they are away.” So if we never dream about our phones, that doesn’t mean we’re not addicted to them. In fact, it’s the opposite: “Alcoholics dream about alcohol more when they are going cold turkey,” she says.
Smartphones don’t bite
Another theory goes that we dream in order to prepare ourselves to face dangers in the real world. Finnish neuroscientist Antti Revonsuo calls dreams an “installation program” for our genetic software. He argues that our bodies use dreams to transfer survival mechanisms encoded in our DNA into our memory.
This means that if someone dreams about running away from a bear, their brain will react more quickly if they encounter that same situation in real life. According to this theory, dreams have an evolutionary function. And they don’t just prepare us for physical danger, but also emotional and social threats.
That is why we dream about our partner cheating on us, or about the infamous naked presentation – and not about the phone in our hand. “Our smartphones are always with us, but they aren’t a threat to us,” Holzinger says. At least, not directly.
Just a vehicle
When our battery runs out or we lose our phone, we might start to panic, but the threat from our phone is more social and emotional: it brings us bad news, unpleasant calls, our ex’s new Instagram profile picture.
If we use our phones shortly before we go to sleep, the things that we see on its screen are more likely to play a role in our dreams. But not the phone itself: “We are concerned with the content, not the packaging,” Holzinger says.
If we watch Terminator before we go to bed, we won’t dream about our TV, but about the actor Arnold Schwarzenegger or the end of the world. In the same way, if we stalk our ex on social media, we are more likely to dream about them than about our phone.
Another reason to keep phones out of the bedroom – and to unfollow your ex.
Why do we not see cell phones in our dreams? Brain surgeon and neurologist Dr. Rahul Jandial explains…
Why do we not see cell phones in our dreams? Brain surgeon and neurologist Dr. Rahul Jandial explains…
Feel something
As for emotions, there has been a lot of research into how scrolling on our smartphones, especially on social media, triggers the release of dopamine. “Everything that our smartphone triggers in us is indirect,” Holzinger says. It doesn’t reach our true emotions, which we feel when interacting directly with people.
Our smartphone is pretty useless in our dreams.
For example, if we see an ex in a café with their new partner, we feel more deeply affected than we would if we saw an Instagram post of the two of them having coffee together. Real-life experiences therefore tend to dominate our dreams.
Dream researcher Kelly Bulkeley goes even further. He explains that we rarely dream about our phones because they don’t provide our bodies with much in the way of stimuli.
Driving a car, for example, is a multi-sensory experience that impacts the entire body – we feel the car’s vibration, hear the engine, see the street going by, smell petrol. But our smartphones give us very little physical stimulation, other than the light of the screen and the gentle pressure on our fingers. That is not enough for them to make an appearance in our dreams.
“The person you have called is not available”
Some things that seem simple in our daily lives are difficult in our dreams. Reading and writing, for example. “Our fine motor skills don’t function as well when we are asleep,” Holzinger says. Although we might sometimes feel like we are reading text, in fact we aren’t. Therefore we might dream about books, but rarely about reading them.
That is most likely because the sense organ that is most important for reading – the eye – cannot be used when we are asleep.
“In our dreams we look inwards,” Holzinger says. “Therefore it seems we cannot scan letters with our eyes as we usually do, because they appear simultaneously before our inner eye.”
Above all, two important areas of the brain are asleep: Broca’s Area and Wernicke’s Area, which are vital for speech production. Without them, we cannot articulate our thoughts in words. Dreams therefore function mainly via images, says Holzinger. “In our dreams, we rarely actually speak to people. The exchange feels more telepathic.”
Hearing is especially difficult when we are asleep, as our ears are still open to sounds from the real world – whether that is an intruder, a crying baby or our alarm clock. That makes our smartphone pretty useless in our dreams: We can’t read what we see on its screen, and we also can’t use it to call someone.
Dreams are free – of modernity?
In any case, we often have nothing coherent to say in our dreams because everything is chaos. Something new is always happening, our surroundings are constantly changing, and people morph into other people. Because at night, the barriers in our brain come down. Activity in our prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for logical thinking, weighing up the consequences of our actions, is reduced.
That is the youngest part of our brains in evolutionary terms. Some researchers therefore suggest that when it is suppressed during our dreams, we become more like our ancestors. And they didn’t have phones.
“This idea could be confirmed in the long term, if we start to dream about phones more in the future,” Holzinger says. And of course, when more comparative data becomes available. Researchers like Holzinger are therefore very much in favor of people writing down their dreams and sharing them with researchers. A good use for a smartphone.
*Originally published August 5, 2024, this article was updated Sept. 11, 2024 with enriched media.
