“You’ll get as many answers to the question ‘What is the purpose of dreaming?’ as there are dream psychologists,” says Deirdre Barrett, dream researcher at Harvard University and author of The Committee of Sleep. A 2005 study lent support to this theory by examining the dreams of Kurdish children exposed to war and trauma. Dreams may also help us process and manage emotions, especially negative ones, according to the emotion regulation theory of dreaming. “We’d rarely ask the analogous question: ‘What is the purpose of thinking?’” she says. In the end, dreams may serve many purposes—or none at all—but they remind us that even in sleep, the brain never truly rests.