The genius of trees: how forests have shaped humanity, from chocolate cravings to our ability to dream | Trees and forests | The Guardian

Dreams are an invaluable way for another world to bolster the waking world. Freud famously interpreted them as a window into the unconscious mind, but recent research suggests that dreams are something more tangible than this, a way of re-enforcing your kinaesthetic memory, the memory that makes you reach for the branch in the right way and swing for the correct distance. Current thinking suggests that the little twitches made by your body in REM allow your brain to map precisely where in the body and the brain that twitch is happening.

In other words, in REM we re-integrate our bodies, essential for an ape searching through a three-dimensional tree world for food, or bouncing along branches to flee a predator, and for an ape developing an idea of self-awareness. Asleep, we develop memories and maps, a shadow world that can map on to the real one, and at times expand it. Trees didn’t only shape our bodies; they enlarged and shaped our brains every single night we slept in them.
— Read on www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/25/the-genius-of-trees-how-forests-have-shaped-humanity-from-chocolate-cravings-to-our-ability-to-dream