The predictions of TST have been empirically supported in several studies (for review, see Valli and Revonsuo, 2009). Due to its beneficial effects in enhancing survival and reproductive success, the threat simulation mechanism was selected for, thus propagating its own existence in the ancestral environment. During dreaming, threat coping skills could have been maintained and rehearsed without the risks of hazardous consequences that accompany threats in real situations. In the ancestral environment, a threat simulation system that selected memory traces representing life-threatening experiences from long term memory and constructed frequent threat simulations based on them could have provided our ancestors with a selective advantage in practicing threat recognition and avoidance skills. The threat simulation theory interprets this evidence by suggesting that dream consciousness evolved as an off-line model of the world that is specialized in the simulation of various threatening events encountered in the ancestral environment. Negative emotions and aggression are prominent dream content characteristics, the universally most often reported dream theme is the dreamer being chased or pursued, and the most frequent themes of recurrent dreams and nightmares consist of the dreamer being chased or attacked. As mentioned above, the major statistically significant features of dreams seem to be biased towards representing negative elements. The TST is based on currently available evidence of the systematically recurring dream content characteristics. If in this analysis some dream content characteristics tend to pop out here and there, again and again, those features probably are traces of the original biological function of dreams. According to him, to study the biological function of dreams we are required to make a systematic, detailed analysis of the content of dreams across a wide range of large data samples: in the “normal” population, in cross-cultural samples, and in various special populations, especially hunter-gatherers, children, frequent nightmare sufferers, and traumatized individuals. Katja Valli, Antti Revonsuo, in Reference Module in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Psychology, 2019 Dreaming as Threat SimulationĪnother simulation function theory is the threat simulation theory (TST), proposed by Antii Revonsuo (2000).
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