It’s not a shocker that the late psychologist and computer scientist Dr. Christopher Evans, who presented the great 1979 TV series The Mighty Micro, combined the two disciplines he was devoted to when trying to explain why he believed people dream. From Daniel Goleman’s 1984 New York Times article about the possible causes of eyes moving rapidly:

Dr. Evans, a psychologist and computer scientist, proposes that dreams are the brain’s equivalent of a computer’s inspection of its programs, allowing a chance to integrate the experiences of the day with the memories already stored in the brain. His theory is based in part on evidence that dreaming consolidates learning and memory.

The contents of a dream, according to Dr. Evans, are fragments of events and experiences during the day which are being patched into related previous memories. “Dreaming,” he writes, “might be our biological equivalent to the computer’s process of program inspection.”•