Dreams might be one step closer to being solved as a scientific entity, if newly published research from Australia is proven correct.

A research team from the University of South Australia has claimed following their studies that dreams play a vital role in ‘sorting and filing’ newly learned information in the brain, and that without dreaming a person could suffer learning and memory recall problems.

“One theory is that it’s a way of allowing your brain to recover and consolidate all the memories and activities of the previous day, like filing time. If we give someone a complex new task to learn and we let them sleep but don’t let them dream, they’re almost as bad the next day as if they didn’t sleep at all,” said Professor Drew Dawson, lead researcher at the Centre for Sleep Research at the University of South Australia, reported the Daily Telegraph.

“Your brainwaves while you’re dreaming actually look very similar to your brainwaves when you are awake,” added Prof. Dawson.