research about dreams

July 26, 2011

The Science Behind Dreaming

New research sheds light on how and why we remember dreams--and what purpose they are likely to serve

By Sander van der Linden

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For centuries people have pondered the meaning of dreams. Early civilizations thought of dreams as a medium between our earthly world and that of the gods. In fact, the Greeks and Romans were convinced that dreams had certain prophetic powers. While there has always been a great interest in the interpretation of human dreams, it wasn’t until the end of the nineteenth century that Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung put forth some of the most widely-known modern theories of dreaming. Freud’s theory centred around the notion of repressed longing -- the idea that dreaming allows us to sort through unresolved, repressed wishes. Carl Jung (who studied under Freud) also believed that dreams had psychological importance, but proposed different theories about their meaning.

Since then, technological advancements have allowed for the development of other theories. One prominent neurobiological theory of dreaming is the “activation-synthesis hypothesis,” which states that dreams don’t actually mean anything: they are merely electrical brain impulses that pull random thoughts and imagery from our memories. Humans, the theory goes, construct dream stories after they wake up, in a natural attempt to make sense of it all. Yet, given the vast documentation of realistic aspects to human dreaming as well as indirect experimental evidence that other mammals such as cats also dream, evolutionary psychologists have theorized that dreaming really does serve a purpose. In particular, the “threat simulation theory” suggests that dreaming should be seen as an ancient biological defence mechanism that provided an evolutionary advantage because of  its capacity to repeatedly simulate potential threatening events – enhancing the neuro-cognitive mechanisms required for efficient threat perception and avoidance.

So, over the years, numerous theories have been put forth in an attempt to illuminate the mystery behind human dreams, but, until recently, strong tangible evidence has remained largely elusive.

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Yet, new research published in the Journal of Neuroscience provides compelling insights into the mechanisms that underlie dreaming and the strong relationship our dreams have with our memories. Cristina Marzano and her colleagues at the University of Rome have succeeded, for the first time, in explaining how humans remember their dreams. The scientists predicted the likelihood of successful dream recall based on a signature pattern of brain waves. In order to do this, the Italian research team invited 65 students to spend two consecutive nights in their research laboratory.

During the first night, the students were left to sleep, allowing them to get used to the sound-proofed and temperature-controlled rooms. During the second night the researchers measured the student’s brain waves while they slept. Our brain experiences four types of electrical brain waves: “delta,” “theta,” “alpha,” and “beta.” Each represents a different speed of oscillating electrical voltages and together they form the electroencephalography (EEG). The Italian research team used this technology to measure the participant’s brain waves during various sleep-stages. (There are five stages of sleep; most dreaming and our most intense dreams occur during the REM stage.) The students were woken at various times and asked to fill out a diary detailing whether or not they dreamt, how often they dreamt and whether they could remember the content of their dreams.

While previous studies have already indicated that people are more likely to remember their dreams when woken directly after REM sleep, the current study explains why. Those participants who exhibited more low frequency theta waves in the frontal lobes were also more likely to remember their dreams.

This finding is interesting because the increased frontal theta activity the researchers observed looks just like the successful encoding and retrieval of autobiographical memories seen while we are awake. That is, it is the same electrical oscillations in the frontal cortex that make the recollection of episodic memories (e.g., things that happened to you) possible. Thus, these findings suggest that the neurophysiological mechanisms that we employ while dreaming (and recalling dreams) are the same as when we construct and retrieve memories while we are awake.

In another recent study conducted by the same research team, the authors used the latest MRI techniques to investigate the relation between dreaming and the role of deep-brain structures. In their study, the researchers found that vivid, bizarre and emotionally intense dreams (the dreams that people usually remember) are linked to parts of the amygdala and hippocampus. While the amygdala plays a primary role in the processing and memory of emotional reactions, the hippocampus has been implicated in important memory functions, such as the consolidation of information from short-term to long-term memory.

The proposed link between our dreams and emotions is also highlighted in another recent study published by Matthew Walker and colleagues at the Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab at UC Berkeley, who found that a reduction in REM sleep (or less “dreaming”) influences our ability to understand complex emotions in daily life – an essential feature of human social functioning.  Scientists have also recently identified where dreaming is likely to occur in the brain.  A very rare clinical condition known as “Charcot-Wilbrand Syndrome” has been known to cause (among other neurological symptoms) loss of the ability to dream.  However, it was not until a few years ago that a patient reported to have lost her ability to dream while having virtually no other permanent neurological symptoms. The patient suffered a lesion in a part of the brain known as the right inferior lingual gyrus (located in the visual cortex). Thus, we know that dreams are generated in, or transmitted through this particular area of the brain, which is associated with visual processing, emotion and visual memories.

Taken together, these recent findings tell an important story about the underlying mechanism and possible purpose of dreaming.

Dreams seem to help us process emotions by encoding and constructing memories of them. What we see and experience in our dreams might not necessarily be real, but the emotions attached to these experiences certainly are. Our dream stories essentially try to strip the emotion out of a certain experience by creating a memory of it. This way, the emotion itself is no longer active.  This mechanism fulfils an important role because when we don’t process our emotions, especially negative ones, this increases personal worry and anxiety. In fact, severe REM sleep-deprivation is increasingly correlated to the development of mental disorders. In short, dreams help regulate traffic on that fragile bridge which connects our experiences with our emotions and memories.

Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about? Please send suggestions to Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist at the Boston Globe. He can be reached at garethideas AT gmail.com or Twitter @garethideas .

Dreams: Why They Happen & What They Mean

Staff Writer

Eric Suni has over a decade of experience as a science writer and was previously an information specialist for the National Cancer Institute.

Want to read more about all our experts in the field?

Alex Dimitriu

Psychiatrist

Dr. Dimitriu is the founder of Menlo Park Psychiatry and Sleep Medicine. He is board-certified in psychiatry as well as sleep medicine.

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Table of Contents

What Are Dreams?

Why do we dream, when do we dream, do dreams have meaning, what are types of dreams, what are nightmares, do dreams affect sleep, how can you remember dreams, how can you stop nightmares.

• Dreams are mental, emotional, or sensory experiences that take place during sleep.
• Dreams are the most common and intense during REM sleep when brain activity increases, but no one knows for sure why we dream.
• Dreaming is normal and healthy, but frequent nightmares can interfere with sleep.
• Waking up gradually and journaling your dreams may help you remember them better.

Dreams are one of the most fascinating and mystifying aspects of sleep. Since Sigmund Freud helped draw attention to the potential importance of dreams in the late 19th century, considerable research has worked to unravel both the neuroscience and psychology of dreams.

Despite this advancing scientific knowledge, there is much that remains unknown about both sleep and dreams. Even the most fundamental question — why do we dream at all? — is still subject to significant debate.

While everyone dreams, the content of those dreams and their effect on sleep can vary dramatically from person to person. Even though there’s no simple explanation for the meaning and purpose of dreams, it’s helpful to understand the basics of dreams, the potential impact of nightmares, and steps that you can take to sleep better with sweet dreams.

Dreams are images, thoughts, or feelings that occur during sleep. Visual imagery is the most common Trusted Source National Library of Medicine, Biotech Information The National Center for Biotechnology Information advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information. View Source , but dreams can involve all of the senses. Some people dream in color while others dream in black and white , and people who are blind tend to have more dream components related to sound, taste, and smell Trusted Source National Library of Medicine, Biotech Information The National Center for Biotechnology Information advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information. View Source .

Studies have revealed diverse types of dream content, but some typical characteristics of dreaming include:

• It has a first-person perspective.
• It is involuntary.
• The content may be illogical or even incoherent.
• The content includes other people who interact with the dreamer and one another.
• It provokes strong emotions.
• Elements of waking life are incorporated into content.

Although these features are not universal, they are found at least to some extent in most normal dreams.

Debate continues among sleep experts Trusted Source National Library of Medicine, Biotech Information The National Center for Biotechnology Information advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information. View Source about why we dream. Different theories Trusted Source Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School A production of WGBH Educational Foundation and the Harvard Medical School Division of Sleep Medicine. View Source about the purpose of dreaming Trusted Source National Center for Biotechnology Information The National Center for Biotechnology Information advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information. View Source include:

• Building memory: Dreaming has been associated with consolidation of memory, which suggests that dreaming may serve an important cognitive function of strengthening memory and informational recall.
• Processing emotion: The ability to engage with and rehearse feelings in different imagined contexts may be part of the brain’s method for managing emotions.
• Mental housekeeping: Periods of dreaming could be the brain’s way of “straightening up,” clearing away partial, erroneous, or unnecessary information.
• Instant replay: Dream content may be a form of distorted instant replay in which recent events are reviewed and analyzed.
• Incidental brain activity: This view holds that dreaming is just a by-product of sleep that has no essential purpose or meaning.

Experts in the fields of neuroscience and psychology continue to conduct experiments to discover what is happening in the brain during sleep, but even with ongoing research, it may be impossible to conclusively prove any theory for why we dream.

On average, most people dream for around two hours per night. Dreaming can happen Trusted Source National Library of Medicine, Biotech Information The National Center for Biotechnology Information advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information. View Source during any stage of sleep , but dreams are the most prolific and intense during the rapid eye movement (REM) stage.

During the REM sleep stage, brain activity ramps up considerably compared to the non-REM stages, which helps explain the distinct types of dreaming Trusted Source National Library of Medicine, Biotech Information The National Center for Biotechnology Information advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information. View Source during these stages. Dreams during REM sleep are typically more vivid, fantastical, and/or bizarre even though they may involve elements of waking life. By contrast, non-REM dreams tend to involve more coherent content that involves thoughts or memories grounded to a specific time and place.

REM sleep is not distributed evenly through the night. The majority of REM sleep happens during the second half of a normal sleep period, which means that dreaming tends to be concentrated in the hours before waking up.

How to interpret dreams, and whether they have meaning at all, are matters of considerable controversy. While some psychologists have argued that dreams provide insight into a person’s psyche or everyday life, others find their content to be too inconsistent or bewildering to reliably deliver meaning.

Virtually all experts acknowledge that dreams can involve content that ties back to waking experiences although the content may be changed or misrepresented. For example, in describing dreams, people often reference people who they recognize clearly even if their appearance is distorted in the dream Trusted Source National Library of Medicine, Biotech Information The National Center for Biotechnology Information advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information. View Source .

The meaning of real-life details appearing in dreams, though, is far from settled. The “continuity hypothesis” in dream research holds that dreams and waking life are intertwined with one another and thus involve overlapping themes and content. The “discontinuity hypothesis,” on the other hand, sees thinking during dreams and wakefulness as structurally distinct.

While analysis of dreams may be a component of personal or psychological self-reflection, it’s hard to state, based on the existing evidence, that there is a definitive method for interpreting and understanding the meaning of dreams in waking, everyday life.

Dreams can take on many different forms. Lucid dreams occur when a person is in a dream while being actively aware that they are dreaming. Vivid dreams involve especially realistic or clear dream content. Bad dreams are composed of bothersome or distressing content. Recurring dreams involve the same imagery repeating in multiple dreams over time.

Even within normal dreams, there are certain types of content that are especially identifiable. Among the most recognizable and common themes Trusted Source National Library of Medicine, Biotech Information The National Center for Biotechnology Information advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information. View Source in dreams are things like flying, falling, being chased, or being unable to find a bathroom.

In sleep medicine, a nightmare is a bad dream that causes a person to wake up from sleep Trusted Source National Library of Medicine, Biotech Information The National Center for Biotechnology Information advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information. View Source . This definition is distinct from common usage that may refer to any threatening, scary, or bothersome dream as a nightmare. While bad dreams are normal and usually benign, frequent nightmares may interfere with a person’s sleep and cause impaired thinking and mood Trusted Source American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM)|National Library of Medicine, Biotech Information View Source during the daytime.

In most cases, dreams don’t affect sleep. Dreaming is part of healthy sleep and is generally considered to be completely normal and without any negative effects on sleep.

Nightmares are the exception. Because nightmares involve awakenings, they can become problematic if they occur frequently. Distressing dreams may cause a person to avoid sleep, leading to insufficient sleep. When they do sleep, the prior sleep deprivation can induce a REM sleep rebound that actually worsens nightmares. This negative cycle can cause some people with frequent nightmares to experience insomnia as a chronic sleep problem.

For this reason, people who have nightmares more than once a week, have fragmented sleep, or have daytime sleepiness or changes to their thinking or mood should talk with a doctor Trusted Source Medline Plus MedlinePlus is an online health information resource for patients and their families and friends. View Source . A doctor can review these symptoms to identify the potential causes and treatments of their sleeping problem.

For people who want to document or interpret dreams, remembering them is a key first step. The ability to recall dreams can be different for every person and may vary based on age Trusted Source National Library of Medicine, Biotech Information The National Center for Biotechnology Information advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information. View Source . While there’s no guaranteed way to improve dream recall, experts recommend certain tips Trusted Source American Psychological Association (APA) APA is the leading scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United States, with more than 121,000 researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants and students as its members. View Source :

• Think about your dreams as soon as you wake up. Dreams can be forgotten in the blink of an eye, so you want to make remembering them the first thing you do when you wake up. Before sitting up or even saying good morning to your bed partner, close your eyes and try to replay your dreams in your mind.
• Have a journal or app on-hand to keep track of your dream content. It’s important to have a method to quickly record dream details before you can forget them, including if you wake up from a dream in the night. For most people, a pen and paper on their nightstand works well, but there are also smartphone apps that help you create an organized and searchable dream journal.
• Try to wake up peacefully in the morning. An abrupt awakening, such as from an alarm clock, may cause you to quickly snap awake and out of a dream, making it harder to remember the dream’s details.
• Remind yourself that dream recall is a priority. In the lead-up to bedtime, tell yourself that you will remember your dreams, and repeat this mantra before going to sleep. While this alone can’t ensure that you will recall your dreams, it can encourage you to remember to take the time to reflect on dreams before starting your day.

People with frequent nightmares that disturb sleep should talk with a doctor who can determine if they have nightmare disorder or any other condition affecting their sleep quality. Treatment for nightmare disorder often includes talk therapy that attempts to counteract negative thinking, stress, and anxiety that can worsen nightmares.

Many types of talk therapy attempt to reduce worries or fears, including those that can arise in nightmares. This type of exposure or desensitization therapy helps many patients reframe their emotional reaction to negative imagery since trying to simply suppress negative thoughts may exacerbate nightmares Trusted Source National Library of Medicine, Biotech Information The National Center for Biotechnology Information advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information. View Source .

Another step in trying to reduce nightmares is to improve sleep hygiene , which includes both sleep-related habits and the bedroom environment . Healthy sleep hygiene can make your nightly sleep more predictable and may help you sleep soundly through the night even if you have bad dreams. Examples of healthy sleep tips include:

• Follow a stable sleep schedule: Keep a steady schedule every day, including on weekends or other days when you don’t have to wake up at a certain time.
• Choose pre-bed content carefully: Avoid scary, distressing, or stimulating content in the hours before bed since it may provoke negative thoughts during sleep.
• Wind down each night: Exercising during the day Trusted Source Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) As the nation’s health protection agency, CDC saves lives and protects people from health threats. View Source can help you sleep better at night. In the evening, try to allow your mind and body to calmly relax before bed such as with light stretching, deep breathing, or other relaxation techniques.
• Limit alcohol and caffeine: Drinking alcohol can cause more concentrated REM sleep later in the night, heightening the risk of nightmares. Caffeine is a stimulant that can throw off your sleep schedule and keep your brain wired when you want to doze off.
• Block out bedroom distractions: Try to foster a sleeping environment that is dark, quiet, smells nice, and has a comfortable temperature. A supportive mattress and pillow can make your bed more inviting and cozy. All of these factors make it easier to feel calm and to prevent unwanted awakenings that can trigger irregular sleep patterns.
• Study Finds Bedtime Procrastination Impacts Sleep Quality
• Only Murders While You’re Sleeping: The Parasomnia Defense
• Crime Risk and Depression Differentially Relate to Aspects of Sleep
• Mechanism During Sleep Found to Determine Which Memories Last

About Our Editorial Team

Eric Suni, Staff Writer

Medically Reviewed by

Alex Dimitriu, Psychiatrist MD

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Scarpelli, S., Bartolacci, C., D’Atri, A., Gorgoni, M., & De Gennaro, L. (2019). Mental sleep activity and disturbing dreams in the lifespan. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 16(19), 3658.

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Paul, F., Schredl, M., & Alpers, G. W. (2015). Nightmares affect the experience of sleep quality but not sleep architecture: an ambulatory polysomnographic study. Borderline personality disorder and emotion dysregulation, 2, 3.

Aurora, R. N., Zak, R. S., Auerbach, S. H., Casey, K. R., Chowdhuri, S., Karippot, A., Maganti, R. K., Ramar, K., Kristo, D. A., Bista, S. R., Lamm, C. I., Morgenthaler, T. I., Standards of Practice Committee, & American Academy of Sleep Medicine (2010). Best practice guide for the treatment of nightmare disorder in adults. Journal of clinical sleep medicine : JCSM : official publication of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, 6(4), 389–401.

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How scientists are studying dreams in the lab

Neuroimaging, sleepwalking, coin tosses.

By Angela Chen

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Once, studying dreams was the domain of mystics, prophets, and a certain sex-obsessed Austrian psychoanalyst. With neuroimaging techniques and better technology, dreams have become a focus of scientific research, from efforts to record dreams to studies investigating how lucid dreaming might be beneficial to mental health.

Journalist Alice Robb is the author of Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey . The Verge spoke with Robb about theories of dreams, the most provocative studies, and the many questions that remain in the field.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Can you start by giving me a brief intellectual history of dreams? Before our modern scientific understanding, what were people’s theories of dreams?

If you look throughout history, you see people taking dreams really seriously. Dream diaries are some of the oldest examples of literature, and dreams in the Bible are often treated as prophetic. In the late 19th and early 20th century, Freud comes along and puts dreams at the center of psychoanalysis, arguing that they’re the royal road to the unconscious, and analysts should ask patients about them, and by unpacking them, you can get to the core of a patient’s issues. You see the idea taking off. On the flip side, Freud also said that dreams are all about sex — “a room represents a woman because it has an entrance” — which perhaps didn’t do dreams a favor.

Another part of the story is that the science of sleep is relatively new. Rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep was only discovered in the 1950s. And until then, most scientists thought that sleep was just a time when your brain turned off, and there wasn’t much to study. Or even if there was, they didn’t have a way to study it. So a big part of the story is also advances in technology and neuroimaging enabling us to study sleep and dreams. And now, you see people becoming much more aware of sleep as important for health, and so dreams and sleep are going to the lab.

From a very reductionist, neuroscientific point of view, what’s happening in the brain when we dream? What’s the difference between dreams at night and daydreaming and fantasy?

It’s time when the frontal lobe, the logic centers, are less activated. There’s less rational thinking. At the same time, dopamine is surging and people are often having intense emotional experiences.

Daydreaming, mind wandering, night dreaming — you can think of them as all on a spectrum. They are all involving the default mode network, the part of the brain that gets involved when everything else has quieted down, and you’re not actively engaged in something. Both mind-wandering and daydreams are involving the medial prefrontal cortex and medial temporal lobe. During REM dreams, you’re also the visual cortex so you’re having these more intensely visual experiences. Sight is the sense that’s more involved than, say, hearing or smell or touch.

Do people really smell things in dreams? I don’t believe I have, though I also generally have a weak sense of smell.

I do think smell is rare in dreams. I don’t have a stat off the top of my head, but dreams are predominantly visual, even for people who are blind, depending on what age they lost their sight. If they lost their sight after around the age of five, they can experience sight in dreams.

Nowadays, what are the main psychological theories for dreams? I’m assuming Freud is no longer in fashion?

Certain ideas of Freud’s have been borne out. One idea is that you are dreaming about things you are suppressing during the day, and there is actually research on something called the “ dream rebound effect .” The psychologist Daniel Wegner found that if people were told not to focus on something before going to bed, they’re more likely to dream about it. He told one group of students to focus on a target person before bed and told another group of students about this target person and found that the group that was trying to avoid those thoughts were actually reporting more dreams about the person.

There’s a theory from evolutionary psychology that’s pretty popular, and it argues that dreams have a survival function. They give us a chance to practice for things we’re stressed out about in real life. That would explain why dreams are predominantly negative. Dreams tend to be much more about anxiety than about pleasure and involve a lot of intense feelings and fear. The idea is that we wake up, and we’re more prepared to tackle the things we faced in our nightmares. That would also maybe explain why dreams tend to involve more primal settings. There are a lot of actions like running around and being chased, elaborate themes that don’t have much to do with our lives if we live in cities. We’re less likely to have dreams about reading and writing and activities that are more recent developments.

What tools are scientists using to study dreams? Do you have favorite studies?

There are a lot of indirect ways that scientists have found to study dreams, like studying the actions of sleepwalkers or putting recording devices in people’s rooms and catching the utterances that they make during sleep talking and analyzing the language of that.

Neuroimaging studies and studies of rats with electrodes have been important. Some of the first research on memory consolidation and dreams comes from rat studies. Matt Wilson, who’s at MIT, was trying to study memory in rats as they stepped into a maze. They went back to sleep and he noticed through the monitor that he had happened to leave on that their neurons were firing again, as if they were awake and running through the maze when they were in fact asleep. They’re replaying the path that they’ve taken through the day.

Building off that, other scientists ran an experiment where they released rats into a maze. The rats would run around randomly with no preference for any area. If the scientists gave them pleasurable stimulation while the rats were replaying a certain part of the maze during sleep, when the rat wakes up they tend to gravitate more toward that place.

Are there certain big questions that everyone in the field is trying to work on?

There’s definitely a lot of questions that are still unanswered. There’s no formula to determine why we have a certain dream on a certain night, why exactly we’re pulling different memories and mixing them up in the way that they appear.

There’s some really interesting new efforts to improve our ability to record dreams. One of the things that has held dream research back is that they’re so hard to study. Either you are asking people what they dreamed about, which obviously isn’t a perfect way to collect data, or you’re doing brain scans that you can only see, you can’t correlate perfectly to the actual dream content.

There was a Japanese study a few years ago where a group was actually able to create a very crude dream reading device . They scanned people’s brains while they were awake and thinking about certain objects and characters — like a man, a woman, computer, food — and then were able to look at those patterns and match them loosely to what they were thinking about when they were asleep. That correlated pretty well with the subject’s own dream reports.

There’s also a handful of researchers focusing on lucid dreaming. Scientists are looking at how we can induce lucid dreams more reliably, as well as clinical applications of lucid dreaming. I met one woman who used her lucid dreams to hypnotize herself and tell herself that she wouldn’t be anxious anymore. She said that had a positive effect on her waking state.

Another question is: if you rehearse for something in a lucid dream, how does that compare to practicing a task while you’re awake? There was one small study where students had a task tossing a coin in a cup and taking that and trying to have a lucid dream about that to see how effective that was .

That’s interesting, though I hate the idea that now I should be working in my dreams, too. What was the result of coin study?

Forty people tried to toss a coin into a cup about six feet away, and then, afterward, one group was allowed to practice in waking life, another tried to practice in a lucid dream and a control group did nothing. Practicing in real life helped the most, then the lucid dreaming group.

Dream research is typically considered a bit woo-woo. Do you feel like dream researcher is moving into the mainstream?

Dream researchers are definitely gaining more and more respectability, and it’s becoming a legitimate topic of study, as it deserves to be. But it’s still hard to get around the fact that dreams lend themselves to some theorizing that not all areas of study do. For example, I went to a conference in the Netherlands called the International Association for the Study of Dreams that has both people who are hard scientists and also people leading groups for dream analysis. It can be hard to disentangle the science from some of the more mystical ideas.

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The Science of Dreams

Dreams are a common experience. Some are scary, some are funny. Recent research into how the brain works helps us understand why we dream. Strange combinations of ideas in our dreams may make us more creative and give us ideas that help us to solve problems. Or, when memories from the day are repeated in the brain during sleep, memories may get stronger. Dreams may also improve our moods. Together, these studies show that dreams and sleep are important for performing well when we are awake.

When she was 8, my daughter told me about one of her dreams. She was in a spaceship with some animals. Although she knew she was in a spaceship in her dream, when telling me about the dream, she realized the spaceship was actually a washing machine. At times, she and the animals would be out in space, but they also came back to earth. She told me the dream with a laugh and then moved on with her day, ignoring the crazy animals and spaceships that entertained her in her sleep.

Since we remember our dreams and then often forget them, what is their purpose? Why do we dream about the things we do? New research tools, particularly those that can be used to investigate the brain, are being used to answer these questions.

What Are Dreams?

Although it is hard to define what a dream is, for the purpose of this article, we will define dreams as our thoughts during sleep that we recall when we wake up. So, sleeping dreams are not the same as “daydreaming.” Dreams are mostly visual (made up of scenes and faces; sound, taste, and smell are rare in dreams [ 1 ]). Dreams can range from truly strange to rather boring, snapshots from a recent event.

To study dreams, scientists need a measure of dreaming. Most studies use dream reports (a person writes out her dreams when she wakes up) or questionnaires (a person answers questions like “How many dreams have you recalled in the past month?” [ 2 ]). Dreams are more likely to be recalled when a person is woken up from REM sleep. REM sleep is a type of sleep that is named for the rapid eye movements that can be measured during this stage of sleep. We do not dream as much in non-REM sleep, the sleep stages that make up the rest of the night, and dream reports from non-REM sleep are often less strange.

Dream frequency (how often dreams happen) and content (what dreams are about) is very different for everyone, and there are many reasons why this may be true. For example, you will remember dreams more if you are woken up by someone or by an alarm clock. This might be because you can still recall that dream memory while it is fresh but, if you wake up on your own, you will transition through a few sleep stages and possibly lose that dream memory. Dream recall changes with age, too. Older people are less likely to report dreaming. This could also be related to memory: since older people have weaker memories, it could be that they dream but cannot remember their dreams by the time they wake up. A brain area called the medial prefrontal cortex is also related to dream recall. If this brain area is damaged, the person recalls few dreams, which may mean the person dreams less (or not at all). Also, how tightly packed the brain cells are in the medial prefrontal cortex can vary from person to person, which may cause some healthy people to dream more or less than other healthy people. There are also genes that affect how much REM sleep people get. People with less REM sleep may not have the strange dreams that tend to come in REM. So, how long you sleep, your age, and your genetics may all explain why you dream more or less than someone else.

Do dreams actually happen while we sleep, or are they ideas that come to us when we wake up and we just “feel” like it happened during sleep? A recent study using a type of brain imaging called magnetic resonance imaging or (MRI: Read more in the Young Minds article “How Is Magnetic Resonance Imaging Used to Learn About the Brain?” [ 3 ]) helped answer this question ( Figure 1A ). The scientists made maps of the brain activity that occurred when people looked at pictures of things—keys, beds, airplanes. Later, the people in the study slept in the MRI machine. The scientists matched the pattern of brain activity from the people as they slept to brain activity patterns for the pictures they viewed earlier, and then chose the best match ( Figures 1B,C ). This match predicted what the person said they dreamed about 60% of the time. Although 60% is not perfect, it is better than guessing! [ 4 ]. This means that dreams are created in the brain during sleep.

• Figure 1 - (A) Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a way to investigate the brain.
• The person lies on a bed inside a giant magnet. (B) MRI can measure the structure of the brain and the areas of the brain that are active. (C) MRI was used to measure dreaming. First, while the participant was awake, they viewed thousands of pictures in the MRI. This told scientists the specific brain responses to specific pictures. Later, when the participant slept in the MRI, scientists measured the brain activity patterns and matched this to the brain responses to the pictures the participant saw when they were awake. Scientists guessed that the best match would tell them what the participant was dreaming about. By asking the participant about their dreams in the MRI, scientists found that the dreams did tend to match the pictures predicted by the brain activity.

Dreams Support Memories

What is the purpose of our dreams? Researchers have found that sleep is important for memory (see this Frontiers for Young Minds article ; “Thanks for the Memories…” [ 5 ]). Memories move from temporary storage in the hippocampus , a brain structure that is very important for short-term memory, to permanent storage in other parts of the brain. This makes the memories easier to remember later. Memories improve with sleep because the memories are replayed during sleep [ 6 ]. If you want to learn all the words to your favorite scene in a movie, you might re-watch that scene over and over again. The brain works the same way: neurons (brain cells) that are active with learning are active again and replay the learned material during sleep. This helps store the memory more permanently.

Memory replay may show up in our dreams. Dreams in non-REM sleep, when most memory replay happens, often contain normal people and objects from recent events. However, sleep switches between non-REM and REM sleep (see Figure 2 ). So, bizarre dreams in REM sleep may come from a combination of many different recent memories, which were replayed in non-REM sleep, and get jumbled up during REM sleep. If dreams help with memory processing, does that mean your memories are not being processed if you do not dream? No. Memories are moving to storage even if we do not dream.

• Figure 2 - There are four types of sleep—REM sleep (purple) and three stages of non-REM sleep (blue).
• REM stands for rapid eye movements, which happen during this stage of sleep. During REM sleep, muscle and brain activity also differ from other sleep stages. Characteristics of dreams tend to be different for each of these sleep stages.

Dreams Improve Creativity and Problem Solving

My daughter’s dream of a spaceship made a great story that she recited to me, and later, to her classmates. The images were intense and interesting, inspiring her to draw scenes in a notebook and write about the dream for school. This is an example of how dreams can help make us more creative. Mary Shelley, the author of the book Frankenstein, got the idea for her book from a dream. Even scientists get ideas from dreams [ 7 ].

To measure creative problem solving, scientists used a remote associates task, in which three unrelated words are shown, and the person is to come up with a word they have in common. For instance, HEART, SIXTEEN, and COOKIES seem unrelated until you realize they all are related to SWEET (sweetheart, sweet sixteen, and cookies are sweet) ( Figure 3 ). The scientists wanted to see whether sleep helped people do better on this task. They found that people were better at thinking of the remote solution if they had a nap, particularly a nap with REM sleep. Given that REM is when most bizarre dreaming occurs, this supports the idea that these dreams might help us find creative solutions to problems [ 8 ].

• Figure 3 - REM sleep helps people find creative solutions.
• In the morning, participants did two tasks to test creativity and problem solving (A) . They did one task again in the afternoon. In between, they either stayed awake (“wake” group) or took a nap. Those that took naps either did not have REM sleep in their nap (“nREM” group) or had both nREM and REM sleep (“nREM + REM” group). (B) If subjects stayed awake between the morning and afternoon tests (yellow bar), they did not improve on the task. They also did not improve if they had a nap that was only nREM sleep (light blue bar). But, if they had a nap with both nREM and REM sleep, they did better in the afternoon compared with when they did the task in the morning (dark blue bar). So, REM sleep must help us find creative solutions (from Cai et al. [ 8 ]).

This study and research like it gives us reason to believe that REM dreams may help us be more creative and solve problems. Many different memories may be activated at the same time and when these memories are mixed together, the result when we wake up may be both the memory of a strange dream and a unique perspective on problems.

Dreams Regulate Our Moods and Emotions

Dreams are usually emotional. One study found that most dreams are scary, angry, or sad.

Dreams might seem to be emotional simply because we tend to remember emotional things better than non-emotional things. For example, in waking life, the day you got a puppy is more memorable than a normal school day. So, dreams about emotional events might be remembered more easily than boring, non-emotional dreams. It is also possible that dreams are emotional because one job of dreams is to help us process emotions from our day [ 9 ]. This may be why the amygdala , an area of the brain that responds to emotions when we are awake, is active during REM sleep. If you had a sad day, you are more likely to have sad dreams. But, sleep also improves mood–sleep after a disagreement or sad event will make you happier.

Dreams could also help prepare us for emotional events, through something called threat simulation theory [ 10 ]. For example, when I dreamt that my young daughter, who could not swim, fell into a swimming pool, recall of that dream convinced me to sign her up for swim lessons. By simulating this fearful situation, I could prevent it by being prepared.

These studies show us that sleep and dreams are important for our emotions. By processing emotions in sleep, we may be better prepared and in a better mood the next day.

Conclusions

There are different ways scientists measure dreams—from asking questions to using MRI. These studies show us that activity in the brain while we sleep gives us the interesting dreams we recall when we wake up. These dreams help us remember things, be more creative, and process our emotions.

We know most kids do not get enough sleep. Some diseases (like Alzheimer’s disease) also make people sleep less, while others (like REM sleep behavior disorder and mood disorders) affect dreams directly. It is important to study sleep and dreams to understand what happens when we do not get enough sleep and how we can treat people with these diseases.

Conflict of Interest

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Rapid Eye Movement (REM) : ↑ A stage of sleep in which the eyes move rapidly and there is no muscle activity.

Medial Prefrontal Cortex : ↑ A specific area in the front of the brain that is associated with dream recall but also has a role in memory and decision-making.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) : ↑ A tool used to take pictures of internal body parts (including the brain). MRI can also be used to measure the activity in the brain.

Hippocampus : ↑ An area in the brain that is thought to be important for short-term memory.

Neuron : ↑ A cell in the nervous system (brain and spinal cord) that can transmit information to other cells.

Amygdala : ↑ An area of the brain involved in the experience of emotions.

Threat Simulation Theory : ↑ A theory of dreaming that says that threats (things that could be bad) are simulated or practiced in your dreams to prepare you for those situations when you are awake.

1. ↑ Zandra, A. L., Nielsen, T. A., and Donderi, D. C. 1998. Prevalence of auditory, olfactory, and gustatory experiences in home dreams. Percept. Mot. Skills 87:819–26.

2. ↑ Schredl, M. 2002. Questionnaires and diaries as research instruments in dream research: methodological issues. Dreaming 12:17–26. doi: 10.1023/A:1013890421674

3. ↑ Hoyos, P., Kim, N., and Kastner, S. 2019. How Is Magnetic Resonance Imaging Used to Learn About the Brain? Front. Young Minds . 7:86. doi: 10.3389/frym.2019.00086

4. ↑ Horikawa, T., Tamaki, M., Miyawaki, Y., and Kamitani, T. 2013. Neural decoding of visual imagery during sleep. Science 340:639–42. doi: 10.1126/science.1234330

5. ↑ Davachi, L., and Shohamy, D. 2014. Thanks for the Memories.… Front. Young Minds. 2:23. doi: 10.3389/frym.2014.00023

6. ↑ O’Neill, J., Senior, T. J., Allen, K., Huxter, J. R., and Csicsvari, J. 2008. Reactivation of experience-dependent cell assembly patterns in the hippocampus. Nat. Neurosci . 11:209–15. doi: 10.1038/nn2037

7. ↑ Barrett, D. 2001. The Committee of Sleep: How artists, scientists, and athletes use dreams for creative problem-solving–and How You Can Too . New York, NY: Crown.

8. ↑ Cai, D. J., Mednick, S. A., Harrison, E. M., Kanady, J. C., and Mednick, S. C. 2009. REM, not incubation, improves creativity by priming associative networks. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A . 106:10130–4. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0900271106

9. ↑ Cremone, A., Kurdziel, L. B. F., Fraticelli, A., McDermott, J., and Spencer, R. M. C. 2017. Napping reduces emotional attention bias during early childhood. Dev. Sci . 20:e12411. doi: 10.1111/desc.12411

10. ↑ Revonsuo, A. 2000. The reinterpretation of dreams: an evolutionary hypothesis of the function of dreaming. Behav. Brain Sci . 23:877–901. doi: 10.1017/s0140525x00004015

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Scientists break through the wall of sleep to the untapped world of dreams

NSF-supported researchers achieve two-way communication with lucidly dreaming people, creating a new method for studying the human mind that might lead to innovative ways of learning and problem-solving.

"Eight minus six … two”

It’s not exactly “one small step for man,” but that humble mathematical message is extraordinary in its own way. The first part — “eight minus six” — was transmitted by a scientist to a place just as exotic as the moon yet frequented by each of us. The response — “two” — came from the mind of a sleeping research subject as he snoozed in a neuroscience laboratory outside Chicago.

You see, “eight minus six... two” is a dialogue between two people — one of whom was asleep and dreaming .

“It’s authentic communication,” says cognitive neuroscientist Ken Paller , who oversees the laboratory where this groundbreaking communication took place. “It can be done.”

Researchers at Paller’s lab at Northwestern University in Illinois, along with researchers in France, Germany and the Netherlands, have independently demonstrated two-way communication with people as they are lucidly dreaming during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. Supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the breakthrough was achieved in the U.S. by Karen Konkoly, Paller’s doctoral student, and Christopher Mazurek, a volunteer research participant at the time of the study — and one of the first people to ever engage in a real-time dialogue from within a dream.

This discovery holds tantalizing possibilities for expanding our understanding of how our minds work. It may even lead to methods that could improve our ability to learn difficult skills or solve complex problems.

And, with the help of a new smartphone app from Paller’s lab, you could even try it at home.

The windows to the soul (and dreams)

Research into the fundamental nature of dreams, and what the human mind can do while dreaming, has been limited by a seemingly unsolvable problem: you can’t get much information about someone’s dream while they’re actually having the dream. “All we have are the stories people tell when they wake up,” says Paller. That deficiency has left an entire state of consciousness largely unexplored.

The novel methods pioneered by Konkoly, Paller and their colleagues are designed to solve this problem and open entirely new areas of research focused on the dreaming mind. Konkoly describes the possibilities: “Right now, we conduct psychology experiments with people who are awake. With two-way communication [during dreams], we could conduct some of the same experiments while people are sleeping. It could really expand our view of consciousness and what the mind is capable of.”

But, how can a dreaming research subject communicate if they can’t even move, let alone speak, while sleeping? The answer requires so me explanation about what happens in our mind during sleep.

Scientists have identified the different stages of sleep by monitoring electrical signals from the brain using electroencephalography, or EEG, and from other places in the body. When the electrical signals are recorded and plotted, they chart the course our mind takes as we progress through the stages of sleep.

As you sleep, your mind transitions through several different stages, from light sleep to deep sleep and eventually to REM sleep. REM sleep is notable not just for what’s moving — our eyes — but what isn’t . Although our mind is active and dreams often occur during REM sleep, our bodies are almost completely paralyzed. That presents an obvious challenge for communications since we can’t move the body parts we typically use to communicate. As the name "rapid eye movement" suggests, however, there is an exception.

During REM sleep, our eyes move around behind our eyelids in a seemingly random fashion, which often corresponds to the sleeper “looking” at various imagined things in their dream. If you dream that you’re looking at something, your closed eyes move correspondingly as if you were looking at something while awake.

That phenomenon led researchers to a key insight: If eye movement were consciously controlled, the dreamer’s eyes could become a vehicle for getting a message to the waking world.  

He’s lucid! Let’s do math

Who among us hasn’t wished we could fly like a bird? Or walk on another planet? So-called lucid dreamers can do these things and more from the comfort of their own bed. Accomplished lucid dreamers have reported being able to regularly achieve awareness in their dreams and even “programming” themselves to have dreams about specific activities or locations.

Christopher Mazurek was not one of those people.

“I had no experience with lucid dreaming,” says Mazurek, an undergraduate student at Northwestern University and now research assistant in Paller’s sleep lab. At the time, he was a volunteer research participant. “Before I entered the lab, I never had anything near a lucid dream.”

To prepare Mazurek and the other U.S. volunteers, Konkoly wired each participant with electrodes that sense brain activity through the scalp, behind the ears, on the chin and — critically — near the eyes. Those would allow the researchers to monitor and record even slight eye movements. “When your eyes move in their sockets, it creates an electrical current which is detected by the electrodes and recorded,” says Konkoly.

Konkoly also trained each research participant to help them achieve lucidity and instructed them on what to do if they succeeded. That included learning to recognize the specific sound she would play when they entered REM sleep, prompting the participants to realize they’re dreaming and thus become lucid. The participants also learned the distinct response signal they should produce from within their dream: moving their eyes from left to right multiple times.

“Repeatedly looking from left to right is a very distinctive eye movement and it stands out from other eye movements during REM sleep,” says Konkoly. As she carefully watched the EEG and saw Mazurek progressing through the stages of sleep and into REM sleep, she spotted the repeating left-right signal on the monitor as Mazurek signaled his awareness.

“He’s lucid!” remembers Konkoly . “Let’s do math.”

Konkoly played a randomly selected audio recording: "eight minus six." Mazurek knew he would be presented with simple math problems but did not know which problems would be selected. Some of the international labs in the study used different methods to send messages to their dreaming subjects, such as flashing lights in Morse code which the sleepers could perceive through their closed eyelids and manifest in their dream. In most of the labs, the research participants were trained to move their “dream eyes” to signal their answer.

A few seconds later, Konkoly saw Mazurek’s response written among the peaks and valleys of his eyes’ electrical signals: “Two.” Konkoly sent another randomly selected math problem and once again received a correct response. And what was Mazurek dreaming about during this groundbreaking exchange between two worlds?

“I dreamed I was sleeping in the lab when I heard her question,” he says. Despite that rather mundane dreamscape, “It still blew me away how different and intense and odd it all felt. It was different than anything I could have imagined.”

To obtain independent verification of their results, Konkoly sent the recorded data to an expert “sleep scorer.” Like an astrophysicist who can tell you what elements are in a distant star by deciphering the colored light recorded in a spectrograph, a sleep scorer is trained to “read” the recorded electrical signals and analyze their complex patterns. The sleep scorer confirmed that Mazurek was indeed in REM sleep during the exchange.

While Mazurek was the first in Paller’s lab to achieve two-way communication in a dream, two more participants later accomplished that same feat. Meanwhile, researchers in France, Germany and the Netherlands were independently testing methods for two-way communication in dreams and reported that three additional individuals were able to provide correct responses while dreaming. The collective results from all the laboratories are now published in the journal Current Biology .

Sleep on it

“Why would you want to do math in your sleep?” quips Konkoly. “I get that comment sometimes.”

Joking aside, researchers have a number of ideas for how this discovery could be expanded and applied. “There’s evidence that lucid dreaming is a great place to practice skills compared to when you're awake," says Konkoly. "For example, you could slow down time so you could practice a skill in more detail or practice something without having any fear of the repercussions of failing."

Imagine a surgeon attempting to perfect a technique used in open heart surgery — in a dream. 

"There are many unexplored neurobiological aspects to learning and training during REM sleep. But without two-way communication, you can't conduct a proper controlled experiment to understand it," she adds.

“ People say 'sleep on it,” when grappling with a hard problem," says Paller, in reference to his research published in 2019 , which showed people who were cued to think about puzzles during sleep exhibited substantial improvement in finding solutions. "There's some sense that sleep can help you find an answer to a problem that's vexing you. Our two-way communication method provides hope for improving that. If you're working on a problem, can you be reminded of that problem during a dream and come up with a creative answer more easily?

"From run of the mill personal problems to complex global problems, we need creative solutions. If we can help people come up with the answers more easily, we should do that," he says.

Paller's lab has also developed a smartphone app that aims to make it easier for people to achieve lucidity, which could enable anyone to phone home from the world of dreams without visiting a sleep laboratory. You can learn how to get the app and give it a try through Paller's cognitive neuroscience website .

Our full potential

Although many aspects of the sleeping mind remain a mystery, researchers across a variety of scientific disciplines are utilizing new techniques and analytical methods to better understand it. “Sleep is valuable for our health in ways we’ve yet to come to grips with,” says Paller. For example, neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, recently uncovered evidence showing that sleep plays a critical role in how our brains flush out beta-amyloid , a toxic substance that contributes to the onset of Alzheimer's disease.

“REM sleep is a unique state of consciousness,” adds Konkoly. “We spend a lot of time in it and yet no one really understands its full potential. We want to know how it works.”

The pioneering work of Konkoly, Paller and their colleagues provides an entirely new method that scientists can use to investigate how sleep and dreams affect health and mental abilities.

And who knows? Perhaps the idea of conversing with someone from within a dream may one day be as routine as sending a text message on your phone:

“Can I snooze five more minutes? I’ve almost figured out this problem...”

[Other contributors to this discovery include researchers at Osnabrück University in Germany, Sorbonne University in Paris, and Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands. NSF supported the researchers at Northwestern University in the U.S.]

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Speaking of Psychology: The science of dreaming, with Deirdre Barrett, PhD

We all dream yet many of us don’t know what to make of our nocturnal adventures. Dream scholar Deirdre Barrett, PhD, explains why we dream and what our dreams may be trying to tell us. She also offers tips on how to better remember your dreams to harness the power of your sleeping mind.

About the expert: Deirdre Barrett, PhD

Streaming Audio

Kaitlin Luna: Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, a podcast from the American Psychological Association. I'm your host Kaitlin Luna. Our guest for this episode is Dr. Deirdre Barrett, a psychologist and scholar of dreams who's on the faculty of Harvard Medical School's Behavioral Medicine Program. She's the editor of the journal Dreaming and has written several books on the topic including the Committee of Sleep . Thank you for joining us, Dr. Barrett.

Deirdre Barrett: Hi, nice to be here.

Kaitlin Luna: So dreams are always a fascinating topic. We all dream but many people don't remember them or don't really know what to do with their dreams and you, as a scholar of dreams, know all about dreams and are even a past president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams. So I'll start off with, I think, a simple question with probably a long answer but why do we dream?

Deirdre Barrett: Well it's not a simple question it's probably the one where you'd get the most disagreement among dream psychologists. Personally I think that we have rapid eye movement sleep which is the stage in which most dreams occur along with all mammals for a lot of reasons many of which are very biological that certain neurotransmitters are being replenished in the brain during that stage of sleep that there's some very physical body reasons for REM that we share with all mammals. But I think evolution isn't that simple and when something's been around since the dawn of mammals it tends to have function upon function layered on top of it and I think for humans there's a lot of problem-solving that goes on in that state but that's my answer and you would get everywhere from you know it has no function, to you know dreams are sort of our wiser self speaking to us from other dream psychologists. But that's my that's my concept of it.

Kaitlin Luna: Yeah I mean I've always thought of it as sort of like it's telling you something, you know your dreams are trying to you tell you something you have been avoiding or something you might not realize what's going on because it's really you are unconscious so I've always wondered if it's really your sort of true self coming out so I'm probably maybe in that camp just as a lay person just being interested in the study of dreams.

Deirdre Barrett: Yeah I mean I like to say it's just it's our brain thinking in a different biochemical state and I don't buy into the perspective that…there's one book called Dreams are Wiser than Men , I don't think that what our dream dreaming mind is thinking about an issue is always the correct one or wiser than our waking one, I think the benefit of dreams lie in just what a different biochemical state it is so if we're kind of stuck in our usual everyday rational thinking, dreams may make an end run around that and show us something very different. But if you had to operate off one or the other I think our waking mind is probably giving us you know more good advice than our dreaming one, but the dream is a great supplement.

Kaitlin Luna: Absolutely and can you explain a bit about what the International Association for the Study of Dreams does?

Deirdre Barrett: It's a nonprofit organization whose mission is just to disseminate information about dreams and that's everything from the most basic education about things that have been known about dreams for a long time to the general public and even to children on to disseminating the latest research between professionals in the field. The ISD has one international conference a year, it has some online virtual conferences, it has some regional conferences and it has two publications. I edit the journal Dreaming which ISD oversees the content, but APA is our publisher and that is an academic journal for professionals in the field. But ISD also has another publication called Dream Time which is a magazine which is much more informal discussion of dreams that the general public can enjoy.

Kaitlin Luna: Yeah, it's very interesting. Until I was researching this topic I didn't know there was such an association.

Deirdre Barrett: Yeah, it's a great group. I recommend its website and for anyone that can get there its conferences are great and unlike many organizations it's a combination of professionals and not professionals so at the conference more than half the presenters and about half the attendees are some kind of professional in the field but there are lots of people who are just extremely dream interested who choose to come to the conference.

Kaitlin Luna: Interesting maybe I'll end up there one day. So, you know, there's those common dreams that I think you know you read about see in television and movies and people talk about like being in a public place naked or having your teeth fall out or being chased. So why do different people have similar dreams. I've always found that question really interesting, like why would I have the same dream as some random person from a you know different walk of life and has there been research into those common themes?

Deirdre Barrett: Well there's some research just on how frequently they occur and that does demonstrate that a few of those themes including the ones you rattled off do occur pretty frequently to people of different ages and around the world. Some are more universal than others and it tends to go with whether the metaphor they seem to be representing is universal. Clearly all cultures have some norms about what parts of your body you're supposed to cover and not even if it's you know a tiny thong just covering your genitals in one culture and bailing you know from head to toe in another one, there's still a how much of your body do you show and shame around showing more than you're supposed to be. So that the naked in public one seems to be quite universal and I'll say more a bit later about this, but we certainly don't think that you should ever just say one dream theme means exactly the same thing for anyone that dreams it. There's always an individual element. But there's some things like naked in public that are much likelier to be representing social shame, social anxieties you know just the common-sense metaphor about being exposed in some uncomfortable way is usually what that dream is about for most of the people having it. Then there are other common themes that are a little more cultural bound like most Western societies with our kind of schooling many, many people in the culture have recurring dreams about tests going wrong, you've overslept, you've missed the test, you aren't figuring out what the classroom is, you're late, you can't find the classroom, you get into the exam you realize you studied the wrong subject for it, the exam’s in hieroglyphics, they're just all kinds of variations. But somehow you are you know about to mess up a test. And we see that in Western schooling type cultures all the time, but you don't see that in hunter-gatherer tribes where, you know, learning to get out there and do adult tasks in some sort of, you know, more intern like way is the way that they're educated and test obviously they don't have sit-down exam dreams. And even in our culture people who decide to be want to be actors or musicians from an early age, they'll have a variation that's the audition dream. They're not sitting down to take an exam but they're showing up with their musical instrument and they realize they've studied the wrong piece of music or they can't find the audition hall so there's some variation even in those standard ones but there's something to the idea that there's some universal, very frequent dreams meaning something similar for most people who have them.

Kaitlin Luna: And those feelings behind those dreams could be, like you said, maybe some sort of shame or some sort of anxiety about what's going to happen to be tested in some way that sort of thing. So they're common feelings that underlie them.

Deirdre Barrett: Well yeah, different shades for different ones but just in line with what otherwise are common metaphors you know if you “feel exposed” or “feel naked”, that's usually more of a shame social disapproval. If you’re being tested, you know that's more of an authority figure is evaluating you sort of are you measuring up you know to society in general or in authority? So most of the recurring themes dreams are anxiety dreams but whether it's about sort of being competent versus being socially appropriate those tend to be represented by different specific things.

Kaitlin Luna:  I've heard that some people say that dreams don't mean anything at all that they're just random impulses from your brain when you're sleeping or perhaps just, you know, consolidating memories, that sort of thing, and that there's no deeper emotional meaning behind them. But, you know, many people do believe dreams are important, that they help problem-solve, perhaps find inspiration which I'll ask about in a few minutes, but what does the psychological research say about the importance of dreams and do we know what would happen if we didn't dream?

Deirdre Barrett: Well let me answer the first part first, it's a little simpler. There is some research, there's a limit to how much you can deprive people of REM sleep and it does have to be depriving of REM sleep, not quite all dreams happen in REM sleep and one of the things that you see if you deprive people of REM sleep is that you begin to get more reports that sound like full-fledged dream narratives out of other stages of sleep. A few of those happen anyway but it's like there's some pressure to dream that if you don't let it happen in rapid eye movement sleep it begins to happen in other stages of sleep. And then in the extreme, in some of the experiments people seemed to hallucinate awake a little bit. So there's certainly a pressure to dream that can sort of break out of REM not that it's always totally confined there. But the other thing is if you’re REM depriving people you see deficits in certain things or it doesn't even have to be REM deprivation, but you can do an experiment where the same amount of time passes between exposure to a task and retrying it and people either do or don't get a REM episode in there. And from those experiments it looks like other stages of sleep have more to do with consolidating some simple straightforward kinds of memory and that rapid eye movement sleep is consolidating and learning more emotionally-tinged memories and certain kinds of problem-solving that require some abstract generalization, from answers to single cases and beginning to see a pattern across them, that people that get a REM period in between exposure to certain problem-solving tasks do better. So that's REM sleep and that's not talking about the dream content but we definitely, in dream content we sometimes see very overt problem-solving pop up somebody doesn't know the answer to a question until they have a dream that shows them the solution so REM is doing something with that biologically whether you're remembering dream content with it or not but again layered on top of REM for human beings dreams seem to be the about the problems and issues we've just been exposed to and sometimes solving them.

Kaitlin Luna: Speaking about what you just mentioned about how people use them to problem-solve or get inspiration and you wrote about in your book, The Committee of Sleep , about some stories from famous artists and inventors like Paul McCartney, Salvador Dali and the inventor of the sewing machine how they received inspiration from their dreams which produced beautiful works of art and practical tools like the sewing machine. Can you explain how we use dreams to problem-solve and to find inspiration?

Deirdre Barrett: Yes, I mean there are two aspects of that. One is that it simply happens spontaneously a fair bit that people who are stuck on a problem will have a breakthrough dream and that was true in the case of the sewing machine inventor that that dream came out of nowhere without his asking for it in any particular way and showed him how to make the sewing machine. And two kinds of problems are likelier to get solved spontaneously in dreams. One is anything that's a very visual-spatial because dreams are so visual we can see things in a hallucinatory way in front of us so the first computer-controlled anti-aircraft gun was dreamed, the sewing machine was dreamed, the structure of the benzene molecule was dreamed and all of those seemed to be cases where being able to see the thing very much more clearly than you could just do visual imagination awake was a helpful part of it. The other big cluster of solved-by dreams are where you're stuck because the conventional wisdom is wrong. The benzene molecule is an example of both. Kekulé knew what the atoms in benzene were but at that time all known molecules were some kind of straight line with a side chain and so he was trying to arrange the atoms in a straight line in some way that made sense and explained the chemical properties and that wasn’t working and he fell asleep and dreamed of molecules dancing in front of his eyes forming, he said snakes, but they were straight lines of molecules and eventually one of the snakes made of atoms reached around and took its tail in its mouth and he woke up realizing that benzene was a closed ring. But all chemists would have been approaching it to make it some kind of straight line. So dreaming just bypasses that conventional wisdom, ”It has to be done this way, it has to be done this way” and shows more possibilities. So very visual problems or problems where you need to think outside the box are likely to get help from dreams. But then the other aspect is that although these happen spontaneously if people are trying to focus their dreams on a particular topic, we tend to call it dream incubation in psychology, to say tonight I want to dream the answer to a particular problem or I just want to dream on this particular topic you're much likelier to have a dream on that topic or even an answer to the problem than if you weren't doing that as a self-suggestion at bedtime. So everybody tends to get some help and inspiration and good advice from their dreams, but you can you can get more by asking your dreams to focus on particular topics.

Kaitlin Luna: Yeah that's really interesting and I'm gonna to just touch on that well we're there so if you want to remember your dream better and you want to be able to have a dream journal and use it for those that problem-solving like I said because sometimes people say, “Oh I dream but I don't remember it”, what tips do you have for that? So for someone to remember their dream better and then how to do a dream journal.

Deirdre Barrett: OK, well the first tip is the most banal but it's really the most important: Get more sleep than the average American does. If you get eight hours of sleep a night, you'll remember a lot more dreams than if you’re getting less than that. And it's not, we enter rapid eye movement sleep about every 90 minutes through the night but each REM period is getting longer so the first one is just a few minutes whereas the last one can be getting closer to half an hour in length so if you sleep four hours instead of eight, you're not getting half your dream time, you're getting twenty percent or less of your dream time when you truncate your sleep because the dreams are coming every 90 minutes but they're getting much longer through the night. So getting enough sleep is extremely important that's the simplest [unintelligible] with high and low dream recall. But other things are the intent. I mean often people that are taking class on dreams or reading a book on dreams it will become more relevant they'll remember more dreams in fact people listening to today's podcast are likelier to remember a dream tonight just by virtue doing that than otherwise, but you can increase that with again a dream incubation like I was talking about for problem solving but just focused on recall. If you're just telling yourself as you fall asleep, “I want to remember my dreams tonight, I want to remember my dreams tonight”, that increases the likelihood and then as you already alluded to keeping some sort of dream journal. What you do in the morning is just as important. First of all aside from the journal, it's better to wake up naturally than to an alarm clock but you know I know everyone can't do that. Whichever way you wake up, if you lie there for a moment and try to think about nothing other than your dream if you already recall it, if you're not gonna write it down or tell it to a recorder, at least rehearse it in your mind. But if you don't recall a dream when you first wake up just lie there and see what content at all is there in your mind. Like, did you wake up kind of thinking about your brother, did you wake up feeling a little sad because sometimes if you just stay focused on that hint of content, a dream will come rushing back, “Oh yeah I was thinking about my brother because I dreamed that he did this” or “I was sad because this dream that just happened.” So dream memory is very fragile and sometimes it's hovering there as you first wake up so don't do anything else first before focusing on the dream. And secondly recording it is nice to have the record but also tends to fix it in your mind even if you're not referring back to the dream journal that much so some people still prefer to hand write things in beautiful leather-bound journals, have a sort of a nice association for some people, or if your laptop's next to your bed you can reach for it and type, but I know that a lot of people are using their smartphones. There are all sorts of apps. Dreams Cloud is one of them, Dream Scope, that have apps where you generally you can set your alarm on the app, make that your alarm in lieu of the other one and they have all sorts of gentler tones to wake you up or even a voice saying, “What were you dreaming?” as the first thing you're going to hear and then your phone is already set to if you speak in response to the alarm or the voice saying, “What were you dreaming?”, it's automatically going to record without you're having to reach over and activate it or anything. So those are some of the easiest you know and then they all do speech to text, so you have an account of it so a lot of the people I know these days, I still type mine out, but most of my students use an app on their phones.

Kaitlin Luna: It's interesting using technology for our dreams. I noticed that I usually will like have to do the hovering where I kind of like [ask myself] “What did I dream” and then I’ll recall it and then I can sort of get it firmly planted in my memory and then I'll write it down when I get the chance. I've been known to do that on the Metro on the way to work. Sitting furiously writing in my journal, the notebook I have.

Deirdre Barrett: Just rehearsing it in your mind, I mean, especially like in the middle of the night if you don't want to disturb a bed partner by speaking your dream or something, if you just kind of run through it in your mind that tends to fix it into long-term memory because otherwise so many people recall waking up from a dream in the middle of the night and going, “Oh wow that was such a weird dream” and that’s all they remember about it or even “I don’t need to write this one down I’m certainly going to remember this one.” Even without writing it down, if you play it through that kind of gets it from short-term to long-term memory.

Kaitlin Luna: Going back to the content of dreams why do some people have recurring dreams and what do we know about what reoccurring dreams mean.

Deirdre Barrett: Recurring dreams are usually thought to be themes that are more important for that person. Freud talked about day residue and it's one of his concepts that's still taken quite seriously the idea that things that happen in the preceding 18 hours are much likelier to show up in your dream than sort of other random previous days. And so lots of lots of dreams are about very recent events and they may be one-time concerns about things that just happened that day and they're still worth interpreting but they're gonna be about a very specific current sort of issue. Whereas if a dream occurs over and over it may be activated by events of a particular day, it may make a long-term issue more salient but it's certainly going to be about something that's a kind of long-term character logic issue for that person. So in general we think of recurring dreams as somewhat more important if you only have time to analyze a few dreams, your recurring dreams would be ones to target.

Kaitlin Luna: And often people talk about having nightmares or violent dreams and I've spoken to friends and you know, myself included, we've had those kinds of scary dreams. So what do those dreams mean and what do you do if you have violent dreams or nightmares often?

Deirdre Barrett: Well they're two very different kinds. One is the metaphoric, they're scary but otherwise the content seems much like other dreams it's fairly metaphoric witches chasing you down a hall in an old building or something. And children have more of those kind of garden-variety metaphor nightmares than adults, they tend to decrease with age but almost everyone has a few of those. Versus post-traumatic nightmares where you've suffered one or more extremely violent, terrifying waking life events and in post-traumatic nightmares, the event tends to unfold very much like it did awake. Some people it replays exactly like they were in a video of the episode of getting raped or being in this battlefield or house burning down around them over and over and over exactly like it happened. Or more commonly it's pretty close to how it happened but it's either got a bit of bizarre dream distortion but not as much as most dreams or often the post traumatic nightmares go one step further like somebody was holding a gun to someone's head and threatening to pull the trigger in real life and they actually do pull the trigger like the dream goes one step further. Whatever was most feared about to happen actually happens. So garden-variety nightmares there they're just normal to a certain extent and some people who have them don't particularly mind them. I've heard a lot of people either say that it's kinda like horror films that you know there's a kind of adrenaline rush and they kind of enjoy their nightmares and I've heard other people who say they don't enjoy them, but they feel like they learn something like it's always pointing out to them things they're anxious about that they hadn't thought of. So many people who have nightmares of that kind of garden variety type don't particularly want them to go away and I think that interpreting them just like you would other dreams thinking about you know what in my waking life you know feels like that feeling in the pit of my stomach when the witch is chasing me down the hall is you know the way to deal with those. But post-traumatic nightmares just retraumatize people it's like having the horrible event happening again night after night after night so that it never recedes into the past and everyone who has post-traumatic nightmares hates having them nobody likes those and I think that it's also not a mystery, you know, if you were raped and you're dreaming about a rape or your house burned down and you're dreaming about flames every night there's not a “Gee, why are you dreaming that” like there is about the witch so there are techniques that can make people stop having post-traumatic nightmares that involve, you can coach people to just wake up if they start, but it seems to be even more effective to have people come up with an alternate scenario, a kind of mastery dream. If the nightmare starts again how would you like it to come out differently and psychologists kind of happened on to this technique because it happens occasionally, spontaneously people have had a nightmare over and over and over about a real event all of a sudden will have this dream where someone comes and rescues them or they do fight off the attacker or in a very dreamlike magical way the whole trauma is swept away and they wake up feeling so much better. And so we found that some people in PTSD groups would hear somebody say, “Oh I used to have a nightmare until one night I had this other wonderful dream” and just hearing that the next week a couple other patients in the group would say they had. So now we coach people to come up with an alternate scenario of what they would like to see happen and kind of get an individual, I mean for the same sounding trauma, some people would rather have someone rescue them other people would rather like fight off some attacker themselves. A lot of sexual abuse survivors would most like to tell off the abuser about why this was so wrong and other people want very magical you know shrink the attacker of the fire down you know to a quarter inch high dreamlike things so once you come up with an alternate scenario you practice that at bedtime this is again another variation on dream incubation just telling yourself you know if my traumatic nightmare starts I want you this scenario and picture the alternate scenario and that that works for a lot of people. A lot of people have the alternate dream and then never have the nightmare again. And then in the research study some people do that, and the nightmares stop without their at least consciously recalling having the alternate dreams, so we don't really know if they have it and forget it, but it still serves its purpose or if simply the visualization of the scenario you know awake at bedtime has a similar effect for some people.

Kaitlin Luna: OK that's really fascinating that you have some control over this I mean if you tell yourself you want the this dream to stop or to reach a better conclusion that's really fascinating.

Deirdre Barrett: Yes, I mean the areas in our brain associated with memory are not quite as active but they're certainly somewhat awake as we dream so requests to our dreaming mind do very often get through it's not a one-to-one, you know just ask for it once and you’ll dream on this topic, but it's very often effective especially with repetition more than one night.

Kaitlin Luna: And moving on to pets. I know you said animals, mammals, do go into REM sleep but you know if you've watched your pet dog on the ground when they start falling asleep, my dog barks and she, you know, twitches her legs, that sort of thing so it looks like they're dreaming, you know, as far as we can tell but so do animals dream and how would we know if they do or don't?

Deirdre Barrett: Well, that's a very good question. I tend to assume that they do. We know that all mammals except cetaceans, whales and dolphins do not have REM sleep, they have this strange sleep where they sleep with one half of their brain at a time, but all other mammals alternate between non-REM sleep and rapid eye movement sleep and their brain has activity that looks very similar to ours when we are dreaming . So I am willing to make the leap and say that I think that mammals are dreaming and whatever they're, you know, elephant or mousy or doggie or catty version of that is. Some of my colleagues would not would not say that, I mean some of my colleagues would not assume any consciousness to other mammalian species or only past a certain level in the evolutionary hierarchy but yeah, I think they have the same brain state that we dream in I think they're probably dreaming in some way. The only slight evidence for dream reports from animals are Penny Patterson who had the gorillas Koko and Michael. Koko died, I believe. But Koko used to sign kind of fantastic scenarios right upon awakening and no other time, so she'd sign about cars flying through the sky or she'd signed something about seeing a person who she actually hadn't seen in six months and those sort of signing not real fantastic things only seemed to happen upon awakening. So Penny assumed that those were dream reports and you know you could argue about that but I, you know, I think that sounds quite likely and the gorilla Michael, who didn't have quite as big of a signed vocabulary, but I guess he's still learning he's certainly still alive and well, he was known to have had his entire extended family group killed by poachers and then he was picked up as an infant and sold through several iterations and eventually went to Penny's reserve so he had a very traumatic killing of all of his family in front of him. And she said that he used to wake up signing, “Bad people kill gorillas, bad people kill gorillas”, and again only in the morning so she interpreted that not just as a memory but as seeming like he was probably having a post-traumatic dream about the event. And again, that's very soft evidence, too, and subjective but possibly, we have dream accounts from two gorillas but just in general they are having the same brain state as REM sleep, so I think it's likely that they're dreaming. Now they're not necessarily dreaming when they're twitching and moving though because in humans, although there's something called REM Behavior Disorder where you act out your dreams, we and other mammals are supposed to be paralyzed during REM sleep, and with normal, healthy people and animals that is the case. Where sleepwalking in non-REM sleep is much more common for people and so I think that most times that you see much activity during sleep, you know, when dogs are woofing or moving their legs a lot as they… that's probably out of non-REM sleep which just seems to be mild slight activity in motor areas that's not associated with a big dream scenario in humans. Human sleep walkers usually don't recall anything or it's a very simple, “I was trying to get from place A to place B”, rather than a dream account so I think when you see your dog making the most noise and moving the most it's not necessarily dreaming. When you see its eyelids moving rapidly under its eyes even if it's completely still that's when it's likely to be dreaming.

Kaitlin Luna: okay interesting I'll pay more attention to my dog's eyes. And when you and I spoke before, we talked about lucid dreaming which I know that the journal Dreaming has touched on in various ways but and you've said it's also become a topic in popular culture since the movie Inception came out a number of years ago, so can you explain more about what lucid dreaming is?

Deirdre Barrett: Well the definition is simply that it's a dream in which you know it's a dream. At some point you're going, “This isn't real, I'm dreaming.” Many people, once they're lucid, they then have a lot of control over the dream. If they're being chased down a hall by witch they can choose, “No, I don't wanna…I don't want to have a witch dream anymore” and you know, dissolve the dark building into a beautiful palace or being outdoors and some of their friends instead of the witch. So some people can switch a dream all around once they know they're lucid but not everyone. So the definition is simply knowing you're dreaming even if the dream keeps unfolding in a very dreamlike way. And most people really enjoy lucid dreams. There's occasionally people stay distressed by scary content but usually even if you let the witch stay there and you turn around and ask her why she's chasing you and what she represents once you know she's a dream witch you're not scared anymore so most lucid dreams are very positive and people enjoy having them.

Kaitlin Luna: So what does that mean exactly? Does that mean part of your consciousness turned on at that moment?

Deirdre Barrett: Yes, the EEGs of people having lucid dreams…I mean back in the 80s, it was established that they really did seem to be in rapid eye movement sleep and that was big news because it had been sort of questioned maybe they're waking up into some sort of fantasy waking state. But Steve LaBerge proved that people having lucid dreams are really in rapid eye movement sleep and that's a battle all that sleep labs could tell at that time. But more recently now that you can put on many more tiny EEG leads and reconstruct a much better 3-D image of what's going on in the brain, what that shows is that the person is basically in rapid eye movement sleep but it's not a completely typical episode of rapid eye movement sleep . The prefrontal cortex, the area right behind our forehead that has a lot to do with abstract thinking, is very much damped down during REM sleep it's often misstated that it's turned off or something in REM sleep. That's not true, there is activity there at a lower level even in normal REM sleep. But in lucid dreams, there is usually a little more activity in the prefrontal cortex than there is during other REM periods and that's exactly the area we're noticing discrepancies. The fact that the prefrontal is damped down during most dreams is why we don't question, you know, bizarre, you know, most of the time if we're flying we're just thrilled to be flying not questioning how we can…somebody that you know is dead is showing up in your dream, you usually don't question how that can be, sometimes you do. So, that area that notices things are odd or just even reflects on what's the nature of this experience, that's just turned back up not as much as on average as when we're awake but somewhat more than in typical dreams so that seems to be necessary for lucid dreaming.

Kaitlin Luna: That's interesting. And what are you currently doing with your with dreaming research?

Deirdre Barrett: Well the most recent research study that I finished was a comparison of the content of dream accounts to the content of sleep talking episodes. Finding that they were similar in many ways compared to waking speech. They both express much more fear than we typically talk about awake. They're less set in the present than our waking topics. But then there's some differences, like there's much, much more anger in sleep walking than in either dreams or awake, dreams and waking speech have much more in common in terms of pretty low levels of anger for most people. And sleep talking involves much more anger. So that was my most recent research study and I'm not starting another one real soon because I'm trying to finish a book which is kind of a sequel to my book, The Committee of Sleep , which is all about dreams and creative problem-solving. They both have more theoretical things that I want to say about it but also once that book came out while I was writing it I had to chase down people who'd have amazing problem-solving dreams but once it came out I was getting letters from some famous, you know, ones with major accomplishments that had come from a dream that I didn't know about.  

Kaitlin Luna: Great, more content for you. When is that coming out?

Deirdre Barrett: It's not even in press yet it's probably coming out in a year and a half I would guess. But it's more of a focus than research right now.

Kaitlin Luna: So, Dr. Barrett, can you talk about what you dream about?

Deirdre Barrett: Well my dreams are probably more similar to other dream researchers than to the average person. I know one dream researcher who is just out of grad school where the person doing the most interesting research who wanted the most research assistance and was the most charismatic figure was doing dream research and that he personally had never thought about much about dreams until getting to grad school. But most dream researchers are drawn to the field because we remember more dreams than average. Our dreams are more vivid than average. We tend to have more lucid dreams and flying dreams and just almost any unusual category of dreams that you mentioned that will have a certain low base rate in the general population, I and other dream researchers have more of.  So I was just always fascinated by all these nocturnal adventures which I did remember more of in more detail than the average person and I think a lot of psychologists go to grad school and then pick a specialty within psychology but for me it was much more the other way around. I was just focused on dreams as this fascinating thing as a kid and as I got to be a little older I realized if someone was gonna pay you to study dreams then you better go to graduate school in psychology. So I don't have any way of characterizing, you know, I have all the things we've talked about: recurring dreams, lucid dreams, problem-solving dreams, a few nightmares, not particularly high rate of those, and I have dreams that have solved very practical problems, I have many more dreams that I think are more about my interpersonal emotional issues where you know I dream about people are important to me and in the dream I'm doing something different than the way I'd usually react to them and I wake up and realize that that has some implications for things to do in real life. I have some dreams that are just so gorgeous visually that I've started making art from my dreams. I've just been doing that for about three years, but I sold some art and have some art in art shows and it's all dream art I have no interest in making art other than to represent some of these images that I just want to drag back into the waking world for other people to see them.

Kaitlin Luna: I did see that actually when I was just looking into researching this topic, I saw your artwork and it was striking, strikingly beautiful. Very colorful. And can you describe what your favorite piece of art you created?

Deirdre Barrett: Probably a pair. Most dreams I just make one piece of art from them. But I had a dream where I was walking through Harvard Square which is the neighborhood where I live late at night and I was discovering these little animals up on the rooftops and thinking they must have been living there all the years I did, and I had just never looked up and seen them before. And then eventually they were down in the street and I was thinking, “Oh, they only come down late at night.” And in the dream, I thought, “I've never been the middle of Harvard Square in the middle of the night” and that's extremely not true but in the dream,  it was. So I was discovering these wonderful animals that live on the roof and come down into the streets and so I actually went down and photographed several different buildings that were on this route through the square but it was one of the Harvard Lampoon building and another of a spot called Charlie's Kitchen that are just interesting buildings that are kind of lit up interestingly at night anyway and they had most captured the feel of the dream before I started adding all the little magical creatures up on the roof and spilling down into the street. So I guess I was the happiest with the two I made out of that dream came out really just as I'd seen them in the dream.

Kaitlin Luna: And what do you use for materials? Is it a painting? Is it a sculpture?

Deirdre Barrett: No, it's digitally manipulated photography. So for a few of them, like one I dreamed about a mask changing in all these ways, I found that I really loved masks, so I take pictures when I got a mask exhibit, so I already had enough pictures of masks to start morphing into that dream. But for the one I just mentioned, I went down took pictures of the building and so a real photograph of the building was the basic backdrop and I left the sky and the brick in certain areas unchanged so that it kind of looks photographically real but then I played somewhat with the surface of the building but mainly I put in little creatures, some of which I created from scratch and digital programs, and others I actually took photographs, not of real animals but of like little carvings of already not quite realistic animals and manipulated them a little bit more digitally, so it's always collaged photography with then lots and lots of digital manipulation to give it the surreal look that the dream had.

Kaitlin Luna: So dreams are also inspiration for you as well?

Deirdre Barrett: Yes, definitely. I mean they've been inspiration for, you know, things in my research life and work as a clinician and interpersonal relationships for a long time and I'd only been writing about arts and dreams but lately it's, yeah all of my art is completely inspired by my dreams.

Kaitlin Luna: Well that's wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us Dr. Barrett.

Deirdre Barrett: Nice to talk to you.

Kaitlin Luna : If you've been a longtime listener or viewer, please consider giving us a rating in iTunes or if you have time please write a review. We'd really appreciate it. We'd also like to hear from you directly, so if you have any questions or comments, please email me at [email protected] . That’s  [email protected] . Speaking of Psychology is part of the APA podcast network, which includes other great podcasts like APA Journals Dialogue , about the latest psychological research and Progress Notes about the practice of psychology. You can find our podcast on iTunes, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also visit speakingofpsychology.org to view more episodes and to find resources on the topics we discuss. I'm your host, Kaitlin Luna for the American Psychological Association. 

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Episode 71: The Science of Dreaming

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Speaking of Psychology

Speaking of Psychology is an audio podcast series highlighting some of the latest, most important, and relevant psychological research being conducted today.

Produced by the American Psychological Association, these podcasts will help listeners apply the science of psychology to their everyday lives.

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Kaitlin Luna was the host of Speaking of Psychology from September 2018 to March 2020. A former broadcast journalist, she worked in APA's Office of Public Affairs as a public affairs manager.

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Why Do We Dream?

There's no single consensus about which dream theory best explains why we dream

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Dr. Sabrina Romanoff, PsyD, is a licensed clinical psychologist and a professor at Yeshiva University’s clinical psychology doctoral program.

Verywell / Madelyn Goodnight

What Is a Dream Theory?

• The Role of Dreams
• Reflect the Unconscious
• Process Information
• Aid In Memory
• Spur Creativity
• Reflect Your Life
• Prepare and Protect
• Process Emotions
• Other Theories

Lucid Dreaming

Stress dreams.

A dream theory is a proposed explanation for why people dream that is backed by scientific evidence. Despite scientific inquiry, we still don't have a solid answer for why people dream. Some of the most notable theories are that dreaming helps us process memories and better understand our emotions , also providing a way to express what we want or to practice facing our challenges.

At a Glance

There is no single dream theory that fully explains all of the aspects of why we dream. The most prominent theory is that dreams help us to process and consolidate information from the previous day. However, other theories have suggested that dreams are critical for emotional processing, creativity, and self-knowledge.

Some theories suggest that dreams also have symbolic meanings that offer a glimpse into the unconscious mind. Keep reading to learn more about some of the best-known theories about why we dream.

7 Theories on Why We Dream

A dream theory focuses on understanding the nature and purpose of dreams. Studying dreams can be challenging since they can vary greatly in how they are remembered and what they are about.

Dreams include the images, thoughts, and emotions that are experienced during sleep. They can range from extraordinarily intense or emotional to very vague, fleeting, confusing, or even boring.

Some dreams are joyful, while others are frightening or sad. Sometimes dreams seem to have a clear narrative, while many others appear to make no sense at all.

There are many unknowns about dreaming and sleep, but what scientists do know is that just about everyone dreams every time they sleep, for a total of around two hours per night, whether they remember it upon waking or not .

Beyond what's in a particular dream, there is the question of why we dream at all. Below, we detail the most prominent theories on the purpose of dreaming and how these explanations can be applied to specific dreams.

How Do Scientists Study Dreams?

The question of why we dream has fascinated philosophers and scientists for thousands of years. Traditionally, dream content is measured by the subjective recollections of the dreamer upon waking. However, observation is also accomplished through objective evaluation in a lab.

In one study, researchers even created a rudimentary dream content map that was able to track what people dreamed about in real time using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) patterns. The map was then backed up by the dreamers' reports upon waking.

What Dream Theory Suggests About the Role of Dreams

Some of the more prominent dream theories suggest that the reason we dream is to:

• Consolidate memories
• Process emotions
• Express our deepest desires
• Gain practice confronting potential dangers

Many experts believe that we dream due to a combination of these reasons rather than any one particular theory. Additionally, while many researchers believe that dreaming is essential to mental, emotional, and physical well-being, some scientists suggest that dreams serve no real purpose at all.

The bottom line is that while many theories have been proposed, no single consensus has emerged about which dream theory best explains why we dream.

Dreaming during different phases of sleep may also serve unique purposes. The most vivid dreams happen during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep , and these are the dreams that we're most likely to recall. We also dream during non-rapid eye movement (non-REM) sleep, but those dreams are known to be remembered less often and have more mundane content.

Sigmund Freud's Dream Theory

Sigmund Freud’s theory of dreams suggests that dreams represent  unconscious desires, thoughts, wish fulfillment, and motivations. According to Freud, people are driven by repressed and unconscious longings, such as aggressive and sexual instincts .

While many of Freud's assertions have been debunked, research suggests there is a dream rebound effect, also known as dream rebound theory, in which suppression of a thought tends to result in dreaming about it.

What Causes Dreams to Happen?

In " The Interpretation of Dreams ," Freud wrote that dreams are "disguised fulfillments of repressed wishes." He also described two different components of dreams: manifest content (actual images) and latent content (hidden meaning).

Freud’s theory contributed to the rise and popularity of dream interpretation . While research has failed to demonstrate that the manifest content disguises the psychological significance of a dream, some experts believe that dreams play an important role in processing emotions and stressful experiences.

Activation-Synthesis Dream Theory

According to the activation-synthesis model of dreaming , which was first proposed by J. Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley, circuits in the brain become activated during REM sleep, which triggers the amygdala and hippocampus to create an array of electrical impulses. This results in a compilation of random thoughts, images, and memories that appear while dreaming.

When we wake, our active minds pull together the dream's various images and memory fragments to create a cohesive narrative.  

In the activation-synthesis hypothesis, dreams are a compilation of randomness that appear to the sleeping mind and are brought together in a meaningful way when we wake. In this sense, dreams may provoke the dreamer to make new connections, inspire useful ideas, or have creative epiphanies in their waking lives.

Self-Organization Dream Theory

According to the information-processing theory, sleep allows us to consolidate and process all of the information and memories that we have collected during the previous day. Some dream experts suggest that dreaming is a byproduct, or even an active part, of this experience processing.  

This model, known as the self-organization theory of dreaming , explains that dreaming is a side effect of brain neural activity as memories are consolidated during sleep.

During this process of unconscious information redistribution, it is suggested that memories are either strengthened or weakened. According to the self-organization theory of dreaming, while we dream, helpful memories are made stronger, while less useful ones fade away.

Research supports this theory, finding improvement in complex tasks when a person dreams about doing them. Studies also show that during REM sleep, low-frequency theta waves were more active in the frontal lobe, just like they are when people are learning, storing, and remembering information when awake.

Creativity and Problem-Solving Dream Theory

Another theory about dreams says that their purpose is to help us solve problems. In this creativity theory of dreaming, the unconstrained, unconscious mind is free to wander its limitless potential while unburdened by the often stifling realities of the conscious world. In fact, research has shown dreaming to be an effective promoter of creative thinking.

Scientific research and anecdotal evidence back up the fact that many people do successfully mine their dreams for inspiration and credit their dreams for their big "aha" moments.

The ability to make unexpected connections between memories and ideas that appear in your dreams often proves to be an especially fertile ground for creativity.

Continuity Hypothesis Dream Theory

Under the continuity hypothesis, dreams function as a reflection of a person's real life, incorporating conscious experiences into their dreams. Rather than a straightforward replay of waking life, dreams show up as a patchwork of memory fragments.

Still, studies show that non-REM sleep may be more involved with declarative memory (the more routine stuff), while REM dreams include more emotional and instructive memories.

In general, REM dreams tend to be easier to recall compared to non-REM dreams.

Under the continuity hypothesis, memories may be fragmented purposefully in our dreams as part of incorporating new learning and experiences into long-term memory . Still, there are many unanswered questions as to why some aspects of memories are featured more or less prominently in our dreams.

Rehearsal and Adaptation Dream Theory

The primitive instinct rehearsal and adaptive strategy theories of dreaming propose that we dream to better prepare ourselves to confront dangers in the real world. The dream as a social simulation function or threat simulation provides the dreamer a safe environment to practice important survival skills.

While dreaming, we hone our fight-or-flight instincts and build mental capability for handling threatening scenarios. Under the threat simulation theory, our sleeping brains focus on the fight-or-flight mechanism to prep us for life-threatening and/or emotionally intense scenarios including:

• Running away from a pursuer
• Falling over a cliff
• Showing up somewhere naked
• Going to the bathroom in public
• Forgetting to study for a final exam

This theory suggests that practicing or rehearsing these skills in our dreams gives us an evolutionary advantage in that we can better cope with or avoid threatening scenarios in the real world. This helps explain why so many dreams contain scary, dramatic, or intense content.

Emotional Regulation Dream Theory

The emotional regulation dream theory says that the function of dreams is to help us process and cope with our emotions or trauma in the safe space of slumber.

Research shows that the amygdala , which is involved in processing emotions, and the hippocampus , which plays a vital role in condensing information and moving it from short-term to long-term memory storage, are active during vivid, intense dreaming.

This illustrates a strong link between dreaming, memory storage, and emotional processing.

This theory suggests that REM sleep plays a vital role in emotional brain regulation. It also helps explain why so many dreams are emotionally vivid and why emotional or traumatic experiences tend to show up on repeat. Research has shown a connection between the ability to process emotions and the amount of REM sleep a person gets.

Sharing Dreams Promotes Connection

Talking about content similarities and common dreams with others may help promote belongingness and connection. Research notes heightened empathy among people who share their dreams with others, pointing to another way dreams can help us cope by promoting community and interpersonal support.

Other Theories About Why We Dream

Many other theories have been suggested to account for why we dream.

• One dream theory contends that dreams are the result of our brains trying to interpret external stimuli (such as a dog's bark, music, or a baby's cry) during sleep.
• Another theory uses a computer metaphor to account for dreams, noting that dreams serve to "clean up" clutter from the mind, refreshing the brain for the next day.
• The reverse-learning theory suggests that we dream to forget. Our brains have thousands of neural connections between memories—too many to remember them all—and that dreaming is part of "pruning" those connections.
• In the continual-activation theory, we dream to keep the brain active while we sleep, in order to keep it functioning properly.

Overfitted Dream Hypothesis

One recently introduced dream theory, known as the overfitted dream hypothesis, suggests that dreams are the brain's way of introducing random, disruptive data to help break up repetitive daily tasks and information. Researcher Erik Hoel suggests that such disruptions helps to keep the brain fit.

Lucid dreams are relatively rare dreams where the dreamer has awareness of being in their dream and often has some control over the dream content. Research indicates that around 50% of people recall having had at least one lucid dream in their lifetime and just over 10% report having them two or more times per month.

It is unknown why certain people experience lucid dreams more frequently than others. While experts are unclear as to why or how lucid dreaming occurs, preliminary research signals that the prefrontal and parietal regions of the brain play a significant role.

How to Lucid Dream

Many people covet lucid dreaming and seek to experience it more often. Lucid dreaming has been compared to virtual reality and hyper-realistic video games, giving lucid dreamers the ultimate self-directed dreamscape experience.

Potential training methods for inducing lucid dreaming include cognitive training, external stimulation during sleep, and medications. While these methods may show some promise, none have been rigorously tested or shown to be effective.

A strong link has been found between lucid dreaming and highly imaginative thinking and creative output. Research has shown that lucid dreamers perform better on creative tasks than those who do not experience lucid dreaming.

Stressful experiences tend to show up with great frequency in our dreams. Stress dreams may be described as sad, scary, and nightmarish .

Experts do not fully understand how or why specific stressful content ends up in our dreams, but many point to a variety of theories, including the continuity hypothesis, adaptive strategy, and emotional regulation dream theories to explain these occurrences. Stress dreams and mental health seem to go hand-in-hand.

• Daily stress shows up in dreams : Research has shown that those who experience greater levels of worry in their waking lives and people diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) report higher frequency and intensity of nightmares.
• Mental health disorders may contribute to stress dreams : Those with mental health disorders such as anxiety, bipolar disorder , and depression tend to have more distressing dreams, as well as more difficulty sleeping in general.
• Anxiety is linked to stress dreams : Research indicates a strong connection between anxiety and stressful dream content. These dreams may be the brain's attempt to help us cope with and make sense of these stressful experiences.

While many theories exist about why we dream, more research is needed to fully understand their purpose. Rather than assuming only one dream theory is correct, dreams likely serve various purposes. In reality, many of these dream theories may be useful for explaining different aspects of the dreaming process.

If you are concerned about your dreams and/or are having frequent nightmares , consider speaking to your doctor or consulting a sleep specialist.

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By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Greater Good Science Center • Magazine • In Action • In Education

Why Your Brain Needs to Dream

We often hear stories of people who’ve learned from their dreams or been inspired by them. Think of Paul McCartney’s story of how his hit song “Yesterday” came to him in a dream or of Mendeleev’s dream-inspired construction of the periodic table of elements.

But, while many of us may feel that our dreams have special meaning or a useful purpose, science has been more skeptical of that claim. Instead of being harbingers of creativity or some kind of message from our unconscious, some scientists have considered dreaming to be an unintended consequence of sleep—a byproduct of evolution without benefit.

Sleep itself is a different story. Scientists have known for a while now that shorter sleep is tied to dangerous diseases, like heart disease and stroke . There is mounting evidence that sleep deprivation leads to a higher risk of obesity and Alzheimer’s disease . Large population studies reflect a saddening truth—the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life . Not only that, sleep helps us to hold onto our memories and to learn facts and skills faster, making it important for everyone including infants, students, athletes, pilots, and doctors.

Much of this I outline in my new book, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams , which summarizes the many findings we have about sleep and its function in our lives.

But what about dreaming? Does it also have a purpose?

Recent work in my neuroscience lab and the work of other scientists has shown that dreams may have a very particular function important to our well-being. Here are the two main ways dreams help us.

Dreaming is like overnight therapy

It’s said that time heals all wounds, but my research suggests that time spent in dream sleep is what heals. REM-sleep dreaming appears to take the painful sting out of difficult, even traumatic, emotional episodes experienced during the day, offering emotional resolution when you awake the next morning.

REM sleep is the only time when our brain is completely devoid of the anxiety-triggering molecule noradrenaline. At the same time, key emotional and memory-related structures of the brain are reactivated during REM sleep as we dream. This means that emotional memory reactivation is occurring in a brain free of a key stress chemical, which allows us to re-process upsetting memories in a safer, calmer environment.

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How do we know this is so? In one study in my sleep center, healthy young adult participants were divided into two groups to watch a set of emotion-inducing images while inside an MRI scanner. Twelve hours later, they were shown the same emotional images—but for half the participants, the twelve hours were in the same day, while for the other half the twelve hours were separated by an evening of sleep.

Those who slept in between the two sessions reported a significant decrease in how emotional they felt in response to seeing those images again, and their MRI scans showed a significant reduction in reactivity in the amygdala, the emotional center of the brain that creates painful feelings. Moreover, there was a reengagement of the rational prefrontal cortex of the brain after sleep that helped maintain a dampening influence on emotional reactivity. In contrast, those who remained awake across the day showed no such dissolving of emotional reactivity over time.

That in itself doesn’t say anything about the role of dreaming. But we had recorded each participant’s sleep during the intervening night between the two test sessions, and we found that specific brain activity that reflected a drop in stress-related brain chemistry during the dream state determined the success of overnight therapy from one individual to the next.

Dreaming has the potential to help people de-escalate emotional reactivity, probably because the emotional content of dreams is paired with a decrease in brain noradrenaline. Support for this idea came from a study done by Murray Raskind on vets with PTSD, who often suffer debilitating nightmares. When given the drug Prazosin—a medication that lowers blood pressure and also acts as a blocker of the brain stress chemical noradrenaline—the vets in his study had fewer nightmares and fewer PTSD symptoms than those given a placebo. Newer studies suggest this effect can be shown in children and adolescents with nightmares, as well, though the research on this is still in its infancy.

The evidence points toward an important function of dreams: to help us take the sting out of our painful emotional experiences during the hours we are asleep, so that we can learn from them and carry on with our lives.

Dreaming enhances creativity and problem-solving

It’s been shown that deep non-REM sleep strengthens individual memories. But REM sleep is when those memories can be fused and blended together in abstract and highly novel ways. During the dreaming state, your brain will cogitate vast swaths of acquired knowledge and then extract overarching rules and commonalties, creating a mindset that can help us divine solutions to previously impenetrable problems.

How do we know dreaming and not just sleep is important to this process?

In one study , we tested this by waking up participants during the night—during both non-REM sleep and dreaming sleep—and gave them very short tests: solving anagram puzzles, where you try to unscramble letters to form a word (e.g., OSEOG = GOOSE). First, participants were tested beforehand, just to familiarize them with the test. Then, we monitored their sleep and woke them up at different points of the night to perform the test. When woken during non-REM sleep, they were not particularly creative—they could solve very few puzzles. But, when we woke up participants during REM sleep, they were able to solve 15-35 percent more puzzles than when they were awake. Not only that, participants woken while dreaming reported that the solution just “popped” into their heads, as if it were effortless.

In another study , I and my colleagues taught participants a series of relational facts—such as, A>B, B>C, C>D, and so on—and tested their understanding by asking them questions (e.g., Is B>D or not? ). Afterwards, we compared their performance on this test before and after a full night’s sleep, and also after they’d had a 60- to 90-minute nap that included REM sleep. Those who’d slept or had a long nap performed much better on this test than when they were awake, as if they’d put together disparate pieces of a jigsaw puzzle in their sleep.

Some may consider this trivial, but it is one of the key operations differentiating your brain from your computer. It also underlies the difference between knowledge (retention of individual facts) and wisdom (knowing what they all mean when you fit them together). The latter seems to be the work of REM-sleep dreaming.

“It’s said that time heals all wounds, but my research suggests that time spent in dream sleep is what heals”

Dreaming improves creative problem solving, too, according to another study . Participants learned to navigate a virtual maze using trial and error and aided by the placement of unique objects—like Christmas trees—at certain junctions in the maze. After this learning session, the group was split in two, with half napping and half watching a video for 90 minutes. Nappers were occasionally awoken to ask about the content of their dreams; those watching a video were also asked about thoughts going through their minds.

Afterwards, the participants again tried to solve the maze, and those who napped were significantly better at it than those who didn’t, as expected. But the nappers who reported dreaming about the maze were 10 times better at the task than those who napped and didn’t dream about the maze. There’s a reason you’ve never been told to stay awake on a problem.

Looking at the content of these dreams, it was clear that the participants didn’t dream a precise replay of the learning experience while awake. Instead, they were cherry-picking salient fragments of the learning experience and attempting to place them within the catalog of preexisting knowledge. This is how dreaming helps us be more creative.

While the benefits of dreaming are real, too many of us have problems getting a full eight hours of sleep and lose out on these advantages. Alternatively, we may think we’re the exception to the rule—that we’re one of those people who doesn’t happen to need a lot of sleep. But nothing could be further from the truth. Research clearly shows that people who overestimate their ability to get by on less sleep are sadly wrong.

Five ways to enhance your sleep

So how can we be sure to get enough sleep and experience a dream state? While we may be tempted to use sleeping pills to get to sleep, this has been shown to be detrimental to dreaming. Instead of taking pills, here are some simple ways to enhance your sleep:

1. Make sure your room is dark and that you are not looking at bright light sources—i.e., computer screens and cell phones—in the last hour or two before going to bed. You may even want to start dimming lights in your house in the earlier parts of the evening, which helps to stimulate sleepiness.

2. Go to bed and wake up at approximately the same time every day. This helps signal to your body a regular time for sleeping. It’s no use trying to sleep in a lot on weekends. There is no way to make up for regular sleep loss during the week.

3. Keep the temperature in your house cool at night—maybe even cooler than you think it should be, like around 65 degrees. Your body temperature needs to drop at night for sleep, and a lower room temperature helps signal your brain that it’s time to sleep.

4. If you have trouble falling asleep, or wake in the night feeling restless, don’t stay in bed awake. That trains the brain that your bed is not a place for sleeping. Instead, get up and read a book under dim light in a different room. Don’t look at your computer or cell phone. When sleepiness returns, then go back to bed. Or if you don’t want to get out of bed, try meditating. Studies suggest it helps individuals fall asleep faster, and also improves sleep quality.

5. Don’t have caffeine late in the day or an alcohol-infused nightcap. Both of these interfere with sleep—either keeping you awake or stimulating frequent wake-ups during the night.

Sleep is the single most effective thing we can do to rest our brain and physical health each day. Atop of sleep, dreaming provides essential emotional first aid and a unique form of informational alchemy. If we wish to be as healthy, happy, and creative as possible, these are facts well worth waking up to.

About the Author

Matthew Walker

Matthew Walker is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, and the director of the university’s Center for Human Sleep Science .

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Key Concepts in Dream Research: Cognition and Consciousness Are Inherently Linked, but Do No Not Control “Control”!

Introduction.

Whilst lucid dreaming (LD) is defined as being aware of dreaming whilst dreaming, a misconception exists in the public domain as a referral to controlling dream content and plot (Neuhäusler et al., 2018 ). This misconception reflects a number of widely-held beliefs about the nature of dreaming, which in part this commentary will seek to explain and rectify.

Furthermore, the aim of this piece is to suggest definitions of key concepts in the study of lucid and non-lucid dreaming concerning control, cognition, and consciousness. Whilst superficially there seems overlap between each of these, independent processes, and associated experiences underpin them.

First it is necessary to identify the parameters of “dreaming.” Essentially dreaming refers to the recollection of mental content from sleep. This broad definition recognizes that dreams may be fragmented, brief, non-narrative, thought-like, and/or containing basic sensory-perceptual experiences such as emotions, without necessarily comprising complex plots or activity. It also emphasizes the role of memory in accessing experiences, as there are no valid means by which dreams can be sampled, as neither can individuals report on their activity during sleep nor can we independently validate individuals' experiences. Some scholars use “REM” (rapid eye-movement) sleep and “dreaming” synonymously (e.g., Walker, 2009 ), recognizing that the majority of spontaneously recalled dream reports emerge from REM sleep, and indeed that REM sleep provides the conditions most typical of dreams, such as bizarreness, clearer dream recall, emotionality and, likely, hyperassociativity (Horton and Malinowski, 2015 ; Malinowski and Horton, 2015 ; Horton, 2017 ), in which several distinct memory sources and images can be simultaneously experienced. However, dreams can be sampled easily from non-REM periods, and REM can exist without dreaming (Solms, 2000 ), thus is it essential to define the parameters of dreaming relevant to each scientific investigation. For instance, if we are interested in cognition and/or consciousness across different periods of sleep, or even across sleep and wake, then the term “mental content” or “mentation” may be more appropriate than “dream,” to aid such comparability (Kahan and LaBerge, 2011 ). If we are interested in characteristics such as emotional intensity or report length, then we need to clarify whether we should focus upon memory recall from sleep or the underlying features of a conscious state such as neurological correlates of such activity.

Next, for explorations LD, or even mere lucidity, researchers need to define and operationalise LD. An awareness of dreaming during dreaming relies on accurate reality monitoring processes (Johnson et al., 1984 ) as well as unbiased recall. Reality monitoring is typically impaired during sleep, hence making experiences of lucidity rare and interesting. However, in order to engage the frontal faculties sufficiently to warrant accurate reality monitoring, an atypical neurological profile is engaged (Voss et al., 2014 ). It is therefore important to note that lucidity is infrequent and abnormal (Vallat et al., 2018 ), and as such likely does not reflect “normal” cognition and consciousness during sleep, particularly when extensive training is necessary in order to create pre-requisite conditions for lucidity to emerge (e.g., Baird et al., 2019 ). Nevertheless, LD can be reliably measured, in laboratory conditions, by asking trained participants to move their eyes systematically whilst lucid (Mota-Rolim, 2020 ), and it is recognized that LD may provide insights into the nature of consciousness (Baird et al., 2019 ), albeit in a more artificial than naturally-occurring environment.

The Elements of Cognition vs. Consciousness

As lucidity during sleep relies on heightened metacognitive activity, we need to understand what is meant by cognition during sleep and during wake. Cognition refers to the capacities and capabilities of function, in this case during sleep, in particular the organization, activation and reactivation of memories or experiences that are either familiar or unfamiliar to the dreamer. These processing capacities are notoriously difficult to study at any time, during sleep or wake, as some are so speedy they are automatic and operate beyond conscious awareness (see also the use of the term “offline processing” insofar as describing non-conscious cognitive activity, e.g., Wamsley, 2014 ). Consequently, it can be apparently tangible for researchers to focus upon the neural correlates of such behavior, to provide evidence for their functional existence (Baird et al., 2019 ). However, cognitive scientists need to offer theory for the function of such processes, for instance in relation to sleep-dependent memory consolidation (Payne and Nadel, 2004 ), rather than merely studying activations without considering functional relevance. In dream science, memory activations and predictable patterns of dreaming of familiar aspects of waking life have largely been explored under the Continuity Hypothesis (Schredl and Hofmann, 2003 ), as well as being observed in relation to other behaviors, such as personality traits (Schredl and Erlacher, 2004 ), moods, or subsequent performance on cognitive tasks such as problem solving, insight, creativity (Cai et al., 2009 ; Lewis et al., 2018 ), composition or recall (Baylor and Cavallero, 2001 ). Studies of cognition and metacognition during sleep have found that dreaming is not deficient but rather different in only a few ways to waking cognition (Kahan and LaBerge, 2011 ), with reality monitoring being one of the key different features. Specifically, during most sleep experiences, people cannot determine that their mental experience is internally- rather than externally-generated, consequently dreams feel real. Only in the cases of LD are individuals aware that they are dreaming. However, often the heightened metacognitive awareness is rousing and awakens the dreamer.

Whilst being aware of an experience as being internally- or externally-oriented can be operationalised in cognitive, or metacognitive terms, the conscious experience of that function may be characterized somewhat differently, although some features may overlap with those of cognition. Consciousness may, here, refer to the more characteristic features of sleep mentation, including experiential elements such as the fluidity, continuity over time, presence of specific features or characters and the more holistic nature of mental content. For instance, we may note that non-REM mentation is typically thought-like and brief, containing day residues and life-like references, whereas REM sampled mentation is typically bizarre, story-like and full of activity (Baylor and Cavallero, 2001 ; Blagrove et al., 2011 ). These descriptions of sleep mentation could well-reflect underlying cognitive processes such as memory activation, likely forming memory consolidation processes, but the overriding consciousness is more descriptive. The cognitive interests relate to function, and may be measures in those terms, such as extent of activation, which may also include aspects that are non-conscious at the point of experience.

When considering lucidity, the nature of the consciousness may include sensations of awe at realizing one is dreaming, as well as vivid memories of the dream experience itself. This is commonly associated with increased underlying neurocognitive activity. The underlying cognition , or hypothetical function, reflects accurate reality monitoring, metacognition, self-awareness and, typically, arousal (from enjoyment of the experience).

Furthermore, in some studies of LD, participants who achieve lucidity may continue to develop the ability to control their actions during dreaming (LaBerge, 1980 ). Indeed, several studies aimed to achieve this, rather than studying the mere presence of lucidity in more naturalistic or opportunistic settings. Such studies confuse the concepts of lucidity and control, with the former being more likely to occur naturally, and the latter being rare and artificial experiences. As such scholars should be cautious about inferring the nature of consciousness and/or cognition from artificial control-induction techniques, as this likely differs from the profile of mental content emerging from experiences of lucidity.

LD is unusual, relative to the existence of dreaming which, arguably, occurs the entire time that one is asleep (if the present definition of dreaming is adopted, as consciousness continues, even during sleep). Whilst lucid, or controlled, experiences may offer a therapeutic benefit, for instance by allowing individuals to rehearse actions (Stumbrys et al., 2016 ) or overcome threats (Putois et al., 2019 ) during sleep, they are typically fleeting, and estimations of their frequency often rely on self-report and retrospective methods (Vallat et al., 2018 ). Furthermore, inducing lucidity interrupts sleep, which we know is required to facilitate emotion-regulation and memory consolidation processes, which arguably would be more beneficial than any benefits of lucid dreaming anyway (Vallat and Ruby, 2019 ).

To operationalise lucidity, researchers should take care not to confuse controlling the dream experience with mere awareness of dreaming. We should then define control carefully for instance as voluntarily changing experience. Superficially control may seem to rely upon both a specific cognitive and consciousness profile, however the conscious awareness of control may only become apparent at the time of recall, rather than during the experience itself, and again scholars should take care to identify any potential additional explanatory information offered to a dream report at the point of reporting it, as being distinct from a description of the original experience.

Caution should be urged when considering whether it may be appropriate to recommend that participants control their dreams, given that doing so increases sleep disturbances via awakenings (however, see LaBerge et al., 2018a , who included data from uninterrupted REM sleep only, but see also LaBerge et al., 2018b , for a paradigm in which participants remained awake for 30 min in the middle of the night, which increased LD recall), and also that controlling dream content is unnatural, therefore it may restrict the activation of memory sources and emotions that may underly sleep-dependent memory consolidation (Wamsley and Stickgold, 2011 ) and emotion regulation (Walker, 2009 ) processes. Perhaps only in the case of nightmares causing substantive distress, most typically in sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder, should the possible benefits of reducing distress from terrifying dreams outweigh the likely negative consequences of changing sleep structure and physiology, by restricting the opportunity for “offline” processing (e.g., Putois et al., 2019 ).

In the occasions of spontaneous ongoing lucidity, whereby the experience does not awaken the dreamer, either the dreamer attempts to understand, or even “interpret” meaning from the typically bizarre dream narrative in which they find themselves, or they attempt to control it in some form during the dream state. The latter, in the case of LD, can be learned in some cases (LaBerge, 1980 ). Comparable practices during wakefulness demonstrate the ability for some to being able to gain fuller awareness of some typically more automatic behaviors, as depicted by the rise in popularity of mindfulness.

LD is concerning for a number of reasons, as recently outlined by Vallat and Ruby ( 2019 ), whereby training to overcome the mental content spontaneously emerging during sleep-dependent cognition ultimately changes and thwarts those processes. Humans likely need to foster the conditions for those processes to occur in order to benefit from the plethora of advantages of sleep.

It seems surprising that LD has received much attention, when time spent dreaming is far greater. Furthermore, the nature of dreaming and consciousness is fascinating, and may provide insights into the nature and perhaps function of underlying cognitive processes. For instance, dream bizarreness, which typifies REM mentation (Revonsuo and Tarkko, 2002 ; Payne, 2010 ) and likely results, at least in part, from hyperassociativity of distinct memory sources during sleep (Horton and Malinowski, 2015 ) may inform an understanding of the activation, fragmentation and re-organization of memory sources as part of sleep-dependent memory consolidation processes (Horton, 2017 ). Lucidity, however, is highly atypical and therefore arguably cannot offer so much insight.

“Control” within LD inherently unnatural and disrupts sleep. Controlled dreams rarely exist spontaneously, either in typical or atypical cognition. Scholars therefore should have the integrity to consider the impact that studies of control may have not only on participants engaging with such studies, but also the wider community who may be attracted to the idea of controlling their dreams. There is a duty to convey that we should not control, control, but instead promote the benefits of sleeping well (Walker, 2019 ), to afford the opportunity to dream.

Nevertheless, it is important to consider whether LD may have adaptiveness value, especially in the case of emotion processing and/or when the incidence of LD correlates with pathologies. LD may also provide insights into the nature of dreaming, principally by involving the dreamer during the dream (Zink and Pietrowsky, 2015 ), rather than just afterwards during recall.

Author Contributions

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.

Conflict of Interest

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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The Psychology of Dreams: Inside the Dream Mind

Why do we dream? How do dreams provide insight into the mind? Are dreams relevant to waking life? From ancient times when dreams were considered to hold prophetic powers to the neurological phenomena studied today, dreams remain one of psychology’s most enduring mysteries. Although scientists continue to research the answers to these questions, they build their work on some commonly accepted dream theories.

The Nature of Dreams

Defined as a series of thoughts, visions or feelings, dreams arise several times per night during sleep.

As a process, sleep is cyclical. It occurs in five stages, each helping to further the body’s goal of bolstering and regenerating itself. While stages 1-4 are simply named as such, the fifth stage is called Rapid Eye Movement, or REM. It makes up about 20 to 25 percent of adult sleep.

The REM stage is the most common time of dreaming , explains the National Sleep Foundation. Dreams themselves usually last between a few seconds to 30 minutes in length. On average, people dream about four to six times per night, with adults dreaming about two hours for every eight hours of sleep.

In addition to its association with dreams, the REM stage is a time when the body processes information, creates memories and increases depleted chemicals, such as serotonin. Although the necessity of sleep has long been observed, only in recent history did people consider that dreams may also serve a utilitarian function.

Four Theories of Dreams

The past two centuries have given rise to four of the most commonly accepted dream theories.

Sigmund Freud and Wish-Fulfillment

The famous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud was the first to suggest that dreams may serve a particular scientific purpose. He came to believe that dreams were often a form of wish-fulfillment , the American Psychoanalytic Association says. In a dream, a subject could act out desires he or she could not fulfill in waking life. Some types of dreams, however, proved problematic within this model, such as dreams involving punishment or traumatic events. These led Freud to believe that dreams sometimes served as a way for patients to express guilt or conquer trauma. All these conjectures played into Freud’s overall (and revolutionary) theory of dreams: that they were manifestations of unconscious workings of the brain.  

Carl Jung: Dreams as Direct Mental Expressions

Although Freud and Carl Jung were contemporaries, they disagreed strongly (and famously) about the nature of dreams. Freud believed that dreams, by nature, disguised their meaning. In contrast, Jung believed that dreams were actually direct expressions of the mind itself . Dreams, he thought, expressed an individual’s unconscious state through a language of symbols and metaphors. This “language” was natural to the unconscious state, but difficult to understand because it varied so much from waking language. Notably, Jung also believed that universal archetypes (or images) intrinsic to all human consciousness existed within this language. He believed that dreams served two functions: to compensate for imbalances in the dreamers’ psyche, and to provide prospective images of the future, which allowed the dreamer to anticipate future events.

REM and Activation-Synthesis

Yet another theory arose with the discovery of REM. The Activation-Synthesis theory was conceived by Harvard professors Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley in the 1970s, explains Joe Griffin of the Human Givens Institute. Hobson and McCarley discovered that during REM sleep, electrical signals called electroencephalogram recordings, or EEGs, pass through the brain. They theorized that the brain naturally reacted by attempting to make sense of the random stimulus. Thus, dreams had no intrinsic meaning; they were just a side effect of the brain’s normal activity. While this theory was revolutionary at the time, the continual advancement of technology has led to tremendous revision of this theory.

Threat Simulation Theory

Finnish psychologist Antti Revonsuo is one of the latest researchers to suggest a convincing theory about the function of dreams. Revonsuo found that during REM sleep , the amygdala (the fight-or-flight section of the brain) actually fires in similar ways as it does during a survival threat. “The primary function of negative dreams,” he explains , “is rehearsal for similar real events, so that threat recognition and avoidance happens faster and more automatically in comparable real situations.” In other words, dreams are an evolutionary trait designed to help us practice being safe.

Advance Your Understanding of Psychology

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• by Psychologs Magazine
• June 23, 2024
• 9 minutes read

It is always the alarm that could ruin the desired moment that we never get to experience in our real life. Everyone had a moment like dreaming of some situation such as urinating on the bed, falling from a height, and a close one passing away. Have you ever wondered about why we dream, their origins, and what that dream trying to convey? And why do dreams fade from memory so quickly? Extensive research is currently underway to uncover the secrets of dreams. Moreover, there exist different types of dreams, each with unique characteristics. And let’s dig into it.

Pioneers and Their Sayings

Before the types of dreams, we have to explore the history, pioneer the concept of dreams. There are some contributors like Aristotle, Sigmund Freud , Wundt, Hildebrant, Maury, Jessen, Radstock, Krauss, Strumpell, and Kant. There was a belief in ancient days that a dream was a divine proclamation and assumed dream was a foreteller.

Aristotle believes that dreams come from the sensory inputs we experience in a day that are retained in our minds, he focuses on the naturalistic explanation of dreams rather than spiritual interpretation and Maury says that what we said, what we did and what did we think were reflected in our dream and Jessen beliefs that the gender, lifestyle, age, experiences are the determinant of the dream and Hildebrant says that the dreams are related to the reality but it has the tendency to show the things that are not connected with our reality.

Freud plays a vital role in the concept of dreams and he also wrote a book about dreams called “The Interpretation of Dreams” he also used a technique in his therapeutic technique to uncover the unconscious, so-called dream analysis. He said that dream is uncovering unconscious material and during sleep , material arises from the unconscious to the conscious.

During dreams, our wishes, needs and fears are expressed and he also refers to dreams as the “royal road to the unconscious”. And he also gives two levels of content namely, latent and manifested content here latent content is hidden or symbolic meaning, our motives, wishes, fears, unconscious feeling and manifested content are the content of dreams that appears to the dreamer exactly as it is.

Read More: How can Dream Analysis Shape Your Reality?

Sleep and Dream

There are two phases of sleep: Non-REM and REM sleep, with REM sleep being the stage where the majority of dreams occur. REM means Rapid Eye Movement, in this stage body temperature increases, the heart beats fast and the eye moves rapidly. Dreams in REM sleep tend to be more bizarre, detailed, vivid, and longer. Sleep paralysis prevents us from acting upon our dream, and the inability to move the voluntary muscles during sleep, especially in REM sleep.

Dreaming can happen at any stage of sleep, but it is most common and vivid during REM sleep. 90% of the dreams occur during REM sleep because in REM sleep brain activity increases significantly compared to non-REM stages.

Read More: The 5 Stages of Sleep Cycle

Types of Dreaming

Types of dreaming, there are several types of dreams namely, lucid dreams, nightmares, night terrors, daydreaming, and false awakening.

Lucid Dream

Lucid dreaming occurs when you become conscious of being in a dream while the dream is still ongoing. This typically occurs during REM sleep, like most dreams. About 55 per cent of individuals have experienced at least one lucid dream in their lifetime. In a lucid dream, you are conscious of being in a dream state, which involves metacognition- awareness of your awareness. This awareness often allows control over the dream’s events. Some find lucid dreams extremely lifelike, while others perceive them as somewhat unclear.

Additionally, experiences of lucid dreaming can vary each time they occur. Stephen LaBerge was the pioneer in lucid dreaming, he also conducted much research to understand lucid dreaming and identify its benefits. As a result, lucid dreaming was found to help treat various conditions involving PTSD , anxiety and nightmares, increasing motor skills, and improving creativity .

DayDreaming

Most of us zone out while our math teacher teaches an important problem and find ourselves in a daydream about exploring Hogwarts, holding a holly wand, flying in Nimbus 2001 and making magical potions. Daydreaming involves shifting attention from external surroundings to internal thoughts and emotions, typically occurring while awake. It often includes imaging visual scenarios and pleasant or desired situations.

Numerous psychological studies have explored daydreaming, revealing that nearly all adults engage in daily daydreaming, which constitutes approximately half of their total thoughts. Psychologists consider daydreaming a natural and essential human behaviour . Daydreaming typically occurs when the brain lacks external stimuli, prompting it to activate a default network that generates these mental wanderings. Daydreaming represents an altered state of consciousness characterized by reduced awareness of external surroundings.

Do you remember any dream that you can’t able to forget and give its impact even after waking up? It’s called an epic dream. Epic dreams are incredibly vivid, often remembered for years or even a lifetime. They are rare occurrences but are truly worth experiencing when they happen. These dreams allow you to recall them as if they occurred just yesterday, their details and events remaining remarkably clear in your memory. Everyone can recall a few dreams from their past, but what sets epic dreams apart is the intense emotional impact upon waking up.

Whether pleasant or nightmarish, we can easily differentiate these experiences. Epic dreams evoke powerful emotional responses that distinguish them from other types of dreams. Those who have experienced an epic dream in their lifetime can readily identify it by the euphoric sensation they feel upon awakening. Enthusiasts of dream interpretation view epic dreams as profound, potentially life-changing events. In contrast, scientists define epic dream disorder as relentless, emotionless, dreaming filled with repetitive, mundane tasks throughout sleep, often leaving individuals feeling excessively fatigued upon waking.

Read More: The science of sleep: what goes on in your brain when you sleep?

False Awakening

A false awakening occurs when a person experiences a vivid dream of waking up from sleep, while in reality, they remain asleep. Unlike typical dreams that often involve fantastical scenarios, false awakenings are typically mundane, where the dreamer believes they have awoken in familiar surroundings like their bedroom or office. These dreams can closely mimic real-life settings, though small discrepancies such as malfunctioning lights or doors leading to unexpected places may occur.

Sleep scientists categorize false awakenings into two types, type 1 where the dream involves routine activities like getting up and showering, and type 2, which can include unsettling or nightmarish elements that may lead to the dreamer waking abruptly from fear or anxiety .

Although false awakenings are often described as vivid and strange, experts do not consider them harmful. However, like other phenomena occurring at the boundary between wakefulness and sleep, false awakenings can sometimes provoke fear, discomfort, or anxiety. False awakenings can occur repeatedly in succession, which can be distressing for the person experiencing them, as they may feel unable to fully wake up. Additionally, false awakenings may result in false memories, where individuals recall having performed actions only to later realize they were part of a dream.

Nightmares are vivid dreams that can be frightening, disturbing, strange, or otherwise troubling. They tend to occur most frequently during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the stage associated with intense dreaming. These unsettling dreams tend to happen more often during the later part of the night when the duration of REM sleep becomes longer.

According to a study, the three most frequent themes in nightmares were related to death or dying, physical violence, and being chased or hunted. Upon awakening from a nightmare, individuals typically have a clear recollection of the dream and may experience feelings of distress or anxiety. Physical symptoms such as fluctuations in heart rate or perspiration may also occur upon awakening from a nightmare. Nightmares are considered a common experience for most individuals, though they can become problematic if they significantly disrupt daily life or sleep patterns.

Read More: Do you know about nightmare disorder?

Night Terrors

Night terrors or sleep terrors are more frequently seen in children than in adults. During a night terror episode, individuals awaken in a state of intense fear with only a vague recollection of their dream content, if any. They often exhibit symptoms such as screaming, kicking or thrashing about, sweating, rapid breathing, elevated heart rate, and confusion about their surroundings. Unlike dreams, night terrors are not considered a form of dreaming but rather a distinct sleep disturbance.

Occasional night terrors typically do not raise significant concerns. But if, the night terrors occur frequently, consistently disrupt the sleep of the individual experiencing them or family members, risk of injury, daytime symptoms include severe sleepiness or difficulties with activities, and terrors persist into the teenage years or start during adulthood, it is recommended to consult a doctor or healthcare provider.

Night terrors and nightmares seem more similar, but night terrors primarily occur during non-REM sleep, whereas nightmares usually occur during REM sleep. Children, who have more non-REM sleep, are more prone to night terrors, whereas nightmares can affect individuals of any age. Nightmares are often vividly remembered dreams, while night terrors are typically forgotten upon waking.

Dreams are the loyal roads to the unconscious mind and it is also fascinating, they help to discover buried emotions, desires and fears. They can be divided into lucid dreaming, epic dreams, daydreaming, nightmares, and night terrors. All of them serve different purposes. If the dreams cause any distress in life and lead to any unwanted consequences, seeking mental health professionals could be appreciable.

Read More: Influence of Horror Movies on Sleep and Dreams

Do dreams have meanings?

Some experts and people believe that dreams are the road to the unconscious and that dreams expose our desires, emotions, and fears. The interpretation of dreams is subjective and varies widely.

Should I be concerned about the night terrors of my child?

Night terrors diminish as they grow old, but night terrors occur frequently and disturb the child’s sleep and daily functioning it is advisable to seek the help of mental health professionals.

Do my dreams reflect real-life experiences?

Yes, dreams can incorporate our daily life emotions, expressions, experiences, and subconscious thoughts. But dreaming does not occur as same as we experience it, it is distorted and exaggerated.

Why do I forget my dreams?

Multiple factors play a role in forgetting the dreams including sleep patterns, environment, individual differences, and lifestyle.

Does everyone forget their dreams?

No, not everyone forgot their dreams. They differ from person to person. But it is common to forget the dreams of many people.

Read More Articles from Psychologs

• Why Daydreaming is good for you?
• Do you Know these Facts about Dreams?
• Why should you start Dream Journaling?
• Transforming Nightmares into silent Dreams
• Hay Festival 2024: Authors Signified DayDreaming Important for Cognitive Development
• Barber, N. (2023, September 15). What is the meaning and cause of false awakening dreams? The Sleep Matters Club. https://www.dreams.co.uk/sleep-matters-club/what-is-the-meaning-and cause-of-false-awakening
• dreams#:~:text=What%20are%20false%20awakening%20dreams,awakenings%20are%20usuall y%20completely%20mundane
• Ciccarelli, S. K., & White, J. N.(2018). Psychology: An exploration (4th ed.). Pearson.
• Elmer, J. (2020, May 20). Different types of dreams and what they may mean about you. Healthline. https://www.healthline.com/health/types-of-dreams
• Nunez, K. (2023, March 22). 5 lucid dreaming techniques to try. Healthline. https://www.healthline.com/health/healthy-sleep/how-to-lucid-dream
• Pacheco, D., & Pacheco, D. (2024, May 8). False awakenings. Sleep Foundation. https://www.sleepfoundation.org/dreams/false-awakening
• Sleep terrors (night terrors) – Symptoms and causes – Mayo Clinic. (2024, January 13). Mayo Clinic. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/sleep-terrors/symptoms-causes/syc 20353524

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Scientists Are Finally Figuring Out Why We Dream, And It's Probably Exactly What You'd Think

Dreaming is one of the strangest things that happens to us, and for as long as we have been recording history, we have been puzzling over why our minds are so active while we sleep.

Finally, new research claims to have evidence as to what dreaming is all about - and it will probably surprise no one.

According to a team from The Swansea University Sleep Lab in the UK, dreaming really does help us process the memories and emotions we experience during our waking lives.

This is not a new idea at all.

The hypothesis that dreaming was connected to waking life was floated by Sigmund Freud in the early 20th century - he called this phenomenon day residues . Many other studies since have expanded on the notion , indicating that a very real link exists.

But dreams are hard to study, because they take place entirely in the mind of someone unable to communicate in the moment.

Scientists don't have the tools to observe them directly - at least, not yet - instead having to rely on the dreamer's memories of their dreams; and, as we all know, that's not always easy to do.

The team's research, however, seems to have hit upon a winning formula, finding that the emotional intensity of a waking experience can be linked to the intensity of dreaming brain activity, and the content of the dream thereof.

They recruited 20 student volunteers for the study, all of whom were able to recall their dreams frequently.

First, they had to make detailed journals of their daily lives for 10 days, logging their major daily activities that took up large blocks of time; personally significant and emotional events; and any concerns that may have been on their minds.

For each of these, the participants had to record how it made them feel, and rate the intensity of that emotion using a numbered scale.

On the evening of the 10th day, they spent the first of several nights in the sleep lab being monitored with non-invasive electroencephalography caps. These were able to observe and record the activity of the brain waves associated with slow-wave sleep (large irregular activity, or LIA) and rapid-eye movement sleep (theta activity).

After 10 minutes of each of these sleep cycles, the researchers would wake the students and ask them what they were dreaming (which sounds like a nightmare, if you ask us). These dreams were then compared with the journals to see if there was any sort of correlation.

And here's the paydirt: there was. The number of events recorded in the diaries was linked to the intensity of theta waves - so the more a person had going on in their lives, the more intense their REM sleep - but not their slow-wave sleep.

In addition, dreams that had a higher emotional impact were more likely to be incorporated into the sleeper's dreams than boring, humdrum everyday stuff. And these correlations were only observed for recent experiences, too - there was no correlation between older waking life experiences and dream activity.

"This is the first finding that theta waves are related to dreaming about recent waking life, and the strongest evidence yet that dreaming is related to the processing that the brain is doing of recent memories," psychologist Mark Blagrove of Swansea University told New Scientist .

The next step in the research will be to use binaural beats to induce theta brain waves in sleeping subjects, to see if this in turn induces the sleeper to dream about their recent experiences.

If so, the researchers could have found a method of manipulating REM sleep and theta brain waves to encourage the memory and emotion processing that occur during this sleep phase - a sort of passive form of therapy.

The research was published last month in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience .

The Science Behind Dreams: How Do Our Nightly Visions Impact Our Waking Lives?

Dreams have long been a source of intrigue and wonder for scientists, philosophers, and dreamers everywhere.

Although no one knows what dreams are for, new studies shed light on the mental and neural processes that make dreams possible at night. Dreams greatly affect our real lives because they change how we feel and help us remember things. 

Understanding the Mechanisms of Dreams

Dreams mostly happen during the REM (Rapid Eye Movement) phase  of sleep, which is marked by more brain activity, fast eye movements, and brief muscle paralysis. The brain is active during REM sleep, but the body is still. People often have detailed, strange dreams that can make them sad.

According to recent neuroscience research, Some brain regions engaged during REM sleep include the amygdala, hippocampus, and visuospatial lobe. These areas of the mind regulate our perceptions, memories, and comprehension of the world. Dreams may be helpful for various things, including emotional regulation and problem-solving.

One popular idea is that dreams help us deal with and control our feelings. Dr. Rosalind Cartwright, known as the "Queen of Dreams," studied people who had marriage problems.

She discovered that people who dreamed about hard times could better handle their feelings when awake. This idea about "emotional regulation" says that dreams help the brain deal with unresolved feelings by making them less strong and affecting.

Dreams can also help you solve problems. According to research by Dr. Robert Stickgold of Harvard Medical School, those who dreamed about a virtual maze  activity performed far better on a second test than those who did not. This demonstrates how dreaming enhances our brain power and creativity by helping us to absorb and restructure our experiences.

READ ALSO: Recurring Dreams Meaning: Why Adults Who Frequently Experience This Have Worse Psychological Health?

What Memory Consolidation Does for You

Remembering things also heavily depends on dreams. While you sleep, particularly during the REM stage, the brain analyzes and absorbs fresh information. Therefore, long-term memory is converted from short-term memory.

Researchers have shown that recalling recent experiences strengthens and facilitates memory access when awake. In one study, people were shown pictures that made them feel strong emotions, and then their reactions were recorded after they slept.

People who dreamed about the pictures had less emotional responses when they saw them again. This suggests that REM sleep helps make emotional memories less painful, which makes them easier to deal with.

Dreaming is Vital for Overall Well-Being

From an evolutionary point of view, dreams may be like real-life fears that help us prepare for possible dangers. This " threat simulation theory " says that when we dream, we can practice handling dangerous events in a safe place, improving our ability to stay alive.

Dreams mean more than what psychologists and scientists say about them. They have deep cultural and personal meanings . These ideas have been used in myths, literature, and art for a long time.

They link our conscious and unconscious thinking. This is not the same as studying dreams. Everyone knows some signs, but only the mind knows what others mean.

As technology advances, scientists investigate the intricate connections between dreams, sleep, and brain function. Functional MRI and other imaging methods may enable us to grasp better and utilize our dreams' power by providing fresh perspectives.

Dreams are transient experiences vital to our mental and emotional well-being. They facilitate emotional management, problem-solving, memory aids, and navigating the bewildering mental landscape. As we continue to attempt to understand what dreams represent, we learn more about the brain and how it influences our everyday lives.

RELATED ARTICLE: Can You Control Your Dreams? Science Says Yes

Check out more news and information on Sleep  in Science Times.

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"To Sleep, Perchance to Dream'': A New Exploration of Dreaming

Cutting-edge research analyzes the phenomenon of dreaming..

Posted June 20, 2024 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk

• We may spend as much as a third of our lives dreaming.
• Erotic dreams are not necessarily evidence of a wish to be unfaithful or of repressed desire.
• Advertisers have found ways to infiltrate the dreams of consumers.

Review of This Is Why You Dream: What Your Sleeping Brain Reveals About Your Waking Life, by Rahul Jandial (Penguin Life).

Researchers have found that dreaming occurs at all stages of sleep, not just REM sleep. Therefore, according to Rahul Jandial, we may spend as much as a third of our lives dreaming.

In This Is Why You Dream , Jandial (a brain surgeon, neuroscientist , and author of Life on a Knife’s Edge , among other books) draws on cutting -edge research to provide an extraordinarily engaging and informative analysis of a mysterious phenomenon.

Dreaming, Jandial points out, occurs when the body is locked down and our executive network, which is responsible for logic, order, and reality testing, is switched off. With disbelief suspended, our imaginary network “spins memories, characters, knowledge, and emotion into coherent narratives,” dramatically different from anything the “waking brain” can produce.

Dreams, Jandial claims, are “often implausible and at other times profoundly moving” thought experiments. A human version of “stochastic resonance”—the injection of random noise to data to train computers to “think” outside the box—dreams are a stronger form of mind wandering , which take up almost half of our waking life, stimulate flexibility, creativity , and insights about ourselves and others.

The ability to dream, Jandial reveals, develops during childhood . At about age five, as they develop visual-spatial skills and a sense of themselves as unique and independent individuals, children appear as characters in their dreams. Their nightmares, which diminish at about age 10, feature monsters who threaten their newly acquired sense of self.

Nightmares and Erotic Dreams

For adolescents and adults, occasional nightmares are normal and harmless. Changes in frequency and intensity, especially if they involve replays of traumatic events, however, are cause for concern. Techniques using daytime plots, mental pictures, and rehearsals to rewrite nightmares, Jandial indicates, have disarmed them. And researchers have recently identified a molecule called neurotensin, which determines whether a memory is imprinted in the amygdala as negative or positive, a discovery that may lead to more effective treatment of people suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder ( PTSD ).

Like nightmares, erotic dreams are part of human nature. Men and women almost always cheat on their sexual partners in nightmares and are more inclined to bisexuality than in their waking lives. Stimulating the same intense physical pleasure as actual sex (because the brain sees no difference between them), as well as powerful emotions, including jealousy , joy, love, and sadness, these “explorations” are not necessarily evidence of a wish to be unfaithful or of repressed desire.

The Sleep-Entry Moment and Lucid Dreaming

Jandial cites studies demonstrating that “sleep entry,” the moment separating sleeping from waking, with its unique relationship between the executive network and the imaginary network, can be “a cocktail for creativity” and problem-solving, especially when a “targeted dream incubation device” gives sound cues at the optimal moment.

Jandial also devotes two chapters to “ lucid dreaming ,” an experience, once deemed impossible, of dreaming while knowing you are in a dream, and even controlling the action within the dream. In 1975, Jandial reveals, a volunteer in a sleep lab moved his eyes back and forth, left-right, left-right, when he became aware that he was dreaming, as he had been instructed to do. Peer-reviewed and then replicated, the experiment became the gold standard for lucid dream research. Combined with targeted incubation, lucid dreaming, during which individuals have even responded to yes-no questions and solved simple math problems, also has potential as a therapeutic tool.

Dream Infiltration by Advertisers

But there is a downside. Advertisers have already found ways to infiltrate the dreams of consumers. A few years ago, for example, a beer company invited people to participate in “potentially the largest sleep experiment ever” and share their results; 1.4 billion impressions were posted, and the company reported an 8 percent increase in sales. In a survey conducted by the American Marketing Association in 2021, 77 percent of 400 companies indicated they intended to deploy dream advertising within the next four years.

Advertisers, Jandial adds, may soon use smartphones, which have invaded our bedrooms, to offer shopping cues to dreamers. And, he asks, what’s to prevent governments “from engaging the sleeping minds of their subjects with propaganda?”

Little wonder, then, that scientists, ethicists, and public officials are discussing “neural rights” in international organizations like UNESCO. Chile has become the first country to heed the advice of Rafael Yuste, a Columbia University neuroscientist—“This is not science fiction. Let’s act before it’s too late”—by protecting brain activity and information in its constitution.

We are only beginning to understand the contributions sleeping brains can make to human health and happiness , Jandial concludes, and we must do whatever is necessary to “protect the sanctity of our dreams.”

Glenn C. Altschuler, Ph.D. , is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.

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Week 3 at DREAM

As a member of Dream of Detroit, I often find myself working and meeting at various coffee shops across the city. One of my favorite spots (I’ve heard about this coffee shop since joining the DREAM team) is The Congregation. It originally was a church then was transformed into a coffee shop after the building was damaged by fire. 

In our community meetings, my roommate’s mentor, who is actively involved with Keep Growing Detroit (KGD), has shared information about this incredible non-profit organization. Founded in 2013, Keep Growing Detroit is dedicated to supporting gardeners and farmers within Detroit, Hamtramck, and Highland Park. 

I am inspired by the mission of Keep Growing Detroit and aspire to deepen my involvement with them one day. Whether it’s by meeting more community members, volunteering, or securing an internship, I look forward to contributing to their impactful work and learning even more about their work and mission.

1 thought on “Week 3 at DREAM”

It’s so cool that you try out new coffee shops as part of your project, I’ll have to give the Congregation a try!

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