When Brains Dream: Understanding the Science and Mystery of Our Dreaming Minds: Exploring the Science and Mystery of Sleep

we also find a sub-network that helps us recall past events and imagine future ones, another that helps us navigate through space, and yet another that helps us interpret the words and actions of others. And these are the mental functions associated with mind wandering.

Choose a night when you are not overly tired or under the influence of substances that may negatively affect your sleep, such as alcohol, sleeping pills, or recreational drugs. 2.Take a few minutes to think about the problem you want to target in your dreams. You may find it helpful to ask yourself some questions like these: Am I ready to act on th

Other models have proposed that by combining negatively toned dream imagery with muscle paralysis, REM sleep dreaming carries out an adaptive “desomatization” function that uncouples emotions from their underlying physiology. Indeed, blood pressure, heart rate, and breathing patterns are often uncoupled from ongoing dream emotions.

Whenever the waking brain doesn’t have to focus on some specific task, it activates the default mode network, identifies ongoing, incomplete mental processes—those needing further attention—and tries to imagine ways to complete them. Sometimes it completes the process shortly after the problem arises, making decisions without our ever realizing it.

Jung also believed that dreams could have an anticipatory or “prospective” function. By tracking the dreamer’s past, the unconscious processes underlying dream formation could present the individual with visions of probable situations and challenges, unmapped potentials, or imaginable results that lay in the dreamer’s future.

When the brain dreams, how does it create an experience of seeing, hearing, or feeling something that’s as realistic as in waking life? Sebastian is not alone in being confused, and to do justice to the story of dreaming, we must address this problem of what dreams are.

only to find elements from both trips combined into a single dream.

Sleep provides a unique benefit for all of these different forms of memory evolution. But the different stages of sleep don’t contribute equally. For example, overnight improvement on the typing task depends on how much N2 sleep we get, especially late in the night. Most verbal memory tasks depend on how much N3 sleep we get, while emotional memory

dreams. The function of these N2 dreams is probably intermediate as well. Although REM sleep appears to be seeking weak, often unexpected, remote associations that might be usefully related to memories of unresolved concerns from the day, N2 dreams appear to search for more obviously related episodic memories from the recent past.

our original questions—what dreams are, where they come from, what they mean, and what they’re for.