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

sleeping brain performs multiple forms of memory evolution. It selects recent salient memories for nocturnal processing, prioritizing emotional memories but also processing unemotional ones; it stabilizes and strengthens some memories while extracting rules and gist from others; and it integrates new memories into older, preexisting knowledge netwo

He concludes that what counts “is whether the novelty . . . is accepted for inclusion in the domain.”7 This definition implies that the product of the creative act must be of some universal value or significance—a demanding constraint, indeed.

The multifaceted, integrative approach to dreams espoused by De Sanctis was perhaps best exemplified when he wrote that to be properly understood and interpreted, a dream had to be viewed as a mathematical sum: “The fundamental state of the dreamer (past experiences, intelligence, character, old habits) + the state of the moment (aspirations, passi

For centuries, dreams were explained within religious and metaphysical belief systems and often viewed as supernatural experiences that presaged future events. Building on the intellectual traditions of Aristotle and Descartes, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophers started to examine dreams in an increasingly rational, secularized fashion

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

Saint-Denys also proposed mechanisms by which images derived from ideas and memories could meld into one another. One of his core concepts was called abstractions, a reference to how the mind could transfer characteristics or qualities of one person or object to another. He gave the example of how the thought of an orange could give rise to differe

Take a look at people walking down the street, driving in their cars, eating alone in restaurants and cafes. Not so long ago, these people wouldn’t be doing anything else. Their minds would wander and they would daydream; their DMN would be active, and, although they were totally unaware of it, they would be tagging recent memories for processing l

Much like the process used in modern laboratory studies of dreams, Calkins started her experiment by using an alarm clock to wake herself and her male subject at different times during the night. This method not only increased her chances of getting a dream report but also let her examine whether the recall and vividness of dreams changed across th

Thus, emotionally engaged narrative dreaming is required for the full exploration, evaluation, and strengthening of novel associations relevant to our ongoing concerns. This process, in a nutshell, is the biological function of dreaming.

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