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

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.

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

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

These newly discovered periods of “rapid, jerky eye movements,” as Aserinsky and Kleitman called them, were not just related to dreaming. We now know that the brain’s normally careful regulation of a host of bodily functions seems to go offline during REM sleep. Heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing all vary widely during REM sleep. Not only th

As you might imagine, almost all REM dreams fall into one of these two categories—90 to 100 percent, depending on the study. In contrast, self-representation is seen in only two-thirds of non-REM dream reports and in somewhere between a quarter and two-thirds of sleep-onset hypnagogic dreams, depending on exactly how long after sleep onset the repo

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

why we dream. We call this model NEXTUP, which stands for “Network Exploration to Understand Possibilities.”

In a very real sense, our consciousness during dreams enfolds the virtual world that surrounds us; the world becomes a part of our consciousness.

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