Why we dream, what dreams do, and how researchers study them.
Dream Research
There is no consensus, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. But the competing explanations are more interesting than the certainty on offer, and they are not all mutually exclusive.
Dream Research
Learning does not end when you stop studying. A substantial part of it happens while you are unconscious, in a process that can be observed, disrupted, and — with a well-timed sound — steered.
Dream Research
Everyone dreams. Recall varies enormously between people, and the differences are measurable in brain activity, personality, and the simple question of how you wake up.
Dream Research
The answer depends entirely on when sight was lost, and the pattern tells us something important about where dream imagery comes from.
Dream Research
David Foulkes spent decades waking children in a sleep laboratory. What he found contradicted almost everything assumed about childhood imagination — and remains the field's most important longitudinal study.
Dream Research
The benzene ring, the periodic table, the sewing machine needle, the structure of a Beatles song. Some of these stories are true, several are embellished, and the controlled evidence points somewhere subtler.
Dream Research
Dream content is not stable across a life. Three well-documented periods change it markedly, and what changes tells us something about what dreaming is doing.
Dream Research
Dream sharing is near-universal across cultures, and listening to someone else's dream is famously tedious. Both facts have explanations, and the second one has an exception.
Dream Research
REM sleep is found across mammals and birds, and rats appear to replay the routes they ran that day. Whether any of that involves experience is a question the evidence cannot reach.
Dream Research
For decades REM sleep and dreaming were treated as the same thing. Patients whose brain damage abolished one while leaving the other intact showed that they are not.
Dream Research
The strangest feature of dreams is not their content but the dreamer's complete failure to notice it. That failure has a location in the brain and a plausible explanation.
Dream Research
Some people have kept dream records for decades, and researchers have analysed them quantitatively. The results are less mystical and more interesting than the practice usually promises.
Dream Research
Sleep architecture is measurably different in several psychiatric conditions, and so is dream content. In depression the REM changes are so consistent they were once proposed as a diagnostic marker.
