NERDING OUT
BY JENNY BROWN
MAYBE YOU DON’T remember your dreams, or maybe you wake up with a sense that you’ve dreamed but can’t recall the content (that’s called having a “white dream”). Regardless, virtually all humans—and possibly animals, birds, fish, and insects too—enter a strange hallucinatory world while asleep. Dreams occur throughout the night, but the longest and most bizarre happen during the REM cycle. Let’s peek at what’s going on.
STILL BODY, WILD MIND
Your body is almost totally paralyzed during REM sleep, to prevent you from acting out your dreams. The only part of you that moves is your eyes, which dart quickly left and right (REM stands for “rapid eye movement”). Meanwhile, the emotional regions of your brain are even more fired up than they are during waking life. And the prefrontal cortex—the part that controls logic—goes quiet.
UNDERLYING MEANING
Despite what dream dictionaries say, there’s no symbolic code behind our nightly visions. (Dreams of being chased are the most common, but the precise meaning is unique to everyone.) They do serve critical functions, though, according to the modern fi eld of dream science. One theory: They’re overnight therapy. Your dreams likely relate to an emotional concern, and during REM, your brain doesn’t produce the stress hormone noradrenaline, which means you can work through feelings in a “safe space.” Another theory: They help you process the world more creatively. Freed from the rational constraints of the prefrontal cortex, your brain can draw kooky connections between your current life and distant memories (why you dream about high school when you have a work project due, say) to gain insights.
WEIRD SCIENCE
Modern technology is helping dream research advance in, well, kind of creepy ways. Through MRI scans, scientists in Japan were able to roughly “read” people’s dreams. By observing which areas of the brain lit up, they described with 60% accuracy what people were seeing in their sleep!
A WORLD OF ITS OWN
Scientists are also enlisting lucid dreamers—people who are aware they’re asleep—to help them get a view from within. While these dreamers are in control of themselves, they can’t usually steer the plot, setting, and, especially, people in their dreams. In one experiment, lucid dreamers asked characters they met to solve basic math problems, and most struggled to do so or just refused. One started to cry! The takeaway? The dream world remains as mysterious and unpredictable as the real one. And math is hard.
Illustration by Kate Dehler