"When we sleep, the brain does a lot of work, taking what we've learned, what we've encoded as new memories in the last day, and trying to figure out what they mean," Stickgold says. Many researchers believe dreams have a close relationship to the way our brains process memories. The finding supports other research finding that "we are using our brains the same when we're dreaming when we're awake," Stickgold says. These experiences activated the same brain circuits that become active when an awake person sees a face or experiences movement. The researchers also found that brain activity could reveal some details of a dream, like whether it included a face or movement. Sleep studies also have led researchers to an area of the brain they suspect is responsible for generating dreams. There's growing evidence that dreams also can occur during non-REM sleep, though these dreams tend to be less vivid. He says many of these "mentation reports" are more fragmented and less likely to contain narrative elements than what most people consider a dream.Īnd scientists have revised an old assumption that dreams occur only during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. When a person is woken up, they report some sort of mental activity about 80 percent of the time, Stickgold says. More evidence comes from sleep studies in which people are repeatedly awakened, which greatly increases the chance they will remember a dream or thought. Some of the evidence for this comes from sleep studies showing many periods during the night when signals from the brain suggest a person is thinking. "I am not convinced that there is ever a time when we're asleep that we don't have some form of consciousness going on," Stickgold says.
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