research studies on dreams

This Web site contains everything needed to conduct scientific studies of dreams using a system of .

or interested in doing quantitative research should check out the page.  If you'd like a multimedia of some of our methods and findings, you can watch Bill Domhoff's 2017 lecture entitled " ," which is one of several videos featured on our .  might be interested in a paper of ours that points out how in their coverage of dream research.

Also of note is our companion site, , where you can do keyword searches on thousands of .

( also available)

Contents of This Site

Resources for Scientists

For people doing their own studies

Dream Library

Published and unpublished articles, books, and lecture notes about dream research

DreamSAT for Excel

A spreadsheet for entering and analyzing dream coding data

Interesting Findings

Established results and recent projects

Recorded lectures and interviews featuring Bill Domhoff , and other dream-related videos

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A new way to control experimentation with dreams

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The study of dreams has entered the modern era in exciting ways, and researchers from MIT and other institutions have created a community dedicated to advancing the field, lending it legitimacy and expanding further research opportunities.    

In a new paper , researchers from the Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces group introduce a novel method called “ Targeted Dream Incubation ” (TDI). This protocol, implemented through an app in conjunction with a wearable sleep-tracking sensor device, not only helps record dream reports, but also guides dreams toward particular themes by repeating targeted information at sleep onset, thereby enabling incorporation of this information into dream content. The TDI method and accompanying technology serve as tools for controlled experimentation in dream study, widening avenues for research into how dreams impact emotion, creativity, memory, and beyond.

The paper, “Dormio: A Targeted Dream Incubation Device,” is co-authored by lead researcher Adam Haar Horowitz and professor of media arts and sciences Pattie Maes, who is also head of the Fluid Interfaces group. Additional authors on the paper are Tony J. Cunningham, postdoc at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, and Robert Stickgold, director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

Previous neuroscience studies from researchers such as sleep and cognitive sciences expert Stickgold show that hypnagogia (the earliest sleep stage) is similar to the REM stage in terms of brainwaves and experience; however, unlike REM, individuals can still hear audio during hypnagogia while they dream. 

“This state of mind is trippy, loose, flexible, and divergent,” explains Haar Horowitz. “It’s like turning the notch up high on mind-wandering and making it immersive — being pushed and pulled with new sensations like your body floating and falling, with your thoughts quickly snapping in and out of control.”

To facilitate the TDI protocol, an interdisciplinary team at the Media Lab designed and developed Dormio , a sleep-tracking device that can alter dreams by tracking hypnagogia and then delivering audio cues based on incoming physiological data, at precise times in the sleep cycle, to make dream direction possible. Upon awakening, a person’s guided dream content can be used to complete tasks such as creative story writing, and compared experimentally to waking thought content.

“Dormio takes dream research to a new level, interacting directly with an individual’s dreaming brain and manipulating the actual content of their dreams,” says Stickgold. “The potential value of Dormio for enhancing learning and creativity are literally mind-blowing.”

The Media Lab team’s first pilot study using Dormio demonstrated dream incubation and creativity augmentation in six people, and was presented alt.CHI in 2018. Multiple scientists began reaching out to the team expressing interest in replicating the dream-control research. These requests led to the first Dream Engineering workshop, which was held at the Media Lab in January 2019, organized by Maes, Haar Horowitz, and Judith Amores from the Fluid Interfaces group, and Michelle Carr, visiting researcher from the University of Rochester Sleep and Neurophysiology Laboratory. The workshop brought together many of the world’s leading dream researchers, including pioneers such as Deirdre Barrett, Bjorn Rasch, Ken Paller, and Stephen LaBerge, to brainstorm new technologies for studying, recording, and influencing dreams. 

The talks and technologies presented at the workshop further led to a Special Issue on Dream Engineering for the journal Consciousness and Cognition , with Maes, Haar Horowitz, Amores, and Carr serving as guest editors.

“Most sleep and dream studies have so far been limited to university sleep labs and have been very expensive, as well as cumbersome, for both researchers and participants,” says Maes. “Our research group is excited to be pioneering new, compact, and cheap technologies for studying sleep and interfacing with dreams, thereby opening up opportunities for more studies to happen and for these experiments to take place in natural settings. Apart from benefiting scientists, this work has the potential to lead to new commercial technologies that go beyond sleep tracking to issue interventions that affect sleep onset, sleep quality, sleep-based memory consolidation, and learning.”

The research itself is central to Haar Horowitz’s thesis work in the Program of Media Arts and Sciences. This past year, he ran a larger dream study with 50 subjects, which replicated and extended the results of the previous study.

“We showed that dream incubation is tied to performance benefits on three tests of creativity, by both objective and subjective metrics,” Haar Horowitz states. “Dreaming about a specific theme seems to offer benefits post-sleep, such as on creativity tasks related to this theme. This is unsurprising in light of historical figures like Mary Shelley or Salvador Dalí, who were inspired creatively by their dreams. The difference here is that we induce these creatively beneficial dreams on purpose, in a targeted manner.”

An enhanced Dormio device has now also been built, as well as an analysis platform, streaming platform, an iOS app for audio capture and streaming, and a web app for audio capture, storage, and streaming. These mobile and online platforms allow the TDI method to be shared through a variety of open source technologies.

A number of other universities have likewise begun related Dormio studies; these include Duke University, Boston College, Harvard University, the University of Rochester, and the University of Chicago.

The Media Lab research team is also leading collaborations with artists, using dreams to create new artwork and augment artistic creativity. This work, which mixes sleep science and media art, has been shown at the Beijing Biennale and Ars Electronica festival, and a new collaboration with installation artist Carsten Holler looks to create an overnight experimental art piece.

The Dormio development team includes researchers Haar Horowitz, Tomás Vega, Ishaan Grover, Pedro Reynolds-Cuéllar, Oscar Rosello, Abhinandan Jain, and Eyal Perry, along with students in the MIT Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program Matthew Ha, Christina Chen, and Kathleen Esfahany.

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MIT researchers have developed a new wearable device, called Dormio, that can be used to record and even guide a person’s dreams, reports Mashable . Dormio is aimed at providing “insights into how dreams work and their effect on various things like memory, emotion, creativity.”

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Scientists break through the wall of sleep to the untapped world of dreams

NSF-supported researchers achieve two-way communication with lucidly dreaming people, creating a new method for studying the human mind that might lead to innovative ways of learning and problem-solving.

"Eight minus six … two”

It’s not exactly “one small step for man,” but that humble mathematical message is extraordinary in its own way. The first part — “eight minus six” — was transmitted by a scientist to a place just as exotic as the moon yet frequented by each of us. The response — “two” — came from the mind of a sleeping research subject as he snoozed in a neuroscience laboratory outside Chicago.

You see, “eight minus six... two” is a dialogue between two people — one of whom was asleep and dreaming .

“It’s authentic communication,” says cognitive neuroscientist Ken Paller , who oversees the laboratory where this groundbreaking communication took place. “It can be done.”

Researchers at Paller’s lab at Northwestern University in Illinois, along with researchers in France, Germany and the Netherlands, have independently demonstrated two-way communication with people as they are lucidly dreaming during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. Supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the breakthrough was achieved in the U.S. by Karen Konkoly, Paller’s doctoral student, and Christopher Mazurek, a volunteer research participant at the time of the study — and one of the first people to ever engage in a real-time dialogue from within a dream.

This discovery holds tantalizing possibilities for expanding our understanding of how our minds work. It may even lead to methods that could improve our ability to learn difficult skills or solve complex problems.

And, with the help of a new smartphone app from Paller’s lab, you could even try it at home.

The windows to the soul (and dreams)

Research into the fundamental nature of dreams, and what the human mind can do while dreaming, has been limited by a seemingly unsolvable problem: you can’t get much information about someone’s dream while they’re actually having the dream. “All we have are the stories people tell when they wake up,” says Paller. That deficiency has left an entire state of consciousness largely unexplored.

The novel methods pioneered by Konkoly, Paller and their colleagues are designed to solve this problem and open entirely new areas of research focused on the dreaming mind. Konkoly describes the possibilities: “Right now, we conduct psychology experiments with people who are awake. With two-way communication [during dreams], we could conduct some of the same experiments while people are sleeping. It could really expand our view of consciousness and what the mind is capable of.”

But, how can a dreaming research subject communicate if they can’t even move, let alone speak, while sleeping? The answer requires so me explanation about what happens in our mind during sleep.

Scientists have identified the different stages of sleep by monitoring electrical signals from the brain using electroencephalography, or EEG, and from other places in the body. When the electrical signals are recorded and plotted, they chart the course our mind takes as we progress through the stages of sleep.

As you sleep, your mind transitions through several different stages, from light sleep to deep sleep and eventually to REM sleep. REM sleep is notable not just for what’s moving — our eyes — but what isn’t . Although our mind is active and dreams often occur during REM sleep, our bodies are almost completely paralyzed. That presents an obvious challenge for communications since we can’t move the body parts we typically use to communicate. As the name "rapid eye movement" suggests, however, there is an exception.

During REM sleep, our eyes move around behind our eyelids in a seemingly random fashion, which often corresponds to the sleeper “looking” at various imagined things in their dream. If you dream that you’re looking at something, your closed eyes move correspondingly as if you were looking at something while awake.

That phenomenon led researchers to a key insight: If eye movement were consciously controlled, the dreamer’s eyes could become a vehicle for getting a message to the waking world.  

He’s lucid! Let’s do math

Who among us hasn’t wished we could fly like a bird? Or walk on another planet? So-called lucid dreamers can do these things and more from the comfort of their own bed. Accomplished lucid dreamers have reported being able to regularly achieve awareness in their dreams and even “programming” themselves to have dreams about specific activities or locations.

Christopher Mazurek was not one of those people.

“I had no experience with lucid dreaming,” says Mazurek, an undergraduate student at Northwestern University and now research assistant in Paller’s sleep lab. At the time, he was a volunteer research participant. “Before I entered the lab, I never had anything near a lucid dream.”

To prepare Mazurek and the other U.S. volunteers, Konkoly wired each participant with electrodes that sense brain activity through the scalp, behind the ears, on the chin and — critically — near the eyes. Those would allow the researchers to monitor and record even slight eye movements. “When your eyes move in their sockets, it creates an electrical current which is detected by the electrodes and recorded,” says Konkoly.

Konkoly also trained each research participant to help them achieve lucidity and instructed them on what to do if they succeeded. That included learning to recognize the specific sound she would play when they entered REM sleep, prompting the participants to realize they’re dreaming and thus become lucid. The participants also learned the distinct response signal they should produce from within their dream: moving their eyes from left to right multiple times.

“Repeatedly looking from left to right is a very distinctive eye movement and it stands out from other eye movements during REM sleep,” says Konkoly. As she carefully watched the EEG and saw Mazurek progressing through the stages of sleep and into REM sleep, she spotted the repeating left-right signal on the monitor as Mazurek signaled his awareness.

“He’s lucid!” remembers Konkoly . “Let’s do math.”

Konkoly played a randomly selected audio recording: "eight minus six." Mazurek knew he would be presented with simple math problems but did not know which problems would be selected. Some of the international labs in the study used different methods to send messages to their dreaming subjects, such as flashing lights in Morse code which the sleepers could perceive through their closed eyelids and manifest in their dream. In most of the labs, the research participants were trained to move their “dream eyes” to signal their answer.

A few seconds later, Konkoly saw Mazurek’s response written among the peaks and valleys of his eyes’ electrical signals: “Two.” Konkoly sent another randomly selected math problem and once again received a correct response. And what was Mazurek dreaming about during this groundbreaking exchange between two worlds?

“I dreamed I was sleeping in the lab when I heard her question,” he says. Despite that rather mundane dreamscape, “It still blew me away how different and intense and odd it all felt. It was different than anything I could have imagined.”

To obtain independent verification of their results, Konkoly sent the recorded data to an expert “sleep scorer.” Like an astrophysicist who can tell you what elements are in a distant star by deciphering the colored light recorded in a spectrograph, a sleep scorer is trained to “read” the recorded electrical signals and analyze their complex patterns. The sleep scorer confirmed that Mazurek was indeed in REM sleep during the exchange.

While Mazurek was the first in Paller’s lab to achieve two-way communication in a dream, two more participants later accomplished that same feat. Meanwhile, researchers in France, Germany and the Netherlands were independently testing methods for two-way communication in dreams and reported that three additional individuals were able to provide correct responses while dreaming. The collective results from all the laboratories are now published in the journal Current Biology .

Sleep on it

“Why would you want to do math in your sleep?” quips Konkoly. “I get that comment sometimes.”

Joking aside, researchers have a number of ideas for how this discovery could be expanded and applied. “There’s evidence that lucid dreaming is a great place to practice skills compared to when you're awake," says Konkoly. "For example, you could slow down time so you could practice a skill in more detail or practice something without having any fear of the repercussions of failing."

Imagine a surgeon attempting to perfect a technique used in open heart surgery — in a dream. 

"There are many unexplored neurobiological aspects to learning and training during REM sleep. But without two-way communication, you can't conduct a proper controlled experiment to understand it," she adds.

“ People say 'sleep on it,” when grappling with a hard problem," says Paller, in reference to his research published in 2019 , which showed people who were cued to think about puzzles during sleep exhibited substantial improvement in finding solutions. "There's some sense that sleep can help you find an answer to a problem that's vexing you. Our two-way communication method provides hope for improving that. If you're working on a problem, can you be reminded of that problem during a dream and come up with a creative answer more easily?

"From run of the mill personal problems to complex global problems, we need creative solutions. If we can help people come up with the answers more easily, we should do that," he says.

Paller's lab has also developed a smartphone app that aims to make it easier for people to achieve lucidity, which could enable anyone to phone home from the world of dreams without visiting a sleep laboratory. You can learn how to get the app and give it a try through Paller's cognitive neuroscience website .

Our full potential

Although many aspects of the sleeping mind remain a mystery, researchers across a variety of scientific disciplines are utilizing new techniques and analytical methods to better understand it. “Sleep is valuable for our health in ways we’ve yet to come to grips with,” says Paller. For example, neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, recently uncovered evidence showing that sleep plays a critical role in how our brains flush out beta-amyloid , a toxic substance that contributes to the onset of Alzheimer's disease.

“REM sleep is a unique state of consciousness,” adds Konkoly. “We spend a lot of time in it and yet no one really understands its full potential. We want to know how it works.”

The pioneering work of Konkoly, Paller and their colleagues provides an entirely new method that scientists can use to investigate how sleep and dreams affect health and mental abilities.

And who knows? Perhaps the idea of conversing with someone from within a dream may one day be as routine as sending a text message on your phone:

“Can I snooze five more minutes? I’ve almost figured out this problem...”

[Other contributors to this discovery include researchers at Osnabrück University in Germany, Sorbonne University in Paris, and Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands. NSF supported the researchers at Northwestern University in the U.S.]

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How scientists are studying dreams in the lab

Neuroimaging, sleepwalking, coin tosses.

By Angela Chen

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Once, studying dreams was the domain of mystics, prophets, and a certain sex-obsessed Austrian psychoanalyst. With neuroimaging techniques and better technology, dreams have become a focus of scientific research, from efforts to record dreams to studies investigating how lucid dreaming might be beneficial to mental health.

Journalist Alice Robb is the author of Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey . The Verge spoke with Robb about theories of dreams, the most provocative studies, and the many questions that remain in the field.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Can you start by giving me a brief intellectual history of dreams? Before our modern scientific understanding, what were people’s theories of dreams?

If you look throughout history, you see people taking dreams really seriously. Dream diaries are some of the oldest examples of literature, and dreams in the Bible are often treated as prophetic. In the late 19th and early 20th century, Freud comes along and puts dreams at the center of psychoanalysis, arguing that they’re the royal road to the unconscious, and analysts should ask patients about them, and by unpacking them, you can get to the core of a patient’s issues. You see the idea taking off. On the flip side, Freud also said that dreams are all about sex — “a room represents a woman because it has an entrance” — which perhaps didn’t do dreams a favor.

Another part of the story is that the science of sleep is relatively new. Rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep was only discovered in the 1950s. And until then, most scientists thought that sleep was just a time when your brain turned off, and there wasn’t much to study. Or even if there was, they didn’t have a way to study it. So a big part of the story is also advances in technology and neuroimaging enabling us to study sleep and dreams. And now, you see people becoming much more aware of sleep as important for health, and so dreams and sleep are going to the lab.

From a very reductionist, neuroscientific point of view, what’s happening in the brain when we dream? What’s the difference between dreams at night and daydreaming and fantasy?

It’s time when the frontal lobe, the logic centers, are less activated. There’s less rational thinking. At the same time, dopamine is surging and people are often having intense emotional experiences.

Daydreaming, mind wandering, night dreaming — you can think of them as all on a spectrum. They are all involving the default mode network, the part of the brain that gets involved when everything else has quieted down, and you’re not actively engaged in something. Both mind-wandering and daydreams are involving the medial prefrontal cortex and medial temporal lobe. During REM dreams, you’re also the visual cortex so you’re having these more intensely visual experiences. Sight is the sense that’s more involved than, say, hearing or smell or touch.

Do people really smell things in dreams? I don’t believe I have, though I also generally have a weak sense of smell.

I do think smell is rare in dreams. I don’t have a stat off the top of my head, but dreams are predominantly visual, even for people who are blind, depending on what age they lost their sight. If they lost their sight after around the age of five, they can experience sight in dreams.

Nowadays, what are the main psychological theories for dreams? I’m assuming Freud is no longer in fashion?

Certain ideas of Freud’s have been borne out. One idea is that you are dreaming about things you are suppressing during the day, and there is actually research on something called the “ dream rebound effect .” The psychologist Daniel Wegner found that if people were told not to focus on something before going to bed, they’re more likely to dream about it. He told one group of students to focus on a target person before bed and told another group of students about this target person and found that the group that was trying to avoid those thoughts were actually reporting more dreams about the person.

There’s a theory from evolutionary psychology that’s pretty popular, and it argues that dreams have a survival function. They give us a chance to practice for things we’re stressed out about in real life. That would explain why dreams are predominantly negative. Dreams tend to be much more about anxiety than about pleasure and involve a lot of intense feelings and fear. The idea is that we wake up, and we’re more prepared to tackle the things we faced in our nightmares. That would also maybe explain why dreams tend to involve more primal settings. There are a lot of actions like running around and being chased, elaborate themes that don’t have much to do with our lives if we live in cities. We’re less likely to have dreams about reading and writing and activities that are more recent developments.

What tools are scientists using to study dreams? Do you have favorite studies?

There are a lot of indirect ways that scientists have found to study dreams, like studying the actions of sleepwalkers or putting recording devices in people’s rooms and catching the utterances that they make during sleep talking and analyzing the language of that.

Neuroimaging studies and studies of rats with electrodes have been important. Some of the first research on memory consolidation and dreams comes from rat studies. Matt Wilson, who’s at MIT, was trying to study memory in rats as they stepped into a maze. They went back to sleep and he noticed through the monitor that he had happened to leave on that their neurons were firing again, as if they were awake and running through the maze when they were in fact asleep. They’re replaying the path that they’ve taken through the day.

Building off that, other scientists ran an experiment where they released rats into a maze. The rats would run around randomly with no preference for any area. If the scientists gave them pleasurable stimulation while the rats were replaying a certain part of the maze during sleep, when the rat wakes up they tend to gravitate more toward that place.

Are there certain big questions that everyone in the field is trying to work on?

There’s definitely a lot of questions that are still unanswered. There’s no formula to determine why we have a certain dream on a certain night, why exactly we’re pulling different memories and mixing them up in the way that they appear.

There’s some really interesting new efforts to improve our ability to record dreams. One of the things that has held dream research back is that they’re so hard to study. Either you are asking people what they dreamed about, which obviously isn’t a perfect way to collect data, or you’re doing brain scans that you can only see, you can’t correlate perfectly to the actual dream content.

There was a Japanese study a few years ago where a group was actually able to create a very crude dream reading device . They scanned people’s brains while they were awake and thinking about certain objects and characters — like a man, a woman, computer, food — and then were able to look at those patterns and match them loosely to what they were thinking about when they were asleep. That correlated pretty well with the subject’s own dream reports.

There’s also a handful of researchers focusing on lucid dreaming. Scientists are looking at how we can induce lucid dreams more reliably, as well as clinical applications of lucid dreaming. I met one woman who used her lucid dreams to hypnotize herself and tell herself that she wouldn’t be anxious anymore. She said that had a positive effect on her waking state.

Another question is: if you rehearse for something in a lucid dream, how does that compare to practicing a task while you’re awake? There was one small study where students had a task tossing a coin in a cup and taking that and trying to have a lucid dream about that to see how effective that was .

That’s interesting, though I hate the idea that now I should be working in my dreams, too. What was the result of coin study?

Forty people tried to toss a coin into a cup about six feet away, and then, afterward, one group was allowed to practice in waking life, another tried to practice in a lucid dream and a control group did nothing. Practicing in real life helped the most, then the lucid dreaming group.

Dream research is typically considered a bit woo-woo. Do you feel like dream researcher is moving into the mainstream?

Dream researchers are definitely gaining more and more respectability, and it’s becoming a legitimate topic of study, as it deserves to be. But it’s still hard to get around the fact that dreams lend themselves to some theorizing that not all areas of study do. For example, I went to a conference in the Netherlands called the International Association for the Study of Dreams that has both people who are hard scientists and also people leading groups for dream analysis. It can be hard to disentangle the science from some of the more mystical ideas.

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Frontiers for Young Minds

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The Science of Dreams

Dreams are a common experience. Some are scary, some are funny. Recent research into how the brain works helps us understand why we dream. Strange combinations of ideas in our dreams may make us more creative and give us ideas that help us to solve problems. Or, when memories from the day are repeated in the brain during sleep, memories may get stronger. Dreams may also improve our moods. Together, these studies show that dreams and sleep are important for performing well when we are awake.

When she was 8, my daughter told me about one of her dreams. She was in a spaceship with some animals. Although she knew she was in a spaceship in her dream, when telling me about the dream, she realized the spaceship was actually a washing machine. At times, she and the animals would be out in space, but they also came back to earth. She told me the dream with a laugh and then moved on with her day, ignoring the crazy animals and spaceships that entertained her in her sleep.

Since we remember our dreams and then often forget them, what is their purpose? Why do we dream about the things we do? New research tools, particularly those that can be used to investigate the brain, are being used to answer these questions.

What Are Dreams?

Although it is hard to define what a dream is, for the purpose of this article, we will define dreams as our thoughts during sleep that we recall when we wake up. So, sleeping dreams are not the same as “daydreaming.” Dreams are mostly visual (made up of scenes and faces; sound, taste, and smell are rare in dreams [ 1 ]). Dreams can range from truly strange to rather boring, snapshots from a recent event.

To study dreams, scientists need a measure of dreaming. Most studies use dream reports (a person writes out her dreams when she wakes up) or questionnaires (a person answers questions like “How many dreams have you recalled in the past month?” [ 2 ]). Dreams are more likely to be recalled when a person is woken up from REM sleep. REM sleep is a type of sleep that is named for the rapid eye movements that can be measured during this stage of sleep. We do not dream as much in non-REM sleep, the sleep stages that make up the rest of the night, and dream reports from non-REM sleep are often less strange.

Dream frequency (how often dreams happen) and content (what dreams are about) is very different for everyone, and there are many reasons why this may be true. For example, you will remember dreams more if you are woken up by someone or by an alarm clock. This might be because you can still recall that dream memory while it is fresh but, if you wake up on your own, you will transition through a few sleep stages and possibly lose that dream memory. Dream recall changes with age, too. Older people are less likely to report dreaming. This could also be related to memory: since older people have weaker memories, it could be that they dream but cannot remember their dreams by the time they wake up. A brain area called the medial prefrontal cortex is also related to dream recall. If this brain area is damaged, the person recalls few dreams, which may mean the person dreams less (or not at all). Also, how tightly packed the brain cells are in the medial prefrontal cortex can vary from person to person, which may cause some healthy people to dream more or less than other healthy people. There are also genes that affect how much REM sleep people get. People with less REM sleep may not have the strange dreams that tend to come in REM. So, how long you sleep, your age, and your genetics may all explain why you dream more or less than someone else.

Do dreams actually happen while we sleep, or are they ideas that come to us when we wake up and we just “feel” like it happened during sleep? A recent study using a type of brain imaging called magnetic resonance imaging or (MRI: Read more in the Young Minds article “How Is Magnetic Resonance Imaging Used to Learn About the Brain?” [ 3 ]) helped answer this question ( Figure 1A ). The scientists made maps of the brain activity that occurred when people looked at pictures of things—keys, beds, airplanes. Later, the people in the study slept in the MRI machine. The scientists matched the pattern of brain activity from the people as they slept to brain activity patterns for the pictures they viewed earlier, and then chose the best match ( Figures 1B,C ). This match predicted what the person said they dreamed about 60% of the time. Although 60% is not perfect, it is better than guessing! [ 4 ]. This means that dreams are created in the brain during sleep.

• Figure 1 - (A) Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a way to investigate the brain.
• The person lies on a bed inside a giant magnet. (B) MRI can measure the structure of the brain and the areas of the brain that are active. (C) MRI was used to measure dreaming. First, while the participant was awake, they viewed thousands of pictures in the MRI. This told scientists the specific brain responses to specific pictures. Later, when the participant slept in the MRI, scientists measured the brain activity patterns and matched this to the brain responses to the pictures the participant saw when they were awake. Scientists guessed that the best match would tell them what the participant was dreaming about. By asking the participant about their dreams in the MRI, scientists found that the dreams did tend to match the pictures predicted by the brain activity.

Dreams Support Memories

What is the purpose of our dreams? Researchers have found that sleep is important for memory (see this Frontiers for Young Minds article ; “Thanks for the Memories…” [ 5 ]). Memories move from temporary storage in the hippocampus , a brain structure that is very important for short-term memory, to permanent storage in other parts of the brain. This makes the memories easier to remember later. Memories improve with sleep because the memories are replayed during sleep [ 6 ]. If you want to learn all the words to your favorite scene in a movie, you might re-watch that scene over and over again. The brain works the same way: neurons (brain cells) that are active with learning are active again and replay the learned material during sleep. This helps store the memory more permanently.

Memory replay may show up in our dreams. Dreams in non-REM sleep, when most memory replay happens, often contain normal people and objects from recent events. However, sleep switches between non-REM and REM sleep (see Figure 2 ). So, bizarre dreams in REM sleep may come from a combination of many different recent memories, which were replayed in non-REM sleep, and get jumbled up during REM sleep. If dreams help with memory processing, does that mean your memories are not being processed if you do not dream? No. Memories are moving to storage even if we do not dream.

• Figure 2 - There are four types of sleep—REM sleep (purple) and three stages of non-REM sleep (blue).
• REM stands for rapid eye movements, which happen during this stage of sleep. During REM sleep, muscle and brain activity also differ from other sleep stages. Characteristics of dreams tend to be different for each of these sleep stages.

Dreams Improve Creativity and Problem Solving

My daughter’s dream of a spaceship made a great story that she recited to me, and later, to her classmates. The images were intense and interesting, inspiring her to draw scenes in a notebook and write about the dream for school. This is an example of how dreams can help make us more creative. Mary Shelley, the author of the book Frankenstein, got the idea for her book from a dream. Even scientists get ideas from dreams [ 7 ].

To measure creative problem solving, scientists used a remote associates task, in which three unrelated words are shown, and the person is to come up with a word they have in common. For instance, HEART, SIXTEEN, and COOKIES seem unrelated until you realize they all are related to SWEET (sweetheart, sweet sixteen, and cookies are sweet) ( Figure 3 ). The scientists wanted to see whether sleep helped people do better on this task. They found that people were better at thinking of the remote solution if they had a nap, particularly a nap with REM sleep. Given that REM is when most bizarre dreaming occurs, this supports the idea that these dreams might help us find creative solutions to problems [ 8 ].

• Figure 3 - REM sleep helps people find creative solutions.
• In the morning, participants did two tasks to test creativity and problem solving (A) . They did one task again in the afternoon. In between, they either stayed awake (“wake” group) or took a nap. Those that took naps either did not have REM sleep in their nap (“nREM” group) or had both nREM and REM sleep (“nREM + REM” group). (B) If subjects stayed awake between the morning and afternoon tests (yellow bar), they did not improve on the task. They also did not improve if they had a nap that was only nREM sleep (light blue bar). But, if they had a nap with both nREM and REM sleep, they did better in the afternoon compared with when they did the task in the morning (dark blue bar). So, REM sleep must help us find creative solutions (from Cai et al. [ 8 ]).

This study and research like it gives us reason to believe that REM dreams may help us be more creative and solve problems. Many different memories may be activated at the same time and when these memories are mixed together, the result when we wake up may be both the memory of a strange dream and a unique perspective on problems.

Dreams Regulate Our Moods and Emotions

Dreams are usually emotional. One study found that most dreams are scary, angry, or sad.

Dreams might seem to be emotional simply because we tend to remember emotional things better than non-emotional things. For example, in waking life, the day you got a puppy is more memorable than a normal school day. So, dreams about emotional events might be remembered more easily than boring, non-emotional dreams. It is also possible that dreams are emotional because one job of dreams is to help us process emotions from our day [ 9 ]. This may be why the amygdala , an area of the brain that responds to emotions when we are awake, is active during REM sleep. If you had a sad day, you are more likely to have sad dreams. But, sleep also improves mood–sleep after a disagreement or sad event will make you happier.

Dreams could also help prepare us for emotional events, through something called threat simulation theory [ 10 ]. For example, when I dreamt that my young daughter, who could not swim, fell into a swimming pool, recall of that dream convinced me to sign her up for swim lessons. By simulating this fearful situation, I could prevent it by being prepared.

These studies show us that sleep and dreams are important for our emotions. By processing emotions in sleep, we may be better prepared and in a better mood the next day.

Conclusions

There are different ways scientists measure dreams—from asking questions to using MRI. These studies show us that activity in the brain while we sleep gives us the interesting dreams we recall when we wake up. These dreams help us remember things, be more creative, and process our emotions.

We know most kids do not get enough sleep. Some diseases (like Alzheimer’s disease) also make people sleep less, while others (like REM sleep behavior disorder and mood disorders) affect dreams directly. It is important to study sleep and dreams to understand what happens when we do not get enough sleep and how we can treat people with these diseases.

Conflict of Interest

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Rapid Eye Movement (REM) : ↑ A stage of sleep in which the eyes move rapidly and there is no muscle activity.

Medial Prefrontal Cortex : ↑ A specific area in the front of the brain that is associated with dream recall but also has a role in memory and decision-making.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) : ↑ A tool used to take pictures of internal body parts (including the brain). MRI can also be used to measure the activity in the brain.

Hippocampus : ↑ An area in the brain that is thought to be important for short-term memory.

Neuron : ↑ A cell in the nervous system (brain and spinal cord) that can transmit information to other cells.

Amygdala : ↑ An area of the brain involved in the experience of emotions.

Threat Simulation Theory : ↑ A theory of dreaming that says that threats (things that could be bad) are simulated or practiced in your dreams to prepare you for those situations when you are awake.

1. ↑ Zandra, A. L., Nielsen, T. A., and Donderi, D. C. 1998. Prevalence of auditory, olfactory, and gustatory experiences in home dreams. Percept. Mot. Skills 87:819–26.

2. ↑ Schredl, M. 2002. Questionnaires and diaries as research instruments in dream research: methodological issues. Dreaming 12:17–26. doi: 10.1023/A:1013890421674

3. ↑ Hoyos, P., Kim, N., and Kastner, S. 2019. How Is Magnetic Resonance Imaging Used to Learn About the Brain? Front. Young Minds . 7:86. doi: 10.3389/frym.2019.00086

4. ↑ Horikawa, T., Tamaki, M., Miyawaki, Y., and Kamitani, T. 2013. Neural decoding of visual imagery during sleep. Science 340:639–42. doi: 10.1126/science.1234330

5. ↑ Davachi, L., and Shohamy, D. 2014. Thanks for the Memories.… Front. Young Minds. 2:23. doi: 10.3389/frym.2014.00023

6. ↑ O’Neill, J., Senior, T. J., Allen, K., Huxter, J. R., and Csicsvari, J. 2008. Reactivation of experience-dependent cell assembly patterns in the hippocampus. Nat. Neurosci . 11:209–15. doi: 10.1038/nn2037

7. ↑ Barrett, D. 2001. The Committee of Sleep: How artists, scientists, and athletes use dreams for creative problem-solving–and How You Can Too . New York, NY: Crown.

8. ↑ Cai, D. J., Mednick, S. A., Harrison, E. M., Kanady, J. C., and Mednick, S. C. 2009. REM, not incubation, improves creativity by priming associative networks. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A . 106:10130–4. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0900271106

9. ↑ Cremone, A., Kurdziel, L. B. F., Fraticelli, A., McDermott, J., and Spencer, R. M. C. 2017. Napping reduces emotional attention bias during early childhood. Dev. Sci . 20:e12411. doi: 10.1111/desc.12411

10. ↑ Revonsuo, A. 2000. The reinterpretation of dreams: an evolutionary hypothesis of the function of dreaming. Behav. Brain Sci . 23:877–901. doi: 10.1017/s0140525x00004015

Speaking of Psychology: The science of dreaming, with Deirdre Barrett, PhD

We all dream yet many of us don’t know what to make of our nocturnal adventures. Dream scholar Deirdre Barrett, PhD, explains why we dream and what our dreams may be trying to tell us. She also offers tips on how to better remember your dreams to harness the power of your sleeping mind.

About the expert: Deirdre Barrett, PhD

Kaitlin Luna: Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, a podcast from the American Psychological Association. I'm your host Kaitlin Luna. Our guest for this episode is Dr. Deirdre Barrett, a psychologist and scholar of dreams who's on the faculty of Harvard Medical School's Behavioral Medicine Program. She's the editor of the journal Dreaming and has written several books on the topic including the Committee of Sleep . Thank you for joining us, Dr. Barrett.

Deirdre Barrett: Hi, nice to be here.

Kaitlin Luna: So dreams are always a fascinating topic. We all dream but many people don't remember them or don't really know what to do with their dreams and you, as a scholar of dreams, know all about dreams and are even a past president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams. So I'll start off with, I think, a simple question with probably a long answer but why do we dream?

Deirdre Barrett: Well it's not a simple question it's probably the one where you'd get the most disagreement among dream psychologists. Personally I think that we have rapid eye movement sleep which is the stage in which most dreams occur along with all mammals for a lot of reasons many of which are very biological that certain neurotransmitters are being replenished in the brain during that stage of sleep that there's some very physical body reasons for REM that we share with all mammals. But I think evolution isn't that simple and when something's been around since the dawn of mammals it tends to have function upon function layered on top of it and I think for humans there's a lot of problem-solving that goes on in that state but that's my answer and you would get everywhere from you know it has no function, to you know dreams are sort of our wiser self speaking to us from other dream psychologists. But that's my that's my concept of it.

Kaitlin Luna: Yeah I mean I've always thought of it as sort of like it's telling you something, you know your dreams are trying to you tell you something you have been avoiding or something you might not realize what's going on because it's really you are unconscious so I've always wondered if it's really your sort of true self coming out so I'm probably maybe in that camp just as a lay person just being interested in the study of dreams.

Deirdre Barrett: Yeah I mean I like to say it's just it's our brain thinking in a different biochemical state and I don't buy into the perspective that…there's one book called Dreams are Wiser than Men , I don't think that what our dream dreaming mind is thinking about an issue is always the correct one or wiser than our waking one, I think the benefit of dreams lie in just what a different biochemical state it is so if we're kind of stuck in our usual everyday rational thinking, dreams may make an end run around that and show us something very different. But if you had to operate off one or the other I think our waking mind is probably giving us you know more good advice than our dreaming one, but the dream is a great supplement.

Kaitlin Luna: Absolutely and can you explain a bit about what the International Association for the Study of Dreams does?

Deirdre Barrett: It's a nonprofit organization whose mission is just to disseminate information about dreams and that's everything from the most basic education about things that have been known about dreams for a long time to the general public and even to children on to disseminating the latest research between professionals in the field. The ISD has one international conference a year, it has some online virtual conferences, it has some regional conferences and it has two publications. I edit the journal Dreaming which ISD oversees the content, but APA is our publisher and that is an academic journal for professionals in the field. But ISD also has another publication called Dream Time which is a magazine which is much more informal discussion of dreams that the general public can enjoy.

Kaitlin Luna: Yeah, it's very interesting. Until I was researching this topic I didn't know there was such an association.

Deirdre Barrett: Yeah, it's a great group. I recommend its website and for anyone that can get there its conferences are great and unlike many organizations it's a combination of professionals and not professionals so at the conference more than half the presenters and about half the attendees are some kind of professional in the field but there are lots of people who are just extremely dream interested who choose to come to the conference.

Kaitlin Luna: Interesting maybe I'll end up there one day. So, you know, there's those common dreams that I think you know you read about see in television and movies and people talk about like being in a public place naked or having your teeth fall out or being chased. So why do different people have similar dreams. I've always found that question really interesting, like why would I have the same dream as some random person from a you know different walk of life and has there been research into those common themes?

Deirdre Barrett: Well there's some research just on how frequently they occur and that does demonstrate that a few of those themes including the ones you rattled off do occur pretty frequently to people of different ages and around the world. Some are more universal than others and it tends to go with whether the metaphor they seem to be representing is universal. Clearly all cultures have some norms about what parts of your body you're supposed to cover and not even if it's you know a tiny thong just covering your genitals in one culture and bailing you know from head to toe in another one, there's still a how much of your body do you show and shame around showing more than you're supposed to be. So that the naked in public one seems to be quite universal and I'll say more a bit later about this, but we certainly don't think that you should ever just say one dream theme means exactly the same thing for anyone that dreams it. There's always an individual element. But there's some things like naked in public that are much likelier to be representing social shame, social anxieties you know just the common-sense metaphor about being exposed in some uncomfortable way is usually what that dream is about for most of the people having it. Then there are other common themes that are a little more cultural bound like most Western societies with our kind of schooling many, many people in the culture have recurring dreams about tests going wrong, you've overslept, you've missed the test, you aren't figuring out what the classroom is, you're late, you can't find the classroom, you get into the exam you realize you studied the wrong subject for it, the exam’s in hieroglyphics, they're just all kinds of variations. But somehow you are you know about to mess up a test. And we see that in Western schooling type cultures all the time, but you don't see that in hunter-gatherer tribes where, you know, learning to get out there and do adult tasks in some sort of, you know, more intern like way is the way that they're educated and test obviously they don't have sit-down exam dreams. And even in our culture people who decide to be want to be actors or musicians from an early age, they'll have a variation that's the audition dream. They're not sitting down to take an exam but they're showing up with their musical instrument and they realize they've studied the wrong piece of music or they can't find the audition hall so there's some variation even in those standard ones but there's something to the idea that there's some universal, very frequent dreams meaning something similar for most people who have them.

Kaitlin Luna: And those feelings behind those dreams could be, like you said, maybe some sort of shame or some sort of anxiety about what's going to happen to be tested in some way that sort of thing. So they're common feelings that underlie them.

Deirdre Barrett: Well yeah, different shades for different ones but just in line with what otherwise are common metaphors you know if you “feel exposed” or “feel naked”, that's usually more of a shame social disapproval. If you’re being tested, you know that's more of an authority figure is evaluating you sort of are you measuring up you know to society in general or in authority? So most of the recurring themes dreams are anxiety dreams but whether it's about sort of being competent versus being socially appropriate those tend to be represented by different specific things.

Kaitlin Luna:  I've heard that some people say that dreams don't mean anything at all that they're just random impulses from your brain when you're sleeping or perhaps just, you know, consolidating memories, that sort of thing, and that there's no deeper emotional meaning behind them. But, you know, many people do believe dreams are important, that they help problem-solve, perhaps find inspiration which I'll ask about in a few minutes, but what does the psychological research say about the importance of dreams and do we know what would happen if we didn't dream?

Deirdre Barrett: Well let me answer the first part first, it's a little simpler. There is some research, there's a limit to how much you can deprive people of REM sleep and it does have to be depriving of REM sleep, not quite all dreams happen in REM sleep and one of the things that you see if you deprive people of REM sleep is that you begin to get more reports that sound like full-fledged dream narratives out of other stages of sleep. A few of those happen anyway but it's like there's some pressure to dream that if you don't let it happen in rapid eye movement sleep it begins to happen in other stages of sleep. And then in the extreme, in some of the experiments people seemed to hallucinate awake a little bit. So there's certainly a pressure to dream that can sort of break out of REM not that it's always totally confined there. But the other thing is if you’re REM depriving people you see deficits in certain things or it doesn't even have to be REM deprivation, but you can do an experiment where the same amount of time passes between exposure to a task and retrying it and people either do or don't get a REM episode in there. And from those experiments it looks like other stages of sleep have more to do with consolidating some simple straightforward kinds of memory and that rapid eye movement sleep is consolidating and learning more emotionally-tinged memories and certain kinds of problem-solving that require some abstract generalization, from answers to single cases and beginning to see a pattern across them, that people that get a REM period in between exposure to certain problem-solving tasks do better. So that's REM sleep and that's not talking about the dream content but we definitely, in dream content we sometimes see very overt problem-solving pop up somebody doesn't know the answer to a question until they have a dream that shows them the solution so REM is doing something with that biologically whether you're remembering dream content with it or not but again layered on top of REM for human beings dreams seem to be the about the problems and issues we've just been exposed to and sometimes solving them.

Kaitlin Luna: Speaking about what you just mentioned about how people use them to problem-solve or get inspiration and you wrote about in your book, The Committee of Sleep , about some stories from famous artists and inventors like Paul McCartney, Salvador Dali and the inventor of the sewing machine how they received inspiration from their dreams which produced beautiful works of art and practical tools like the sewing machine. Can you explain how we use dreams to problem-solve and to find inspiration?

Deirdre Barrett: Yes, I mean there are two aspects of that. One is that it simply happens spontaneously a fair bit that people who are stuck on a problem will have a breakthrough dream and that was true in the case of the sewing machine inventor that that dream came out of nowhere without his asking for it in any particular way and showed him how to make the sewing machine. And two kinds of problems are likelier to get solved spontaneously in dreams. One is anything that's a very visual-spatial because dreams are so visual we can see things in a hallucinatory way in front of us so the first computer-controlled anti-aircraft gun was dreamed, the sewing machine was dreamed, the structure of the benzene molecule was dreamed and all of those seemed to be cases where being able to see the thing very much more clearly than you could just do visual imagination awake was a helpful part of it. The other big cluster of solved-by dreams are where you're stuck because the conventional wisdom is wrong. The benzene molecule is an example of both. Kekulé knew what the atoms in benzene were but at that time all known molecules were some kind of straight line with a side chain and so he was trying to arrange the atoms in a straight line in some way that made sense and explained the chemical properties and that wasn’t working and he fell asleep and dreamed of molecules dancing in front of his eyes forming, he said snakes, but they were straight lines of molecules and eventually one of the snakes made of atoms reached around and took its tail in its mouth and he woke up realizing that benzene was a closed ring. But all chemists would have been approaching it to make it some kind of straight line. So dreaming just bypasses that conventional wisdom, ”It has to be done this way, it has to be done this way” and shows more possibilities. So very visual problems or problems where you need to think outside the box are likely to get help from dreams. But then the other aspect is that although these happen spontaneously if people are trying to focus their dreams on a particular topic, we tend to call it dream incubation in psychology, to say tonight I want to dream the answer to a particular problem or I just want to dream on this particular topic you're much likelier to have a dream on that topic or even an answer to the problem than if you weren't doing that as a self-suggestion at bedtime. So everybody tends to get some help and inspiration and good advice from their dreams, but you can you can get more by asking your dreams to focus on particular topics.

Kaitlin Luna: Yeah that's really interesting and I'm gonna to just touch on that well we're there so if you want to remember your dream better and you want to be able to have a dream journal and use it for those that problem-solving like I said because sometimes people say, “Oh I dream but I don't remember it”, what tips do you have for that? So for someone to remember their dream better and then how to do a dream journal.

Deirdre Barrett: OK, well the first tip is the most banal but it's really the most important: Get more sleep than the average American does. If you get eight hours of sleep a night, you'll remember a lot more dreams than if you’re getting less than that. And it's not, we enter rapid eye movement sleep about every 90 minutes through the night but each REM period is getting longer so the first one is just a few minutes whereas the last one can be getting closer to half an hour in length so if you sleep four hours instead of eight, you're not getting half your dream time, you're getting twenty percent or less of your dream time when you truncate your sleep because the dreams are coming every 90 minutes but they're getting much longer through the night. So getting enough sleep is extremely important that's the simplest [unintelligible] with high and low dream recall. But other things are the intent. I mean often people that are taking class on dreams or reading a book on dreams it will become more relevant they'll remember more dreams in fact people listening to today's podcast are likelier to remember a dream tonight just by virtue doing that than otherwise, but you can increase that with again a dream incubation like I was talking about for problem solving but just focused on recall. If you're just telling yourself as you fall asleep, “I want to remember my dreams tonight, I want to remember my dreams tonight”, that increases the likelihood and then as you already alluded to keeping some sort of dream journal. What you do in the morning is just as important. First of all aside from the journal, it's better to wake up naturally than to an alarm clock but you know I know everyone can't do that. Whichever way you wake up, if you lie there for a moment and try to think about nothing other than your dream if you already recall it, if you're not gonna write it down or tell it to a recorder, at least rehearse it in your mind. But if you don't recall a dream when you first wake up just lie there and see what content at all is there in your mind. Like, did you wake up kind of thinking about your brother, did you wake up feeling a little sad because sometimes if you just stay focused on that hint of content, a dream will come rushing back, “Oh yeah I was thinking about my brother because I dreamed that he did this” or “I was sad because this dream that just happened.” So dream memory is very fragile and sometimes it's hovering there as you first wake up so don't do anything else first before focusing on the dream. And secondly recording it is nice to have the record but also tends to fix it in your mind even if you're not referring back to the dream journal that much so some people still prefer to hand write things in beautiful leather-bound journals, have a sort of a nice association for some people, or if your laptop's next to your bed you can reach for it and type, but I know that a lot of people are using their smartphones. There are all sorts of apps. Dreams Cloud is one of them, Dream Scope, that have apps where you generally you can set your alarm on the app, make that your alarm in lieu of the other one and they have all sorts of gentler tones to wake you up or even a voice saying, “What were you dreaming?” as the first thing you're going to hear and then your phone is already set to if you speak in response to the alarm or the voice saying, “What were you dreaming?”, it's automatically going to record without you're having to reach over and activate it or anything. So those are some of the easiest you know and then they all do speech to text, so you have an account of it so a lot of the people I know these days, I still type mine out, but most of my students use an app on their phones.

Kaitlin Luna: It's interesting using technology for our dreams. I noticed that I usually will like have to do the hovering where I kind of like [ask myself] “What did I dream” and then I’ll recall it and then I can sort of get it firmly planted in my memory and then I'll write it down when I get the chance. I've been known to do that on the Metro on the way to work. Sitting furiously writing in my journal, the notebook I have.

Deirdre Barrett: Just rehearsing it in your mind, I mean, especially like in the middle of the night if you don't want to disturb a bed partner by speaking your dream or something, if you just kind of run through it in your mind that tends to fix it into long-term memory because otherwise so many people recall waking up from a dream in the middle of the night and going, “Oh wow that was such a weird dream” and that’s all they remember about it or even “I don’t need to write this one down I’m certainly going to remember this one.” Even without writing it down, if you play it through that kind of gets it from short-term to long-term memory.

Kaitlin Luna: Going back to the content of dreams why do some people have recurring dreams and what do we know about what reoccurring dreams mean.

Deirdre Barrett: Recurring dreams are usually thought to be themes that are more important for that person. Freud talked about day residue and it's one of his concepts that's still taken quite seriously the idea that things that happen in the preceding 18 hours are much likelier to show up in your dream than sort of other random previous days. And so lots of lots of dreams are about very recent events and they may be one-time concerns about things that just happened that day and they're still worth interpreting but they're gonna be about a very specific current sort of issue. Whereas if a dream occurs over and over it may be activated by events of a particular day, it may make a long-term issue more salient but it's certainly going to be about something that's a kind of long-term character logic issue for that person. So in general we think of recurring dreams as somewhat more important if you only have time to analyze a few dreams, your recurring dreams would be ones to target.

Kaitlin Luna: And often people talk about having nightmares or violent dreams and I've spoken to friends and you know, myself included, we've had those kinds of scary dreams. So what do those dreams mean and what do you do if you have violent dreams or nightmares often?

Deirdre Barrett: Well they're two very different kinds. One is the metaphoric, they're scary but otherwise the content seems much like other dreams it's fairly metaphoric witches chasing you down a hall in an old building or something. And children have more of those kind of garden-variety metaphor nightmares than adults, they tend to decrease with age but almost everyone has a few of those. Versus post-traumatic nightmares where you've suffered one or more extremely violent, terrifying waking life events and in post-traumatic nightmares, the event tends to unfold very much like it did awake. Some people it replays exactly like they were in a video of the episode of getting raped or being in this battlefield or house burning down around them over and over and over exactly like it happened. Or more commonly it's pretty close to how it happened but it's either got a bit of bizarre dream distortion but not as much as most dreams or often the post traumatic nightmares go one step further like somebody was holding a gun to someone's head and threatening to pull the trigger in real life and they actually do pull the trigger like the dream goes one step further. Whatever was most feared about to happen actually happens. So garden-variety nightmares there they're just normal to a certain extent and some people who have them don't particularly mind them. I've heard a lot of people either say that it's kinda like horror films that you know there's a kind of adrenaline rush and they kind of enjoy their nightmares and I've heard other people who say they don't enjoy them, but they feel like they learn something like it's always pointing out to them things they're anxious about that they hadn't thought of. So many people who have nightmares of that kind of garden variety type don't particularly want them to go away and I think that interpreting them just like you would other dreams thinking about you know what in my waking life you know feels like that feeling in the pit of my stomach when the witch is chasing me down the hall is you know the way to deal with those. But post-traumatic nightmares just retraumatize people it's like having the horrible event happening again night after night after night so that it never recedes into the past and everyone who has post-traumatic nightmares hates having them nobody likes those and I think that it's also not a mystery, you know, if you were raped and you're dreaming about a rape or your house burned down and you're dreaming about flames every night there's not a “Gee, why are you dreaming that” like there is about the witch so there are techniques that can make people stop having post-traumatic nightmares that involve, you can coach people to just wake up if they start, but it seems to be even more effective to have people come up with an alternate scenario, a kind of mastery dream. If the nightmare starts again how would you like it to come out differently and psychologists kind of happened on to this technique because it happens occasionally, spontaneously people have had a nightmare over and over and over about a real event all of a sudden will have this dream where someone comes and rescues them or they do fight off the attacker or in a very dreamlike magical way the whole trauma is swept away and they wake up feeling so much better. And so we found that some people in PTSD groups would hear somebody say, “Oh I used to have a nightmare until one night I had this other wonderful dream” and just hearing that the next week a couple other patients in the group would say they had. So now we coach people to come up with an alternate scenario of what they would like to see happen and kind of get an individual, I mean for the same sounding trauma, some people would rather have someone rescue them other people would rather like fight off some attacker themselves. A lot of sexual abuse survivors would most like to tell off the abuser about why this was so wrong and other people want very magical you know shrink the attacker of the fire down you know to a quarter inch high dreamlike things so once you come up with an alternate scenario you practice that at bedtime this is again another variation on dream incubation just telling yourself you know if my traumatic nightmare starts I want you this scenario and picture the alternate scenario and that that works for a lot of people. A lot of people have the alternate dream and then never have the nightmare again. And then in the research study some people do that, and the nightmares stop without their at least consciously recalling having the alternate dreams, so we don't really know if they have it and forget it, but it still serves its purpose or if simply the visualization of the scenario you know awake at bedtime has a similar effect for some people.

Kaitlin Luna: OK that's really fascinating that you have some control over this I mean if you tell yourself you want the this dream to stop or to reach a better conclusion that's really fascinating.

Deirdre Barrett: Yes, I mean the areas in our brain associated with memory are not quite as active but they're certainly somewhat awake as we dream so requests to our dreaming mind do very often get through it's not a one-to-one, you know just ask for it once and you’ll dream on this topic, but it's very often effective especially with repetition more than one night.

Kaitlin Luna: And moving on to pets. I know you said animals, mammals, do go into REM sleep but you know if you've watched your pet dog on the ground when they start falling asleep, my dog barks and she, you know, twitches her legs, that sort of thing so it looks like they're dreaming, you know, as far as we can tell but so do animals dream and how would we know if they do or don't?

Deirdre Barrett: Well, that's a very good question. I tend to assume that they do. We know that all mammals except cetaceans, whales and dolphins do not have REM sleep, they have this strange sleep where they sleep with one half of their brain at a time, but all other mammals alternate between non-REM sleep and rapid eye movement sleep and their brain has activity that looks very similar to ours when we are dreaming . So I am willing to make the leap and say that I think that mammals are dreaming and whatever they're, you know, elephant or mousy or doggie or catty version of that is. Some of my colleagues would not would not say that, I mean some of my colleagues would not assume any consciousness to other mammalian species or only past a certain level in the evolutionary hierarchy but yeah, I think they have the same brain state that we dream in I think they're probably dreaming in some way. The only slight evidence for dream reports from animals are Penny Patterson who had the gorillas Koko and Michael. Koko died, I believe. But Koko used to sign kind of fantastic scenarios right upon awakening and no other time, so she'd sign about cars flying through the sky or she'd signed something about seeing a person who she actually hadn't seen in six months and those sort of signing not real fantastic things only seemed to happen upon awakening. So Penny assumed that those were dream reports and you know you could argue about that but I, you know, I think that sounds quite likely and the gorilla Michael, who didn't have quite as big of a signed vocabulary, but I guess he's still learning he's certainly still alive and well, he was known to have had his entire extended family group killed by poachers and then he was picked up as an infant and sold through several iterations and eventually went to Penny's reserve so he had a very traumatic killing of all of his family in front of him. And she said that he used to wake up signing, “Bad people kill gorillas, bad people kill gorillas”, and again only in the morning so she interpreted that not just as a memory but as seeming like he was probably having a post-traumatic dream about the event. And again, that's very soft evidence, too, and subjective but possibly, we have dream accounts from two gorillas but just in general they are having the same brain state as REM sleep, so I think it's likely that they're dreaming. Now they're not necessarily dreaming when they're twitching and moving though because in humans, although there's something called REM Behavior Disorder where you act out your dreams, we and other mammals are supposed to be paralyzed during REM sleep, and with normal, healthy people and animals that is the case. Where sleepwalking in non-REM sleep is much more common for people and so I think that most times that you see much activity during sleep, you know, when dogs are woofing or moving their legs a lot as they… that's probably out of non-REM sleep which just seems to be mild slight activity in motor areas that's not associated with a big dream scenario in humans. Human sleep walkers usually don't recall anything or it's a very simple, “I was trying to get from place A to place B”, rather than a dream account so I think when you see your dog making the most noise and moving the most it's not necessarily dreaming. When you see its eyelids moving rapidly under its eyes even if it's completely still that's when it's likely to be dreaming.

Kaitlin Luna: okay interesting I'll pay more attention to my dog's eyes. And when you and I spoke before, we talked about lucid dreaming which I know that the journal Dreaming has touched on in various ways but and you've said it's also become a topic in popular culture since the movie Inception came out a number of years ago, so can you explain more about what lucid dreaming is?

Deirdre Barrett: Well the definition is simply that it's a dream in which you know it's a dream. At some point you're going, “This isn't real, I'm dreaming.” Many people, once they're lucid, they then have a lot of control over the dream. If they're being chased down a hall by witch they can choose, “No, I don't wanna…I don't want to have a witch dream anymore” and you know, dissolve the dark building into a beautiful palace or being outdoors and some of their friends instead of the witch. So some people can switch a dream all around once they know they're lucid but not everyone. So the definition is simply knowing you're dreaming even if the dream keeps unfolding in a very dreamlike way. And most people really enjoy lucid dreams. There's occasionally people stay distressed by scary content but usually even if you let the witch stay there and you turn around and ask her why she's chasing you and what she represents once you know she's a dream witch you're not scared anymore so most lucid dreams are very positive and people enjoy having them.

Kaitlin Luna: So what does that mean exactly? Does that mean part of your consciousness turned on at that moment?

Deirdre Barrett: Yes, the EEGs of people having lucid dreams…I mean back in the 80s, it was established that they really did seem to be in rapid eye movement sleep and that was big news because it had been sort of questioned maybe they're waking up into some sort of fantasy waking state. But Steve LaBerge proved that people having lucid dreams are really in rapid eye movement sleep and that's a battle all that sleep labs could tell at that time. But more recently now that you can put on many more tiny EEG leads and reconstruct a much better 3-D image of what's going on in the brain, what that shows is that the person is basically in rapid eye movement sleep but it's not a completely typical episode of rapid eye movement sleep . The prefrontal cortex, the area right behind our forehead that has a lot to do with abstract thinking, is very much damped down during REM sleep it's often misstated that it's turned off or something in REM sleep. That's not true, there is activity there at a lower level even in normal REM sleep. But in lucid dreams, there is usually a little more activity in the prefrontal cortex than there is during other REM periods and that's exactly the area we're noticing discrepancies. The fact that the prefrontal is damped down during most dreams is why we don't question, you know, bizarre, you know, most of the time if we're flying we're just thrilled to be flying not questioning how we can…somebody that you know is dead is showing up in your dream, you usually don't question how that can be, sometimes you do. So, that area that notices things are odd or just even reflects on what's the nature of this experience, that's just turned back up not as much as on average as when we're awake but somewhat more than in typical dreams so that seems to be necessary for lucid dreaming.

Kaitlin Luna: That's interesting. And what are you currently doing with your with dreaming research?

Deirdre Barrett: Well the most recent research study that I finished was a comparison of the content of dream accounts to the content of sleep talking episodes. Finding that they were similar in many ways compared to waking speech. They both express much more fear than we typically talk about awake. They're less set in the present than our waking topics. But then there's some differences, like there's much, much more anger in sleep walking than in either dreams or awake, dreams and waking speech have much more in common in terms of pretty low levels of anger for most people. And sleep talking involves much more anger. So that was my most recent research study and I'm not starting another one real soon because I'm trying to finish a book which is kind of a sequel to my book, The Committee of Sleep , which is all about dreams and creative problem-solving. They both have more theoretical things that I want to say about it but also once that book came out while I was writing it I had to chase down people who'd have amazing problem-solving dreams but once it came out I was getting letters from some famous, you know, ones with major accomplishments that had come from a dream that I didn't know about.  

Kaitlin Luna: Great, more content for you. When is that coming out?

Deirdre Barrett: It's not even in press yet it's probably coming out in a year and a half I would guess. But it's more of a focus than research right now.

Kaitlin Luna: So, Dr. Barrett, can you talk about what you dream about?

Deirdre Barrett: Well my dreams are probably more similar to other dream researchers than to the average person. I know one dream researcher who is just out of grad school where the person doing the most interesting research who wanted the most research assistance and was the most charismatic figure was doing dream research and that he personally had never thought about much about dreams until getting to grad school. But most dream researchers are drawn to the field because we remember more dreams than average. Our dreams are more vivid than average. We tend to have more lucid dreams and flying dreams and just almost any unusual category of dreams that you mentioned that will have a certain low base rate in the general population, I and other dream researchers have more of.  So I was just always fascinated by all these nocturnal adventures which I did remember more of in more detail than the average person and I think a lot of psychologists go to grad school and then pick a specialty within psychology but for me it was much more the other way around. I was just focused on dreams as this fascinating thing as a kid and as I got to be a little older I realized if someone was gonna pay you to study dreams then you better go to graduate school in psychology. So I don't have any way of characterizing, you know, I have all the things we've talked about: recurring dreams, lucid dreams, problem-solving dreams, a few nightmares, not particularly high rate of those, and I have dreams that have solved very practical problems, I have many more dreams that I think are more about my interpersonal emotional issues where you know I dream about people are important to me and in the dream I'm doing something different than the way I'd usually react to them and I wake up and realize that that has some implications for things to do in real life. I have some dreams that are just so gorgeous visually that I've started making art from my dreams. I've just been doing that for about three years, but I sold some art and have some art in art shows and it's all dream art I have no interest in making art other than to represent some of these images that I just want to drag back into the waking world for other people to see them.

Kaitlin Luna: I did see that actually when I was just looking into researching this topic, I saw your artwork and it was striking, strikingly beautiful. Very colorful. And can you describe what your favorite piece of art you created?

Deirdre Barrett: Probably a pair. Most dreams I just make one piece of art from them. But I had a dream where I was walking through Harvard Square which is the neighborhood where I live late at night and I was discovering these little animals up on the rooftops and thinking they must have been living there all the years I did, and I had just never looked up and seen them before. And then eventually they were down in the street and I was thinking, “Oh, they only come down late at night.” And in the dream, I thought, “I've never been the middle of Harvard Square in the middle of the night” and that's extremely not true but in the dream,  it was. So I was discovering these wonderful animals that live on the roof and come down into the streets and so I actually went down and photographed several different buildings that were on this route through the square but it was one of the Harvard Lampoon building and another of a spot called Charlie's Kitchen that are just interesting buildings that are kind of lit up interestingly at night anyway and they had most captured the feel of the dream before I started adding all the little magical creatures up on the roof and spilling down into the street. So I guess I was the happiest with the two I made out of that dream came out really just as I'd seen them in the dream.

Kaitlin Luna: And what do you use for materials? Is it a painting? Is it a sculpture?

Deirdre Barrett: No, it's digitally manipulated photography. So for a few of them, like one I dreamed about a mask changing in all these ways, I found that I really loved masks, so I take pictures when I got a mask exhibit, so I already had enough pictures of masks to start morphing into that dream. But for the one I just mentioned, I went down took pictures of the building and so a real photograph of the building was the basic backdrop and I left the sky and the brick in certain areas unchanged so that it kind of looks photographically real but then I played somewhat with the surface of the building but mainly I put in little creatures, some of which I created from scratch and digital programs, and others I actually took photographs, not of real animals but of like little carvings of already not quite realistic animals and manipulated them a little bit more digitally, so it's always collaged photography with then lots and lots of digital manipulation to give it the surreal look that the dream had.

Kaitlin Luna: So dreams are also inspiration for you as well?

Deirdre Barrett: Yes, definitely. I mean they've been inspiration for, you know, things in my research life and work as a clinician and interpersonal relationships for a long time and I'd only been writing about arts and dreams but lately it's, yeah all of my art is completely inspired by my dreams.

Kaitlin Luna: Well that's wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us Dr. Barrett.

Deirdre Barrett: Nice to talk to you.

Kaitlin Luna : If you've been a longtime listener or viewer, please consider giving us a rating in iTunes or if you have time please write a review. We'd really appreciate it. We'd also like to hear from you directly, so if you have any questions or comments, please email me at [email protected] . That’s  [email protected] . Speaking of Psychology is part of the APA podcast network, which includes other great podcasts like APA Journals Dialogue , about the latest psychological research and Progress Notes about the practice of psychology. You can find our podcast on iTunes, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also visit speakingofpsychology.org to view more episodes and to find resources on the topics we discuss. I'm your host, Kaitlin Luna for the American Psychological Association. 

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Episode 71: The Science of Dreaming

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Kaitlin Luna was the host of Speaking of Psychology from September 2018 to March 2020. A former broadcast journalist, she worked in APA's Office of Public Affairs as a public affairs manager.

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Scientists Are Finally Figuring Out Why We Dream, And It's Probably Exactly What You'd Think

Dreaming is one of the strangest things that happens to us, and for as long as we have been recording history, we have been puzzling over why our minds are so active while we sleep.

Finally, new research claims to have evidence as to what dreaming is all about - and it will probably surprise no one.

According to a team from The Swansea University Sleep Lab in the UK, dreaming really does help us process the memories and emotions we experience during our waking lives.

This is not a new idea at all.

The hypothesis that dreaming was connected to waking life was floated by Sigmund Freud in the early 20th century - he called this phenomenon day residues . Many other studies since have expanded on the notion , indicating that a very real link exists.

But dreams are hard to study, because they take place entirely in the mind of someone unable to communicate in the moment.

Scientists don't have the tools to observe them directly - at least, not yet - instead having to rely on the dreamer's memories of their dreams; and, as we all know, that's not always easy to do.

The team's research, however, seems to have hit upon a winning formula, finding that the emotional intensity of a waking experience can be linked to the intensity of dreaming brain activity, and the content of the dream thereof.

They recruited 20 student volunteers for the study, all of whom were able to recall their dreams frequently.

First, they had to make detailed journals of their daily lives for 10 days, logging their major daily activities that took up large blocks of time; personally significant and emotional events; and any concerns that may have been on their minds.

For each of these, the participants had to record how it made them feel, and rate the intensity of that emotion using a numbered scale.

On the evening of the 10th day, they spent the first of several nights in the sleep lab being monitored with non-invasive electroencephalography caps. These were able to observe and record the activity of the brain waves associated with slow-wave sleep (large irregular activity, or LIA) and rapid-eye movement sleep (theta activity).

After 10 minutes of each of these sleep cycles, the researchers would wake the students and ask them what they were dreaming (which sounds like a nightmare, if you ask us). These dreams were then compared with the journals to see if there was any sort of correlation.

And here's the paydirt: there was. The number of events recorded in the diaries was linked to the intensity of theta waves - so the more a person had going on in their lives, the more intense their REM sleep - but not their slow-wave sleep.

In addition, dreams that had a higher emotional impact were more likely to be incorporated into the sleeper's dreams than boring, humdrum everyday stuff. And these correlations were only observed for recent experiences, too - there was no correlation between older waking life experiences and dream activity.

"This is the first finding that theta waves are related to dreaming about recent waking life, and the strongest evidence yet that dreaming is related to the processing that the brain is doing of recent memories," psychologist Mark Blagrove of Swansea University told New Scientist .

The next step in the research will be to use binaural beats to induce theta brain waves in sleeping subjects, to see if this in turn induces the sleeper to dream about their recent experiences.

If so, the researchers could have found a method of manipulating REM sleep and theta brain waves to encourage the memory and emotion processing that occur during this sleep phase - a sort of passive form of therapy.

The research was published last month in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience .

Why You Needed the Dream You Had Last Night

While we know we need to sleep, do we know we also need to dream.

Posted August 9, 2024 | Reviewed by Tyler Woods

• Dreams serve important functions, from the consolidation of learning to emotional regulation.
• Research findings reveal the power of dreams to enhance learning and performance.
• Sleeping and dreaming offer valuable memory processing functions.

You dream several times a night, even if you don't remember most of them ( Walker, 2017 ). In a typical lifetime, we spend years dreaming .

Throughout time and across cultures, man has ascribed importance to dreams. Recognized for his seminal contribution, The Interpretation of Dreams , Sigmund Freud considered dreams to be the royal road to the unconscious . According to him, dreams represented instinctual aggressive and sexual drives pressing for discharge. Disguised by the primary process of symbols, displacements, and condensations, the dream was believed to represent hidden instinctual wish fulfillment.

While dreamers still make important use of metaphors and symbolic representations in their dreams, the thinking around the meaning of dreams has changed.

Both ongoing dream theory (Fossage, 2000) and research in the field (Walker, 2017) reveal that, well beyond wish fulfillment, we need and use dreams in the organization of data, the consolidation of memory , the integration of skills, and the regulation of psychological functioning.

Important in understanding the function of dreams are the findings related to sleep cycles:

• During all stages of sleep, the mind and brain work to process new memories, consolidating them into long-term storage and integrating recently acquired information with past experience (Warmsly and Stickhold, 2011) .
• The human body cycles through two phases of sleep: rapid eye movement (REM) and non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, which is further divided into three stages—N1 to N3. Each phase and stage of sleep includes variations in muscle tone, brain wave patterns, and eye movements. The body cycles through all stages approximately four to six times each night, averaging 90 minutes for each cycle.
• Lab studies reveal that we have dreams in both phases of sleep and that non-REM dreams and REM dreams actually serve different functions (Walker, 2017 ) .

The Purpose of Non-REM Dreams

If you have ever skied all day, studied for hours, or spent hours reaching a level on a video game, you may have dreamed of moguls, math equations, or video images. These are non-REM dreams. They are very beneficial, as they are generally associated with the consolidation of newly learned facts, skills, and experiences.

In a study by Wamsley, et al . (2010), subjects were trained on a virtual navigation task and then retested on the same task five hours after the initial training. Improved performance at the retest was strongly associated with dreaming about the task during an intervening afternoon nap. Task-related thoughts during wakefulness, in contrast, did not predict improved performance. These findings underscore the importance of sleep-dependent memory consolidation in humans. The offline reactivation of recently formed memories in dream experiences reflects this valuable memory processing that sleeping and dreaming offer.

For students, scientists, performing artists, professionals, and anyone who feels compelled to pull all-nighters, it makes sense to work, find some time to sleep, and “ perchance to dream .”

REM Sleep Dreams: Your Overnight Therapy

Building on the benefits of REM dreams, Matthew Walker, in his book Why We Sleep (2017), reveals that REM dreaming reduces the pain of the difficult, at times, traumatic emotional episodes we have experienced. This is due to a formerly unrecognized change in the chemical cocktail that takes place in our brains during REM dreams.

Chemical Changes

During REM dreaming, concentrations of a key stress -related chemical called noradrenaline, also known as norepinephrine, are completely shut off. Actually, it is the only time in a 24-hour period that our brain is completely free of this anxiety -triggering chemical. This means that during REM sleep dreams, we are reviewing memories, be they frightening, tragic, or terrifying, without anxiety, in a “safe” dreaming brain environment.

Experimental Findings

One experiment with healthy young adults measured emotional reactivity when shown a set of emotionally charged images while inside an MRI scanner. One group was shown the pictures in the morning and 12 hours later in the evening. The other group was shown the pictures and then got a full night’s sleep before being re-shown the pictures. Those who slept during their 12 hours reported a significant decrease in how emotional they felt in response to the images compared to those who had not slept. Significantly, the recorded sleep of those who slept showed the electrical patterns of REM sleep dreams ( Walker, 2017 ).

What about Nightmares?

Nightmares are one of the most frequent symptoms for those who have suffered trauma ( Albanese et al., 2022 ). Imagery Rehearsal Therapy (IRT) is considered the method of choice for reducing nightmares. In this method, the therapist moves from having the client develop and create positive images, colors, scenes, etc., to sharing the nightmare with the plan of "rescripting the nightmare," reducing their sense of helplessness and terror in the process. Given the proven potential of dreams to expand learning, reduce anxiety, and enhance emotional regulation , it makes sense that those who change the script of their nightmare and practice new versions of it, are able to actually change nightmares. Essentially, they move from the terror recorded in dreams to the coping and healing made possible through dreams.

As life presents you with the good, the bad, and the unresolved, consider reflecting on your next dream and asking, "What was the feeling of my dream?" No expert knows the feeling of a dream like the dreamer. Maybe you were anxious. Maybe you were thrilled. It's your glimpse into the night shift that is busy as you sleep!

Suzanne B. Phillips, Psy.D., ABPP, a psychologist and host of “Psych Up Live” on International Talk Radio, formerly taught at Long Island University Post and is the author of three books including Healing Together for Couples.

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A marine biologist inspects coral on the Great Barrier Reef in April 2024.

Highest Ocean Heat in 400 Years Poses 'Existential Threat' to Great Barrier Reef

"in the absence of rapid, coordinated, and ambitious global action to combat climate change, we will likely be witness to the demise of one of earth's great natural wonders," the authors of a study in science wrote..

The Great Barrier Reef recently experienced the highest ocean temperatures in at least four centuries and faces an "existential threat" due to repeated mass coral bleaching episodes, a study published Wednesday in Science found.

The network of coral reefs off of Australia—the world's largest living structure—has faced five of the six hottest three-month periods of average surface temperature ever recorded just since 2016, each of which was accompanied by devastating coral bleaching .

Ocean temperatures around the reef reached a record-breaking extreme from January to March this year, with the three-month mean temperature 1.73°C higher than the pre-1900 average, according to the study, authored by researchers based in Australia.

The study includes climate modeling that attributes the temperatures to fossil fuel-driven carbon emissions, and concludes that urgent climate action is needed.

"This attribution, together with the recent ocean temperature extremes, post-1900 warming trend, and observed mass coral bleaching, shows that the existential threat to the Great Barrier Reef ecosystem from anthropogenic climate change is now realized," the study says.

"In the absence of rapid, coordinated, and ambitious global action to combat climate change, we will likely be witness to the demise of one of Earth's great natural wonders," the authors also wrote.

The Great Barrier Reef is under critical pressure, with warming sea temperatures and mass coral bleaching events threatening to destroy the remarkable ecology, biodiversity, and beauty of the world’s largest coral reef, according to research in @nature . https://t.co/67bXgmfTEn — Robin Hicks (@RobinHicks_) August 8, 2024

The researchers estimated the surface temperatures for 1618-1899 by using a reconstruction method based on drilling into coral skeletons and analyzing the chemical makeup. For the period from 1900 to 1995, they used both the reconstruction method and measurements by modern instruments, and for the last 30 years they used instrumental data.

They found that temperatures were relatively stable until 1900 but have climbed steadily since, especially since 1960.

The trend has culminated in a series of bleaching events, in which stressed corals expel the microscopic algae in their tissues and become transparent or white. Without the helpful algae, which live inside them symbiotically, corals are at risk of disease and death.

In interviews with journalists, the study authors spoke about the severity of the threat to the Great Barrier Reef and the urgent need for climate action.

"The heat extremes are occurring too often for those corals to effectively adapt and evolve," Ben Henley, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Melbourne and lead author of the study, told The New York Times . "If we don't divert from our current course, our generation will likely witness the demise of one of Earth's great natural wonders, the Great Barrier Reef."

Henley said he snorkeled with his father on the Great Barrier Reef as a child.

"You can't even take in the diversity," he said. "It's a kaleidoscope of color, it's absolutely spectacular."

He said he worries that his own 2-year-old daughter may not be able to enjoy the same experience.

"In her childhood years the reef is likely to see immense destruction," he said.

He called for strong global action so that his daughter and members of her generation could "marvel at the reef in their lifetimes."

Helen McGregor, a scientist at the University of Wollongong and study co-author, told the BBC the new research "could send a huge signal to the world about how grave the problem is."

"We know what we need to do," she added. "We have international agreements in place [to limit global temperature rise]."

Scientists not involved in the study agreed about the importance of the research, not just for the Great Barrier Reef but for coral reefs more generally.

"It's a stunningly important summary of the history of the world's largest reef system," Stephen Palumbi, a marine biologist at Stanford University, told the Times . "The paper lays out the danger that corals all around the world face from this heat."

Join Us: News for people demanding a better world

• Some Journalists Get It: Fossil Fuel Giants Are Directly to Blame for Coral Bleaching ›
• New Mass Bleaching Threatens Australia's Great Barrier Reef ›

Scientists lay out revolutionary method to warm Mars

Uchicago, northwestern study suggests new approach to warm mars could be 5,000 times more efficient than previous proposals.

Ever since we learned that the surface of planet Mars is cold and dead, people have wondered if there is a way to make it friendlier to life.

In a groundbreaking study published Aug. 7 in Science Advances , researchers from the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and the University of Central Florida have proposed a revolutionary approach towards terraforming Mars. This new method, using engineered dust particles released to the atmosphere, could potentially warm the Red Planet by more than 50 degrees Fahrenheit, to temperatures suitable for microbial life—a crucial first step towards making Mars habitable.

The proposed method is over 5,000 times more efficient than previous schemes to globally warm Mars, representing a significant leap forward in our ability to modify the Martian environment.

What sets this approach apart is its use of resources readily available on Mars, making it far more feasible than earlier proposals that relied on importing materials from Earth or mining rare Martian resources.

This strategy would take decades. But it appears logistically easier than other plans proposed so far.

“This suggests that the barrier to warming Mars to allow liquid water is not as high as previously thought,” said Edwin Kite, an associate professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago and corresponding author on the study. The lead author was Samaneh Ansari, a graduate student in Prof. Hooman Mohseni's group at Northwestern University.

Astronauts still won’t be able to breathe Mars' thin air; making the planet suitable for humans to walk on the surface unaided requires much more work. But perhaps groundwork could be laid, by making the planet habitable for microbes and food crops that could gradually add oxygen to the atmosphere—much as they have done for Earth during its geologic history.

A new approach to an age-old dream

There is a rich history of proposals to make Mars habitable; Carl Sagan himself came up with one back in 1971. These have ranged from outright daydreams, such as science fiction writers depicting turning one of Mars’ moons into a sun , to more recent and scientifically plausible ideas, such as engineering transparent gel tiles to trap heat .

Any plan to make Mars habitable must address several hurdles, including deadly UV rays and salty soil. But the biggest is the planet’s temperature; the surface of Mars averages about -80 degrees Fahrenheit.

One strategy to warm the planet could be the same method that humans are unintentionally using here on Earth: releasing material into the atmosphere, which would enhance Mars' natural greenhouse effect, trapping solar heat at the surface.

The trouble is that you would need tons of these materials—literally. Previous schemes depended on bringing gases from Earth to Mars, or attempting to mine Mars for a large mass of ingredients that aren’t very common there—both are costly and difficult propositions. But the team wondered whether it could be done by processing materials that already exist abundantly on Mars.

We know from rovers like Curiosity that dust on Mars is rich in iron and aluminum. By themselves, those dust particles aren’t suitable to warm the planet; their size and composition mean they tend to cool the surface slightly rather than warm it. But if we engineered dust particles that had different shapes or compositions, the researchers hypothesized, perhaps they could trap heat more efficiently.

The researchers designed particles shaped like short rods—similar in size to commercially available glitter. These particles are designed to trap escaping heat and scatter sunlight towards the surface, enhancing Mars' natural greenhouse effect.

“How light interacts with sub-wavelength objects is fascinating. Importantly, engineering nanoparticles can lead to optical effects that far exceed what is conventionally expected from such small particles,” said Ansari. Mohseni, who is a co-author, believes that they have just scratched the surface: “We believe it is possible to design nanoparticles with higher efficiency, and even those that can dynamically change their optical properties.”

“You'd still need millions of tons to warm the planet, but that’s five thousand times less than you would need with previous proposals to globally warm Mars,” said Kite. “This significantly increases the feasibility of the project.”

Calculations indicate that if the particles were released into Mars’ atmosphere continuously at 30 liters per second, the planet would warm by more than 50 degrees Fahrenheit—and the effect could be noticeable within as soon as months. Similarly, the warming would be reversible, stopping within a few years if release was switched off.

Potential impact and future research

Much work remains to be done, the scientists said. We don’t know exactly how fast the engineered dust would cycle out of Mars’ atmosphere, for example. Mars does have water and clouds, and, as the planet warms, it’s possible that water would increasingly start to condense around the particles and fall back to the surface as rain.

"Climate feedbacks are really difficult to model accurately," Kite cautioned. "To implement something like this, we would need more data from both Mars and Earth, and we'd need to proceed slowly and reversibly to ensure the effects work as intended."

While this method represents a significant leap forward in terraforming research, the researchers emphasize that the study focuses on warming Mars to temperatures suitable for microbial life and possibly growing food crops—not on creating a breathable atmosphere for humans.

“This research opens new avenues for exploration and potentially brings us one step closer to the long-held dream of establishing a sustainable human presence on Mars,” said Kite.

Other coauthors of the study were Ramses Ramirez of the University of Central Florida and Liam Steele, formerly a postdoctoral researcher at UChicago, now with the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.

The authors used the Quest high-performance computing facility at Northwestern and the University of Chicago Research Computing Center.

Citation: “ Feasibility of keeping Mars warm with nanoparticles .” Ansari et al, Science Advances, August 7, 2024.

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How we could warm Mars

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Ever since learning the surface of the planet Mars is cold and dead, scientists have wondered if there was a way to make it friendlier to life.

In a groundbreaking study published Aug. 7 in Science Advances, researchers from Northwestern University, University of Chicago and University of Central Florida have proposed a revolutionary approach toward terraforming Mars. This new method, using engineered dust particles released into the atmosphere, could potentially warm the Red Planet by more than 50 degrees Fahrenheit, to temperatures suitable for microbial life — a crucial first step toward making Mars habitable.

The proposed method is more than 5,000 times more efficient than previous schemes to globally warm the planet , representing a significant leap forward in our ability to modify the Martian environment, according to lead author and Northwestern electrical and computer engineering graduate student Samaneh Ansari, who works in the lab of Northwestern professor Hooman Mohseni .

What sets this approach apart is its use of resources readily available on Mars, making it far more feasible than earlier proposals that relied on importing materials from Earth or mining rare Martian resources.

This strategy would take decades. But it appears logistically easier than other plans proposed so far, the researchers said.

“This suggests that the barrier to warming Mars to allow liquid water is not as high as previously thought,” said Edwin Kite, an associate professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago and corresponding author on the study.

> Related: Ancient bacteria might lurk beneath Mars’ surface  

M aking the planet suitable for humans to walk on the surface unaided requires much more work — astronauts still won’t be able to breathe Mars' thin air . But perhaps groundwork could be laid by making the planet habitable for microbes and food crops that could gradually add oxygen to the atmosphere, much as they have done for Earth during its geologic history.

A new approach to an age-old dream

There is a rich history of proposals to make Mars habitable — Carl Sagan himself came up with one back in 1971. These have ranged from outright daydreams, such as science fiction writers depicting turning one of Mars’ moons into a sun, to more recent and scientifically plausible ideas, such as engineering transparent gel tiles to trap heat.

Any plan to make Mars habitable must address several hurdles, including deadly UV rays and salty soil. But the biggest is the planet’s temperature — the surface of Mars averages about -80 degrees Fahrenheit.

One strategy to warm the planet could be the same method that humans are unintentionally using here on Earth: releasing material into the atmosphere, which would enhance Mars' natural greenhouse effect, trapping solar heat at the surface.

The trouble is that tons of these materials would be needed — literally. Previous schemes depended on bringing gases from Earth to Mars, or attempting to mine Mars for a large mass of ingredients that aren’t very common there are both costly and difficult propositions. But the team wondered whether it could be done by processing materials that already exist abundantly on Mars.

Changing the shape of the planet’s dust

Scientists have learned from rovers like Curiosity that dust on Mars is rich in iron and aluminum. By themselves, those dust particles aren’t suitable to warm the planet; their size and composition mean they tend to cool the surface slightly rather than warm it. But if dust particles could be engineered to have different shapes or compositions, the researchers hypothesized, perhaps they could trap heat more efficiently.

The researchers designed particles shaped like short rods, similar in size to commercially available glitter. These particles are designed to trap escaping heat and scatter sunlight towards the surface, enhancing Mars' natural greenhouse effect.

“How light interacts with sub-wavelength objects is fascinating,” Ansari said. “Importantly, engineering nanoparticles can lead to optical effects that far exceed what is conventionally expected from such small particles.”

A step toward feasibility

Mohseni, a study co-author and the AT&T Professor of Information Technology at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering, as well as a professor of physics and astronomy in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, believes that they have just scratched the surface.

“We believe it is possible to design nanoparticles with higher efficiency, and even those that can dynamically change their optical properties,” he said.

“You'd still need millions of tons to warm the planet, but that’s five thousand times less than you would need with previous proposals to globally warm Mars,” said Kite. “This significantly increases the feasibility of the project.”

Calculations indicate that if the particles were released into Mars’ atmosphere continuously at 30 liters per second, the planet would warm by more than 50 degrees Fahrenheit . T he effect could be noticeable within as soon as months. Similarly, the warming would be reversible, stopping within a few years if release was switched off.

The authors used the Quest high-performance computing facility at Northwestern and the University of Chicago Research Computing Center.

Potential impact and future research

Much work remains to be done, the scientists said. They don’t know exactly how fast the engineered dust would cycle out of Mars’ atmosphere, for example. Mars does have water and clouds, and, as the planet warms, it’s possible that water would increasingly start to condense around the particles and fall back to the surface as rain.

"Climate feedbacks are really difficult to model accurately," Kite cautioned. "To implement something like this, we would need more data from both Mars and Earth, and we'd need to proceed slowly and reversibly to ensure the effects work as intended."

While this method represents a significant leap forward in terraforming research, the researchers emphasize that the study focuses on warming Mars to temperatures suitable for microbial life and possibly growing food crops — not on creating a breathable atmosphere for humans.

“This research opens new avenues for exploration and potentially brings us one step closer to the long-held dream of establishing a sustainable human presence on Mars,” Kite said.

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STUDY ABROAD SCHOLARSHIP: Fund for Education Abroad - Spring 2025 applications due Sept. 18!

FUND FOR EDUCATION ABROAD OVERVIEW The Fund for Education Abroad (FEA) was established in 2010 as a 501(c)3 non-profit organization to enable more American college students to study abroad. Applicants from groups underrepresented in study abroad are given preference, in an effort to make the demographics of U.S. undergraduates studying abroad reflect the rich diversity of the U.S. population. Since 2010, FEA has awarded over $3.7 million in scholarships to 1186 undergraduates, helping students from all over the United States follow their dreams of studying abroad. Multiple scholarships are available through FEA, and just one application enables students to be considered for every scholarship for which they meet the criteria. Those scholarships include, in addition to the FEA General Scholarship, a range of special named & dedicated scholarships.

AWARD ELIGIBILITY FEA invests in deserving U.S. undergraduates who are least likely to study abroad. They consider financial need, demographic factors, and academic plan and preparedness to decide their scholarship recipients.

• Financial need is determined by the FEA Financial Aid Form that will be provided when you begin an application. Students must have a completed FAFSA for the current academic year.
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To be eligible for an FEA scholarship, you must be a U.S. citizen, permanent resident, or DACA recipient; be currently enrolled as an undergraduate at a college or university in the US; receive credit at your home institution for the study abroad program; and have demonstrated financial need. APPLICATION DEADLINES The application deadline is September 18, 2024 for Spring 2025 programs. For Summer 2025, Fall 2025, and Academic Year 2025-26 programs, the application cycle will open in November 2024.

SPRING 2025 APPLICANT WEBINAR Watch the FEA Spring 2025 applicant webinar for information about eligibility requirements, application components, recent changes to the application form, and more: Fund for Education Abroad Spring 2025 Applicant Webinar on Vimeo

FOR MORE INFORMATION  FEA Mission and Vision Additional Scholarships through FEA’s Access Partners Eligibility Application Instructions FAQs NEED MORE INFORMATION TO PLAN YOUR STUDY ABROAD EXPERIENCE? Schedule an appointment with a study abroad adviser - we'll help you find the program that's right for you. Please note: we recommend meeting with an academic adviser to discuss your study abroad needs and timeline BEFORE scheduling a one-on-one study abroad appointment. 

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Key Concepts in Dream Research: Cognition and Consciousness Are Inherently Linked, but Do No Not Control “Control”!

Introduction.

Whilst lucid dreaming (LD) is defined as being aware of dreaming whilst dreaming, a misconception exists in the public domain as a referral to controlling dream content and plot (Neuhäusler et al., 2018 ). This misconception reflects a number of widely-held beliefs about the nature of dreaming, which in part this commentary will seek to explain and rectify.

Furthermore, the aim of this piece is to suggest definitions of key concepts in the study of lucid and non-lucid dreaming concerning control, cognition, and consciousness. Whilst superficially there seems overlap between each of these, independent processes, and associated experiences underpin them.

First it is necessary to identify the parameters of “dreaming.” Essentially dreaming refers to the recollection of mental content from sleep. This broad definition recognizes that dreams may be fragmented, brief, non-narrative, thought-like, and/or containing basic sensory-perceptual experiences such as emotions, without necessarily comprising complex plots or activity. It also emphasizes the role of memory in accessing experiences, as there are no valid means by which dreams can be sampled, as neither can individuals report on their activity during sleep nor can we independently validate individuals' experiences. Some scholars use “REM” (rapid eye-movement) sleep and “dreaming” synonymously (e.g., Walker, 2009 ), recognizing that the majority of spontaneously recalled dream reports emerge from REM sleep, and indeed that REM sleep provides the conditions most typical of dreams, such as bizarreness, clearer dream recall, emotionality and, likely, hyperassociativity (Horton and Malinowski, 2015 ; Malinowski and Horton, 2015 ; Horton, 2017 ), in which several distinct memory sources and images can be simultaneously experienced. However, dreams can be sampled easily from non-REM periods, and REM can exist without dreaming (Solms, 2000 ), thus is it essential to define the parameters of dreaming relevant to each scientific investigation. For instance, if we are interested in cognition and/or consciousness across different periods of sleep, or even across sleep and wake, then the term “mental content” or “mentation” may be more appropriate than “dream,” to aid such comparability (Kahan and LaBerge, 2011 ). If we are interested in characteristics such as emotional intensity or report length, then we need to clarify whether we should focus upon memory recall from sleep or the underlying features of a conscious state such as neurological correlates of such activity.

Next, for explorations LD, or even mere lucidity, researchers need to define and operationalise LD. An awareness of dreaming during dreaming relies on accurate reality monitoring processes (Johnson et al., 1984 ) as well as unbiased recall. Reality monitoring is typically impaired during sleep, hence making experiences of lucidity rare and interesting. However, in order to engage the frontal faculties sufficiently to warrant accurate reality monitoring, an atypical neurological profile is engaged (Voss et al., 2014 ). It is therefore important to note that lucidity is infrequent and abnormal (Vallat et al., 2018 ), and as such likely does not reflect “normal” cognition and consciousness during sleep, particularly when extensive training is necessary in order to create pre-requisite conditions for lucidity to emerge (e.g., Baird et al., 2019 ). Nevertheless, LD can be reliably measured, in laboratory conditions, by asking trained participants to move their eyes systematically whilst lucid (Mota-Rolim, 2020 ), and it is recognized that LD may provide insights into the nature of consciousness (Baird et al., 2019 ), albeit in a more artificial than naturally-occurring environment.

The Elements of Cognition vs. Consciousness

As lucidity during sleep relies on heightened metacognitive activity, we need to understand what is meant by cognition during sleep and during wake. Cognition refers to the capacities and capabilities of function, in this case during sleep, in particular the organization, activation and reactivation of memories or experiences that are either familiar or unfamiliar to the dreamer. These processing capacities are notoriously difficult to study at any time, during sleep or wake, as some are so speedy they are automatic and operate beyond conscious awareness (see also the use of the term “offline processing” insofar as describing non-conscious cognitive activity, e.g., Wamsley, 2014 ). Consequently, it can be apparently tangible for researchers to focus upon the neural correlates of such behavior, to provide evidence for their functional existence (Baird et al., 2019 ). However, cognitive scientists need to offer theory for the function of such processes, for instance in relation to sleep-dependent memory consolidation (Payne and Nadel, 2004 ), rather than merely studying activations without considering functional relevance. In dream science, memory activations and predictable patterns of dreaming of familiar aspects of waking life have largely been explored under the Continuity Hypothesis (Schredl and Hofmann, 2003 ), as well as being observed in relation to other behaviors, such as personality traits (Schredl and Erlacher, 2004 ), moods, or subsequent performance on cognitive tasks such as problem solving, insight, creativity (Cai et al., 2009 ; Lewis et al., 2018 ), composition or recall (Baylor and Cavallero, 2001 ). Studies of cognition and metacognition during sleep have found that dreaming is not deficient but rather different in only a few ways to waking cognition (Kahan and LaBerge, 2011 ), with reality monitoring being one of the key different features. Specifically, during most sleep experiences, people cannot determine that their mental experience is internally- rather than externally-generated, consequently dreams feel real. Only in the cases of LD are individuals aware that they are dreaming. However, often the heightened metacognitive awareness is rousing and awakens the dreamer.

Whilst being aware of an experience as being internally- or externally-oriented can be operationalised in cognitive, or metacognitive terms, the conscious experience of that function may be characterized somewhat differently, although some features may overlap with those of cognition. Consciousness may, here, refer to the more characteristic features of sleep mentation, including experiential elements such as the fluidity, continuity over time, presence of specific features or characters and the more holistic nature of mental content. For instance, we may note that non-REM mentation is typically thought-like and brief, containing day residues and life-like references, whereas REM sampled mentation is typically bizarre, story-like and full of activity (Baylor and Cavallero, 2001 ; Blagrove et al., 2011 ). These descriptions of sleep mentation could well-reflect underlying cognitive processes such as memory activation, likely forming memory consolidation processes, but the overriding consciousness is more descriptive. The cognitive interests relate to function, and may be measures in those terms, such as extent of activation, which may also include aspects that are non-conscious at the point of experience.

When considering lucidity, the nature of the consciousness may include sensations of awe at realizing one is dreaming, as well as vivid memories of the dream experience itself. This is commonly associated with increased underlying neurocognitive activity. The underlying cognition , or hypothetical function, reflects accurate reality monitoring, metacognition, self-awareness and, typically, arousal (from enjoyment of the experience).

Furthermore, in some studies of LD, participants who achieve lucidity may continue to develop the ability to control their actions during dreaming (LaBerge, 1980 ). Indeed, several studies aimed to achieve this, rather than studying the mere presence of lucidity in more naturalistic or opportunistic settings. Such studies confuse the concepts of lucidity and control, with the former being more likely to occur naturally, and the latter being rare and artificial experiences. As such scholars should be cautious about inferring the nature of consciousness and/or cognition from artificial control-induction techniques, as this likely differs from the profile of mental content emerging from experiences of lucidity.

LD is unusual, relative to the existence of dreaming which, arguably, occurs the entire time that one is asleep (if the present definition of dreaming is adopted, as consciousness continues, even during sleep). Whilst lucid, or controlled, experiences may offer a therapeutic benefit, for instance by allowing individuals to rehearse actions (Stumbrys et al., 2016 ) or overcome threats (Putois et al., 2019 ) during sleep, they are typically fleeting, and estimations of their frequency often rely on self-report and retrospective methods (Vallat et al., 2018 ). Furthermore, inducing lucidity interrupts sleep, which we know is required to facilitate emotion-regulation and memory consolidation processes, which arguably would be more beneficial than any benefits of lucid dreaming anyway (Vallat and Ruby, 2019 ).

To operationalise lucidity, researchers should take care not to confuse controlling the dream experience with mere awareness of dreaming. We should then define control carefully for instance as voluntarily changing experience. Superficially control may seem to rely upon both a specific cognitive and consciousness profile, however the conscious awareness of control may only become apparent at the time of recall, rather than during the experience itself, and again scholars should take care to identify any potential additional explanatory information offered to a dream report at the point of reporting it, as being distinct from a description of the original experience.

Caution should be urged when considering whether it may be appropriate to recommend that participants control their dreams, given that doing so increases sleep disturbances via awakenings (however, see LaBerge et al., 2018a , who included data from uninterrupted REM sleep only, but see also LaBerge et al., 2018b , for a paradigm in which participants remained awake for 30 min in the middle of the night, which increased LD recall), and also that controlling dream content is unnatural, therefore it may restrict the activation of memory sources and emotions that may underly sleep-dependent memory consolidation (Wamsley and Stickgold, 2011 ) and emotion regulation (Walker, 2009 ) processes. Perhaps only in the case of nightmares causing substantive distress, most typically in sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder, should the possible benefits of reducing distress from terrifying dreams outweigh the likely negative consequences of changing sleep structure and physiology, by restricting the opportunity for “offline” processing (e.g., Putois et al., 2019 ).

In the occasions of spontaneous ongoing lucidity, whereby the experience does not awaken the dreamer, either the dreamer attempts to understand, or even “interpret” meaning from the typically bizarre dream narrative in which they find themselves, or they attempt to control it in some form during the dream state. The latter, in the case of LD, can be learned in some cases (LaBerge, 1980 ). Comparable practices during wakefulness demonstrate the ability for some to being able to gain fuller awareness of some typically more automatic behaviors, as depicted by the rise in popularity of mindfulness.

LD is concerning for a number of reasons, as recently outlined by Vallat and Ruby ( 2019 ), whereby training to overcome the mental content spontaneously emerging during sleep-dependent cognition ultimately changes and thwarts those processes. Humans likely need to foster the conditions for those processes to occur in order to benefit from the plethora of advantages of sleep.

It seems surprising that LD has received much attention, when time spent dreaming is far greater. Furthermore, the nature of dreaming and consciousness is fascinating, and may provide insights into the nature and perhaps function of underlying cognitive processes. For instance, dream bizarreness, which typifies REM mentation (Revonsuo and Tarkko, 2002 ; Payne, 2010 ) and likely results, at least in part, from hyperassociativity of distinct memory sources during sleep (Horton and Malinowski, 2015 ) may inform an understanding of the activation, fragmentation and re-organization of memory sources as part of sleep-dependent memory consolidation processes (Horton, 2017 ). Lucidity, however, is highly atypical and therefore arguably cannot offer so much insight.

“Control” within LD inherently unnatural and disrupts sleep. Controlled dreams rarely exist spontaneously, either in typical or atypical cognition. Scholars therefore should have the integrity to consider the impact that studies of control may have not only on participants engaging with such studies, but also the wider community who may be attracted to the idea of controlling their dreams. There is a duty to convey that we should not control, control, but instead promote the benefits of sleeping well (Walker, 2019 ), to afford the opportunity to dream.

Nevertheless, it is important to consider whether LD may have adaptiveness value, especially in the case of emotion processing and/or when the incidence of LD correlates with pathologies. LD may also provide insights into the nature of dreaming, principally by involving the dreamer during the dream (Zink and Pietrowsky, 2015 ), rather than just afterwards during recall.

Author Contributions

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.

Conflict of Interest

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Breaking’s Olympic Debut

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More than 50 years after its inception, “breaking” — not “break dancing,” a term coined by the media and disdained by practitioners — will debut as an Olympic sport.

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We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.

The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Michael Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexie Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Sophia Lanman, Shannon Lin, Diane Wong, Devon Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Olivia Natt, Daniel Ramirez and Brendan Klinkenberg.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Julia Simon, Sofia Milan, Mahima Chablani, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Maddy Masiello, Isabella Anderson, Nina Lassam and Nick Pitman.

Jonathan Abrams writes about the intersections of sports and culture and the changing cultural scenes in the South. More about Jonathan Abrams

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