Dream researcher Başak Türker explains how she was able to communicate with people while they were dreaming. Listen to The Conversation Weekly podcast.
Dreams keep our brains ticking over. They wash the thoughts from the day’s events at a molecular level. They might even help us imagine what’s possible during our waking hours.
By learning what parts of the brain are crucial for imagination to work, neuroscientists can look back over hundreds of millions of years of evolution to figure out when it first emerged.
Yuta Senzai, University of California, San Francisco and Massimo Scanziani, University of California, San Francisco
Why your eyes move during the REM stage of sleep has puzzled scientists for years. Researchers measured mice brains to look for a possible explanation.
Dreams help us regulate our emotions and adapt to stressful events. Repetitive content may represent an unsuccessful attempt to integrate difficult experiences.
Spontaneous thought, or mind wandering, occupies up to 50% of our time awake. In a time of COVID, the unruliness and unboundedness of our minds might be a great escape.
Dreams that are more vivid, more frequent and more striking… Lockdown seems to trouble our nights as well as our days, and there’s reason to believe that’s not just a figment of our imagination.
During times of stress and anxiety we either dream more or remember our dreams more often, as a way of coping with challenging circumstances and new information.