Dr. David Eagleman

So anyway, this is our hypothesis about why we dream, and it's the only hypothesis that makes quantitative predictions across species.

Yeah, and the important part here, of course, is they're more visually elaborate.

You know, there are dreams that people can have in deep sleep.

Obviously, the way...

that this gets studied, as you know, is you rouse the sleeper and you say, hey, what were you just dreaming about?

What were you just thinking about?

And so if you do that during REM sleep where their eyes are moving around, they'll say, whoa, I was just, you know, riding across a meadow on a camel and this is what was going on.

If you wake somebody during other stages of sleep, deep sleep, they'll, you know, they sometimes have something like, well, I was just considering this thing

feeling i had of whatever but it's not as visual it's not as rich by the way people who are blind still have dreams but their dreams are not visual they have a dream like oh i was you know feeling my way around the living room but all the furniture was rearranged and then i felt in the corner and it was a jaguar and the jaguar started chasing me and i was trying to get away from it and so on

But it's sound, it's touch, it's things like that.

Why?

Because their occipital lobe at the back of their head is not visual.

It's coming from these other things.

So the dreaming circuitry, which is very ancient, is just blasting activity into that area of the occipital lobe.

And so they experience whatever that correlates with.

By the way, counselors who are at these who deal with these blind students at these blind schools, they're generally encouraged to blindfold themselves for like seven days and they absolutely start having totally different experiences.

Their brain starts, you know, changing.

Great question.

Well, it turns out, first of all,

What victims often have is what's called weapon focus.