Dr Karen Conkley

And until we really understand everything that dreams are doing, I think it is a bit dangerous to try to change them all the time, especially with sounds, because they might be doing things that we're not accounting for.

And maybe we don't need to solve problems in our dreams tonight.

Maybe we really need to process a difficult emotional memory we had that day or something like that.

And so I think that dreams have an intelligence all their own, and we should respect that.

But

I still think it's exciting to be able to make scientific progress on understanding them and also to help when people's dreams go awry, such as if you have PTSD or traumatic nightmares.

There's definitely a lot of linkages between mental health and altered dreaming, and so it could be a really good intervention time for people who struggle with mental health.

Yeah, and, you know, it's one thing to study the function of sleep, but the extent to which dreams contribute to the functions of sleep is an even more unknown question.

Yeah, for sure.

And it could be.

But one kind of argument against that and kind of the reason why we did that study is because if you could say that the specific content of someone's dream is more informative to what that period of sleep is doing than the overall...

night of sleep or the amount of sleep or any other physiological thing about that sleep, it would kind of show you, it would provide decent evidence that the dreams are important.

Like you might have this exact amount of sleep and REM sleep and blah, blah, blah.

But if your dream pertains to this specific puzzle, you're more likely to solve it.

So, I mean, it's an argument that the dream itself is relevant.

So we know that sleep is really good at helping you improve in... If you learn a song on the piano, you kind of reach a plateau where you're not improving.

And then after a night of sleep, you can play it much better the next day.

And that's been established.

But the question is, are dreams contributing?

And so I have this friend, Claudia, who did a cool study where she gave people a really complex motor task.