Dr Michelle Carr

speaker

145 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 28 Jul

Dr Michelle Carr’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Science Weekly · Revisited: The surprising science of dreams and nightmares · 28 Jul 2026 podcast

But we actually dream in every stage of sleep.

So if you wake people up all across the night, the majority of the time they will remember some type of conscious experience that they were having during sleep.

It's just that the type of experience changes.

So during a deeper stage of sleep, people might have not a very vivid experience.

Maybe they even feel like they're just thinking.

And then at the end of the night is when we have REM sleep.

And that's the state where the brain is really the most active.

From the brain activity, it almost looks like wakefulness, sensory cortices are active, emotional regions of the brain are active, and people really experience the most vivid and immersive dreams during this date.

There's a lot of different avenues of research looking at potential functions of dreaming.

One of the main ones is looking at how dreams are related to memory processing, because this is a major function of sleep is essentially reactivating memories and strengthening or consolidating those memories that are important.

As an example, if you have someone do a certain learning task before they go to sleep at night, then during the night if we collect their dream content, we might see aspects of that learning task showing up in their dreams.

The people who dream more about that learning task are actually going to have a better performance in the morning.

The dream content is reflecting processes of memory consolidation that are occurring across the night.

Yeah, you know, it's not just consolidating memories that we've experienced.

It's also trying to learn from them.

There's this view of dreams as a simulation or a rehearsal space where we re-encounter things that we faced during the day.

But there may be slightly different scenarios.

There's slightly more bizarre scenarios.

There's kind of evolutionary models there.

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