Dr Michelle Carr

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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

that frame dreaming as perhaps a space where we can rehearse how we respond to threats, you know, how we would respond if something is chasing us or somebody is threatening us.

And it enables us to be better prepared for similar situations in the future.

Right, yeah, the bizarreness of dreams.

In part it's because, especially in REM sleep, there's this really, what dream scientists call a hyper-associativity that's occurring, that there's a lot of activation occurring across cortical regions of the brain.

And we think that this is enabling us to make associations that are really broad and really wide throughout memories in the brain.

So we maybe are making associations between something that happened yesterday

yesterday with a memory from a year ago and a childhood memory and this is useful kind of in creative thinking but also more broadly it just helps us to to integrate each experience into this really broad autobiography that we have of our entire life you know drawing connections through so many things that we've experienced in the past

Yeah, definitely there are common themes.

We call them typical dream themes, and they've been studied quite a bit across cultures and across different age groups.

And over 40 of them have been discovered.

The ones you mentioned are very common.

Dreams of flying, dreams of being chased, dreams where you're trying again and again and again to accomplish a task, but you can't quite do it.

Out of control cars or teeth falling out.

There's a lot of different

potential reasons for some of these themes.

And I don't think there's just one answer for why we have these dreams.

I think some of them are actually related to the physical sensations of sleep.

So I mentioned the dream of teeth falling out, and there was one study that showed that that's actually related to having dental distress.

So maybe people who are clenching their jaw or grinding their teeth at night, and it's just the mind making sense of the sensation.

Sometimes people in their dreams, they have this sensation that their body is slowed down, like they can't move or control their body very well.

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