Dr Sutapa Mukherjee

And not many people knew much about it.

So I went on and did my respiratory training and then I did my PhD, which was actually in lung cancer.

And then I went off to Harvard Medical School for my postdoctoral work.

And it was there that I got to meet some very, very experienced sleep researchers.

And it got me thinking about, oh, I don't really have the skills to

as a sleep physician to really help people with sleep problems.

So then I came back to Australia in the early 2000s and that's when I did my sleep training in Perth and really, you know, spent a few years honing my craft and then...

went on and did a lot of research into sleep.

And that was a really great time because, you know, sleep was very new and we were just learning so much about sleep and we're still learning about sleep.

It's a great field because there's so much uncharted water.

So, you know, once again, the physiology tells us that dreaming is really when you're in REM sleep.

And that is so important for learning, memory consolidation, emotional processing, and also for brain development.

So, you know, if you're trying to learn something new, uh,

It's so important to, you know, obviously you're learning new techniques, whatever it is, to actually have good sleep because the next day when you come back to whatever you were learning, you will have actually consolidated all that work that you did the day before because of sleep.

We don't really understand why we dream.

And of course, once again, dreaming is really, really difficult to measure.

You know, some of the skilled researchers will get people to work on something and then...

they'll get them to go to sleep and the minute they start dreaming, they wake them up and they ask them what they were dreaming about.

But most of the time we don't remember our dreams but we know that everybody dreams and it's only occasionally that you will actually remember what you're dreaming about.

And sometimes it relates to something that you were doing the day before but a lot of the time it can be something completely different.