Revisited: The surprising science of dreams and nightmares
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This is The Guardian.
Hi Ian here. The Science Weekly team is on a break but we'll be back with some new episodes for you next week. For now we're going back to a few of our favourites from the year so far. If you've ever woken up from a strange dream and wondered what on earth your subconscious was thinking, this might be the episode for you. I spoke with dream scientist Dr Michelle Carr about the fascinating science of dreams and nightmares. I hope you enjoy it. Dr Michelle Carr has an unusual job. She spends her time watching people sleep.
So as a dream scientist, you know, I work in a sleep lab and we invite subjects into the lab, usually in the evening.
Before they can get cozy, Michelle's subjects are hooked up to electrodes on their scalp and face. Then it's lights out.
The subject will go into a bedroom, which we've tried to make kind of homey with a nice night table and a nice bed. And they'll sleep. And we are watching their brain activity and their eye movement activity. And we have a video of them sleeping in bed.
But brain activity and eye movement only get the scientists so far. To really get an insight into the mysteries of dreams, Michelle and her colleagues have to do something a little unkind.
Periodically throughout the night, we just wake them up. We use a two-way intercom to kind of call their name. And after they wake up, we ask them about their dream. And then they can go back to sleep. And we just repeat this process multiple times across the night to collect as much dream content as we can.
The dream content Michelle has collected over her two decades as a dream scientist has informed her new book, Into the Dream Lab, The New Science of Dreams and Nightmares.
From studying dreams, we can see that the scaffolding of dreams is really our experience from waking life. And there are certain features that really often reappear in dreams. And really, they're like a simulation of our reality.
So today, why do we dream? What happens when dreams go wrong? And how can we take control of our sleeping life? From The Guardian, I'm Ian Sample, and this is Science Weekly.
Michelle is an assistant professor of psychiatry and addictology at the University of Montreal and directs the dream engineering lab there. As you can imagine, with all those late nights in the lab, her dream life is patchy.
Yeah, it's kind of a problem of being a dream researcher is that we are sleep deprived and a little dream deprived during experiments.
Occupational hazard.
Yeah.
I wondered if you could take me through a kind of what a typical night of sleep looks like in terms of its relevance to dreaming. And I'm thinking about whether our dreams kind of change across the night. I mean, we hear a lot about REM sleep, but is that the only time when we dream?
So across the night, we go through four different stages of sleep. So starting early in the night, right as you enter sleep, you go into a really light sleep called stage one sleep.
How do researchers study dreams in a sleep lab?
And then you descend into gradually slower, deeper stages of sleep, stage two and stage three. And historically, these stages have been less studied related to dreaming. And people have focused on REM sleep, which is the stage that occurs really at the end of the night and especially in the morning. 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. It 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.
And what about the purpose of dreams, Michelle?
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