Simple science: Dreaming

By:  William Lohrmann

We spend about one third of our lives asleep. Sleeping is what we do the most, yet there is no definitive answer to why we do this. Perhaps more interestingly, we are not even sure why we dream. This mysterious, seemingly unconscious state of mind have made people ponder for centuries, and with modern tools and instruments, we have come much closer to solving this riddle. Theories have been stated, tested, and some have passed. But there is still much to be known about this. The questions are still there: Why do we sleep, and what’s the big deal with dreaming?

Sigmund Freud was a well-known scientist who specialized in neurology. He is most known for founding the study of psychoanalysis. However, he also worked with dreaming. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), he concluded that our dreams are influenced by our hidden desires. Not surprisingly, the important principles of psychoanalysis are also about desires and sexuality. Freud wrote in The psychopathology of Everyday Life that all human behavior is driven by our sexual desires. He meant this was true even for infants.

At Freud’s time, there was no way of knowing what a person was thinking about without asking.  Even to this day, we are far from figuring out exactly how the brain thinks but we have a much better idea than we had before. When our brain is working, millions of electric impulses are sent back and forth between nerve cells. Often, these impulses behave according to special patterns, creating wave signals that can be measured. The scientists Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman developed an instrument based on these principles so they could study sleep and dreaming more accurately.

 Aserinsky and Kleitman found out that sleeping is not as simple as we thought. It turns out that sleep can be divided into two separate stages. In the first type of sleep, we do not dream much, and the brain is not very active. Fittingly enough, this is called deep sleep. REM-sleep, on the other hand, is so interesting you’ll wake up from it – literally. The REM stage is in many ways very paradoxical. To Aserinsky and Kleitman’s surprise, when they studied brains in REM-sleep, it did not seem as if the test objects were dreaming at all. Their brains functioned very much like when they were awake. Therefore, it is no surprise that REM-sleep is the sleep stage when we experience the most life-like and vivid dreams.  Now, before we go on, you may wonder what REM stands for. When scientists have studied sleeping, they have found that most of the body does not move. This is to prevent the person from responding to things inside the dream.  However, the eyes are free to move. In fact, there is Rapid Eye Movement during REM-sleep (You may now guess what REM stands for).

 There are several theories as to why we dream as we do in REM-sleep. One of the more prominent ones says that we use REM-sleep to make connections between our newly acquired knowledge and memories. By processing through the events of the day, the brain is able to relate experiences with each other to learn more about how things work and equips us with tools to predict the outcomes of future events. A transformation of short-term memory into long-term memory is one way to put it.

Another theory## claims that REM-sleep is vital in developing the brain, not just sorting through new information. The fact that infants sleep in the REM-stage about 80 % of the time, as opposed to about 40 % for adults, is evidence for this.

Yet another theory## states that REM-sleep is a form of simulation that helps us train for dangerous situations in a safe environment (our beds). This suggests why we can have such weird dreams as we have. The unpredictability of our dreams is also an indication of this. However, as mentioned earlier, the brain remains almost completely active during the REM-stage. The only part that remains inactive is our dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain responsible for predicting outcomes and planning ahead. This may not be so surprising, since our dreams can be very unpredictable sometimes. What would then happen if we allowed this part to “wake up”? The consequence is what we call lucid dreaming.

During lucid dreaming, the dreamer is aware that he or she is dreaming, and therefore able to exert some control over the “plot” of the dream. Most people have experienced at least one lucid dream. It varies greatly from person to person, as some people have them more often. Other than the relevant brain parts, scientists do not know much about lucid dreaming, such as why we have them and how they are beneficial to us.

Now, don’t fall asleep! To conclude, we may say that there is still a lot to be known about the workings of our brains and the function of sleep and dreaming. We have come far in our studies with the help of brilliant scientists such as Aserinsky and Kleitman and new instruments and methods are just waiting to be discovered. This would benefit curious minds all over the world but also patients with sleep disorders who struggle with this every day. No matter the motive, there is definitely a huge need for more information on this topic. That’s all for today… zzz…