Sweet Dreams

Sleep and dreams are quite fascinating, but quite mysterious as well. Out of all of the articles I've read about sleep and dream that I hoped would inspire me to write a good post, I just kept seeing over and over again how little psychologists and researchers really know about sleep and dreams. Why do we dream? Why do we dream about what certain things? What do our dreams mean? Why do we sleep? Why can some people have lucid dreams while others can't? These are all questions that psychologists struggle with. I read about a recent study in Japan that is getting researchers closer to an answer--or at least they think so.

Researchers in Japan used a technique called neural decoding, which uses measurements of brain activity to predict visual content. Basically, these researchers are trying to see if they can predict what people will dream about by looking at their brain activity. Seems pretty cool, right? In this study, the researchers used MRI and EEG scans to monitor the brain activity of 3 adult males while they slept. They would wake up the men several times per hour and asked to report what they had been dreaming about. They did this so they could connect the brain activity the researchers saw with what the men were seeing in their dreams. After a few days, the researchers had over 200 dream reports that they put into different categories (cars, women, sports etc). Then, the researchers showed the men pictures that represent the different categories. So, they would show the men a picture of a car or a woman or something like that. While the men looked at the pictures, the researchers conducted the same brain scans that they had done while the men were sleeping. They saw that the brain activity while sleeping was pretty similar to the brain activity used for visual processing while awake. Apparently, the neural processing was so similar that the researchers were able to predict the visual content of the mens' dreams with 75%-80% accuracy. Seems pretty crazy, right? The ability to actually predict what people are dreaming about is a big step for dream research as a whole and the psychology of dreams and sleep.

We still are pretty clueless when it comes to dreams. As of now, yes, we have our theories, but still can't seem to figure it out. The wish fulfillment theory--the idea that our dreams have hidden meaning and are sending us messages, the information process theory--when we dream we are going through our memories and deciding if they are worth keeping, developing and preserving neural pathways--see and hear images while out neural networks are pruning, and the activation-sythesis theory--stimulation that your mind can't make sense of so we interpret it in some strange way--these are theories we have now that attempt to explain our dreams.

Yeah, so I guess I could deal with some of these theories, but what about lucid dreams? To me, lucid dreams are the definition of divided consciousness. A person can be asleep, paralyzed as if in REM sleep, and be completely aware in a dream. This seems really cool, as long as its not a nightmare. Lucid dreamers have claimed to be able to have supernatural powers in dreams and can even have conversations with other dream characters. These dreams seem so real that they can even be confused with reality. Not sure if this is true, but I saw somewhere that a person was reported to have woken up with a heart attack and reportedly waking up from a lucid dream in which he was shot in the heart by another dream character. Psychologists say that lucid dreaming occurs in REM-partial waking state. During lucid dreams, there are no alpha waves and the prefrontal and parietal lobes are reactivated (they are usually deactivated in REM sleep). That is why lucid dreamers are able to have logical thoughts in their dreams.

All very interesting, yet there are still very few answers out there. Would you want to have lucid dreams? Would they confuse you? I feel like as cool as they could be, I'd probably rather live in my dreams than in reality...and that could be an issue.

Anyway,
Sweet Dreams, my friends.