Most of us have about five dreams each night, though we’re not likely to remember any of them.
But a team of researchers has found a pattern of brain activity that seems to reveal not only when the brain is generating a dream but something about the content of that dream.
“When subjects were having [dream] experiences during sleep, there was a region in the back of the brain that tended to be very active, as if this region was a little bit more awake,” says Francesca Siclari, a researcher at the Center for Research and Investigation in Sleep at Lausanne University Hospital in Switzerland.
Patterns of brain activity in this region also suggested whether the dream included a face or movement, Siclari and a team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison report in Nature Neuroscience.
The team found that dreams occurred during both rapid eye movement — REM — and non-REM sleep. But there were also periods of deep sleep in which dreaming did not occur.
The team studied dreams by monitoring electrical activity in the brains of 32 people as they slept. To read more from Jon Hamilton, click here.