“It also seems to suggest that our recall of dreams is based on short-term memory, because dream decoding was most accurate in the tens of seconds before waking,” he adds.
Kamitani and his colleagues are now trying to collect the same kind of data from the rapid eye movement (REM) stage of sleep, which is also associated with dreaming. “This is more challenging because we have to wait at least one hour before sleeping subjects reach that stage,” Kamitani says.
But the extra effort will be worth it, he says. “Knowing more about the content of dreams and how it relates to brain activity may help us to understand the function of dreaming.”
This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on October 19, 2012.
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8 Comments
Add Comment"Car, male, female, computer..." Those are some prosaic dreams!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow about flaming buildings that melt into giant witch's heads from which sprout vines whose flowers turn into eyeballs that follow me everywhere and recite "recipes for flying" in my grandmother's voice?
That's what my dreams are like.
I'm with you on that one, Randoo. And no sex? That's weak.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"but some contained unusual content, such as talking to a famous actor." How incredibly bizarre! And I thought the dream about my cat scolding me for not fully grasping Bayesian statistics was on the unusual side.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisInteresting study though.
I once lucid-dreamed through the entire Captain America movie, up until the point where Cap has to jump onto the Red Skull's jet (I chickened out over the Alps, and woke up wetting the bed and twisted up like a pretzel (from doing action moves while out cold). Embarrasing but true). Compared to getting to pull off superhero moves and saying all of the cool lines, talking to famous actors is mind-crushingly dull.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe headline typically overstates the case. Just another example of SciAm sounding like grocery store gossip tabloids. "Scientists Read Dreams" Really?! Did SciAm editors learn to write these headlines during their vast experience on the National Inquirer or the US Weekly? What ever happened to SciAm professionalism and accuracy?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this(Apologies to readers, but this one deserves every bit of sarcasm. I wish that I could say it isn't typical output from the online editors lately.)
"scan the brains of three people as they slept" - wow, what a dataset. They used 3 people and inferred 20 categories from the dreams of those 3 people. Really? And they think this is newsworthy?? Ugh.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisScientists read dreams article is fantastic. Reading dream is reading mind is a great achievement. Good luck.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisS. N. Tiwary
Director
Dreams happen during REM and usually just before you wake up after hours long sleep.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have MS and used to periodically have dreams(nightmares) where I was involved in car collision and I couldn't move a muscle. In the dream I wanted to wake up but couldn't. My wife would tell me I groaning and grunting and not making any intelligible speech. She would tap me on the shoulder, or while napping on my own, I eventually snapped out of the dream.
A couple months later I realized my brain was trying to tell me something. I eventually figured out that I had to accept that due to my MS I may (unlikely) become so disabled that would not be able to move at all. Like what happened to my aunt who died from a rare form of MS in 1980 at age 40.
Once I thought carefully about it and accepted, really accepted, this possibility I no longer had these types of dreams.