It looks like the lower brain stem activity wakes the cortex up and then the cortex does a lot of organized, meaningful thinking once it's activated. There's one school of thought that this rhythmic firing is the sole cause of dreaming and all the upper cortical activity is a simple response to that. During this phase, there are rhythmic bursts of activity in the brain stem. REM is generally the only time during sleep that most of the cortex is pretty much as active as it is when we're awake. Why do most dreams seem to occur in REM, and what's happening during that sleep phase that seems to produce dreams? Some things that seem to look like dreams occasionally occur in other stages of sleep. A few people will define it as a REM (rapid eye movement) sleep experience but, actually, the research doesn't support that. The literal definition is a narrative experience that occurs during sleep. ![]() We're all familiar with dreams, but what's the scientific definition? We asked Deirdre Barrett, author of the book The Committee of Sleep: How Artists, Scientists and Athletes Use Dreams for Creative Problem-Solving-and How You Can, Too (Crown, 2001) and assistant clinical professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, about what dream-control strategies do and don't work-and why. But emerging technologies raise the prospect that, at the very least, we'll get an idea of what others are dreaming about in real time. The ability to influence other people's sleep worlds is still crude. With practice we can also increase our chances of having a lucid dream, the sort of "dream within a dream" that Inception's characters regularly slip into. We can strategize to dream about a particular subject, solve a problem or end a recurring nightmare. ![]() Techniques to control, or at least influence, our dreams have been shown to work in sleep experiments. Although the heavy sedation and level of detail incited are far-fetched, dream control isn't entirely a Hollywood fantasy. In the blockbuster movie Inception, Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his compatriots use drugs and psychological profiles to trigger specific dreams in people. It turns out, however, that our ability to shape our dreams is better than mere chance. Some dreams feel so revelatory-if only returning to sleep would take us back there.
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