“The Dream,” Pablo Picasso, 1932FLICKR, NICHODESIGNNeuroscientists have long associated rapid eye movement (REM) sleep—the sleep stage that occurs before waking—with dreaming, and non-REM sleep with dreamlessness. These generalizations are not fully accurate, however; study participants often report having dreamt during non-REM sleep and, occasionally, the absence of dreams during REM sleep. In a study published today (April 10) in Nature Neuroscience, researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and their colleagues have reported changes in the brainwave activity of one area of the brain, which they call the “posterior hot zone,” which are correlated with dreaming during both REM and non-REM sleep.
“This study looks at whether you can detect the occurrence of dreaming by analysis of high-density EEG recordings and even whether you can tell something about the categories of dream content, and it argues that they can do both of those,” Robert Stickgold, director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, who was not involved in the work, told The Scientist.
Researchers are keen to understand dreaming in part because they believe it may help them understand consciousness. It’s an old scientific idea: to study the areas involved in a given process, find a model in which that process is disrupted. During sleep, we are sometimes conscious—such as during dreams—and at other times, not, making it an ...
