(Image: Mallory Morrison/Corbis)
By David Robson
Our dreams tend to be silent movies
Read more: “Sleep and dreaming: The how, where and why”
MARY SHELLEY’S involved a pale student kneeling beside a corpse that was jerking back to life. Paul McCartney’s contained the melody of Yesterday, while James Cameron’s feverish visions inspired the Terminator films. My dreams often feature a shrinking rabbit, which then turns into an insect that leaps across the lawn and under the neighbour’s fence.
With their eerie mixture of the familiar and the bizarre, it is easy to look for meaning in these nightly wanderings. Why do our brains take these journeys and why do they contain such outlandish twists and turns? Unfortunately for armchair psychoanalysts, Sigmund Freud’s attempts to interpret our dreams remain hotly disputed. Nevertheless, neuroscientists and psychologists have recently made big strides in understanding the way the brain builds our dreams, and the factors that shape their curious stories. Along the way, they have found startling hints that our use of technology may be permanently changing the very nature of this fundamental human experience.
Anyone who has ever awoken feeling amazed by their night’s dream only to forget its contents by the time they reach the shower will understand the difficulties of studying such an ephemeral state of mind. Some of the best attempts to catalogue dream features either asked participants to jot them down as soon as they woke up every morning or, better still, invited volunteers to sleep in a lab, where they were awoken and immediately questioned at intervals in the night. Such experiments have shown that our dreams tend to be
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