Word: sleepings
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...other study involves comparing the sleeping ability of subjects who dream with that of subjects who can't because of brain lesions. Solms argues that because our motivational drive is fully active while we're asleep, our brain's way of keeping us asleep and undertaking the necessary repairs is by tricking us, through dreams, into thinking we're up and about and pursuing our desires. It's the neurological equivalent of putting on a DVD for the kids so the main players in the house can get some shut-eye. "Dreams replace the real actions that are instigated...
...Harvard's Stickgold believes dreams have a different function entirely. "I think it's pretty clear now that sleep and dreaming serve to process memories from the last day and all the way back," he says. "Sleep can strengthen memories... and help extract the meaning of events by building associative networks with other memories. Dreaming is probably a high-level version of this processing." Clearly, he adds, you don't have to remember your dreams for these processes to work. "The brain is tuning your memory circuits as you sleep, and remembering the imagery created during this process...
...Stickgold's evidence includes an experiment he led in 2000 when Harvard researchers were able to elicit the same dream in a bunch of people as they drifted off to sleep. They did this by exposing 27 subjects to an intensive three-day course in the computer game Tetris, which involves assembling geometric shapes. By the second night of training, 17 subjects had reported having the same dream image-falling Tetris pieces-indicating to Stickgold that the need to learn prods the brain to dream. More of these kinds of studies are needed, he says, "because as we learn...
...when other parts that inhibit us are off-line, "it follows that there's value in interpreting dreams," he says. They provide a "privileged, unfiltered access" to what's on a person's mind. Mark Blagrove, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Wales, where he runs a sleep laboratory, thinks it's possible the search for a biological function of dreaming could be futile. "It could just be," he says, "that our elaborate dreams are a side effect of the fact that we have a highly evolved imagination...
...vast, closed chain, incomprehensibly complex and ever changing. When you look at life from this second perspective, some unlikely connections reveal themselves. You're forced to retreat from the den of libertarianism and sniff the wind, to wake up when someone in Khartoum or Mogadishu twitches in his sleep...