What we don't know about dreams

I had the good luck to attend a class where Dr. Gabriela Torres spoke about her research on dreaming and what happens in the human brain during dreams. Due to my interest in this subject, I have made the decision to learn more about it and present my findings today. Because dreams could only be researched after awakening, which I believe is fantastic, dream science was unreliable and incomplete for most of history. Dr. Torre's research and other studies, however, are changing this by showing that dreams are not closed off experiences but rather measurable and, more significantly, interactive brain states. 

Before speaking in my Neuro 300 seminar class, Dr. Torres presented a study that shows how REM sleepers can use eye movements or facial muscle signals to receive questions and answers in real time. This implies that while completely asleep, the dream brain is capable of understanding speech, carrying out mental tasks, and purposefully responding. Their research demonstrates that dream cognition is more complex as well as well-organized and connected to reality than previously thought. 

I became interested in this because, when doing my own research, I found that a supplementary study by Horikawa, Tamaki, Miyawaki, and Kamitani (2013) further supports this. They used fMRI and machine-learning models to directly translate the visual content of dreams from brain activity. Because the same visual regions that are active during waking perception also become active during dream imagery, researchers were able to predict what patients were dreaming before they woke up. This shows that the brain's neuronal architecture for dream imagery is the same as that of real perception. 

When taken as a whole, these investigations offer a convincing conclusion, which is that dreams are not personal hallucinations but rather readable and interactive in cognitive states. While Konkoly (in the study, Dr. Torres presented) showed that dreamers can communicate openly, Horikawa, Tamaki, Miyawaki, and Kamitani (2013) (in the study I found) showed that researchers can analyze dream material inwardly. These findings support the idea that consciousness is not an "on and off" switch but rather a fluid spectrum, with elements of waking perception, memory, and reasoning staying partially active even during REM sleep. This new science may be used to treat PTSD and nightmares, as well as to enhance creativity, memory, and emotional processing while you sleep. Together, these investigations reveal a link between neurological interpretation and discourse, transforming dreams from a mysterious internal experience into a measurable and reachable part of human thought. 

 

APA Citations  

Horikawa, T., Tamaki, M., Miyawaki, Y., & Kamitani, Y. (2013). Neural decoding of visual imagery during sleep. Science, 340(6132), 639–642..https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23558170/ 

Konkoly, K. R., Appel, K., Chabani, E., Mangiaruga, A., Gott, J., Mallett, R., Caughran, B., Witkowski, S., Whitmore, N. W., Mazurek, C. Y., Berent, J. B., Weber, F. D., Türker, B., Leu-Semenescu, S., Maranci, J.-B., Pipa, G., Arnulf, I., Oudiette, D., Dresler, M., & Paller, K. A. (2021). Real-time dialogue between experimenters and dreamers during REM sleep. Current Biology, 31(7), 1417–1427.e6.