The Mysterious Science Behind Your Wildest Dreams

Science journalist Alice Robb on why we need to take our dreams seriously.

Examining dream content can assist in the diagnosis of psychiatric and neurological illnesses. What does fighting off a lion mean?

All around the world, the pandemic provoked strange nocturnal visions. Can they help shed light on the age-old question of why we dream at all?

Can technology shape our dreams?

In recent years, the word “storytelling” has been thoroughly absorbed by the language of commerce, reshaped into self-aggrandizing doublespeak for “selling.”

Once dismissed as a new age fad, lucid dreaming has gained attention as a possible performance enhancer and therapeutic tool.

Maybe you’re inside your house, or walking through the park down the street. The scene around you is vividly real, yet altered in ways that are making you feel uneasy. Family and friends appear, but conversations produce a sense of anxiety or even dread.

Sleep is a semiconscious state, but there are neurons firing in the brain even when all seems quiet. Now brain activity during the deepest sleep phase could make it possible for people to communicate with the waking world during lucid dreaming.

A new artificial intelligence system can reconstruct images a person saw based on their brain activity

When a sleeping animal’s eyes twitch beneath its eyelids, is it looking around a dream world?