The New Science of Dreaming

I’m reclining in a large blue chair in a small dark room: earbuds in, tinted glasses on, eyelids closed.

Clasping my head is a swimmer’s cap of electrodes fastened under my chin.

My fingers are wrapped in sensors.

I hear a voice through a monitor: “Now we’re going to flash some lights.” When I see flashes, I am to move my cheek twice in the direction they came from.

I get similar instructions about sounds I hear and vibrations I feel in my fingers.

Karen Konkoly, a postdoctoral researcher at University of Cambridge in the U.K., and Marco Wolf, a German graduate student working with her, are getting ready to watch me while I dream.

No one really knows why people dream .

There have been psychoanalytical theories, of course.

Sigmund Freud wrote that dreams were a kind of acting-out of repressed impulses.

And since long before Freud, dreams have been regarded as prophetic.

They can feel important, like they ought to mean something .

However, when scientists imagine what evolutionary purpose dreams might have—how they might be helping us survive this crazy whirlwind called life—definitive answers have been hard to come by.

Whatever insight we might get from thinking about our own dreams is unlikely to be the whole story.

Studies suggest we dream multiple times per night , and we forget almost all of them, so whatever purpose dreams might serve probably doesn’t depend only on our remembering them.