Both Salvador Dali and Thomas Edison are said to have used their dreams to blow away their creative process. To inspire new ideas, men begin to fall asleep for a moment, wake up and pay attention to the dreamy vision they had on the brink of their unconscious.
However, you may have heard that dreams only occur at a stage called rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. Is it possible to dream at other stages of sleep, as Dali and Edison did?
Dreams of different stages of sleep can take many different forms, but it’s certainly not just about the time we dream of, experts told Live Science.
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“The belief that dreams are only related to REM sleep comes from people who are not familiar with the subject matter or have a somewhat outdated knowledge,” Isabel Arnulf, a sleep neurologist at the Sorbonne University in Paris, told Live Science in an email.
When REM sleep was first described in the 1950s, there were some simple observable properties that encouraged scientists to link the stages of sleep to dreams. REM sleep, which accounts for approximately 25% of the total sleep time, is characterized by electrical activity during awakening, fast eye movements, and brain waves similar to general paralysis. Scientists theorized that these rapid eye movements reflect people “watching” their dreams and that they were paralyzed to prevent the body from performing those dreams in real life. While these theories about REM sleep are still retained, scientists now know that these outwardly physical properties are not necessarily necessary to dream.
When people wake up during REM sleep, they often report recalling vivid dreams with strong story threads. However, since the discovery of REM sleep, further research has shown that people also dream during non-REM (NREM) sleep.
Related: What happens to the brain while you sleep?
In one study, Arnulf used drugs to suppress REM sleep in a small group of participants, and then woke up regularly throughout the night to see if they had dreams. Many participants reported that they remembered dream-like mental content when they woke up, despite having never entered REM sleep. Based on their reports, the structure and content of those dreams were slightly different.
“NREM dreams are less frequent, short, not vivid, conceptual or thought-like, often lacking a clear narrative,” Francesca Siclari, sleep researcher at the Netherlands Institute of Neuroscience, told Live Science in an email. “In contrast, Rem’s dreams are almost always story-like, vivid and rich in sensory details, and he said there is a lot of variation.
Siclari learned more about dreams at various stages of sleep using EEG, a technology that measures electrical activity in the brain. She found herself sharing similarities between REM and non-Rem signatures. She also discovered that people’s brain activity is less likely to report dreams when they wake up.
These results shed light on the mechanisms behind REM and non-REM sleep dreams, but many questions remain. Scientists still don’t understand exactly how the brain creates dreams, why we remember them, and even why we dream at all. They hope that if they can learn more about their dreams, they can uncover deeper truths about how the human brain functions in the various sleep stages they occur.
“[Dreaming is] It’s much more frequent and diverse than most people notice — we usually remember only a small portion of our dreams,” Sikrali said.
Sleep Quiz: How much do you know about sleep and dreams?
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