Dream Movements Translate to Real Life
Any lucid dreamers out there? Thanks to neural imaging and this very realistic state of dreaming, scientists have shown that the movements you dream about fire the same neurons as the real-life action.
Whether we’re falling or flying, dancing or driving, moving in our dreams feels very real to us at the time. And our brains, it seems, agree. By imaging the brains of sleeping subjects, researchers have found that when we move in our dreams, our brains fire in the same pattern as when we move in the real world.
Because we tend to forget our dreams as soon as we wake up, researchers know little about how our minds create them. Neuroscientists Martin Dresler and Michael Czisch, both of the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, Germany, and their colleagues wanted to find a way to use brain-imaging techniques to watch what people were doing in their dreams. To interpret these images of the dreaming brain, however, they would first have to know how the brain looks when it is performing a certain task in the dream—a difficult challenge because most dreamers can’t control what they’re doing.
Very rarely, however, dreamers experience a phenomenon known as lucid dreaming, in which a sleeper is aware that he or she is dreaming and has some level of control over actions in the dream.
(via ScienceNOW; Painting: “The Sleeping Gypsy“ by Henri Rosseau)
how is science so awesome?
(via jtotheizzoe)
