Dreams Measured for the First Time
Have you ever wondered what happens in our brains while we are dreaming? How the images and feelings that we experience when we dream shape in our heads remains a mystery. Well, scientist now can measure our dream content. In Germany, scientists from Max Planck Institute have now succeeded: the brain activity during dreaming could be analyzed. They found the way how the brain activity can be measured when dreaming. They chose lucid dreamers, who can dream voluntarily and are aware of what they are dreaming, and are even able to change the content of their dreams. They were asked to "dream" that they were repeatedly clenching first their right fist and then their left one for ten seconds. This was a sign of what do they dream. Methods like magnetic resonance imaging allowed scientists to picture and recognize the precise location of brain activity during sleep. This enabled the scientists to measure the beginning of the REM sleep - a phase in which we dream the most intensively - with the help of electroencephalogram (EEG), which measures brains electromagnetic waves. The movement during a dream, controlled by the sensorimotor cortex of the brain, which is responsible for the performance of actions, matched the one observed during a real movement in a state of awareness. Even if the lucid dreamer just imagines the hand movement while awake, the sensorimotor cortex reacts in a similar way. The matching of the brain activity measured during dreaming and the aware action shows that dream content can be measured. Obviously, our dreams are not just a 'sleep cinema' in which we merely watch an event passively, but involve activity in the areas of the brain that are related to the dream content.
