Where were you, last night, while you were sleeping? “In bed,” you are probably saying
to yourself, but it's almost certain that several times during the night, as you slept, your
mind was elsewhere. I’m referring to dreams, the story-like sequences of images,
sensations, and perceptions that occur primarily during the stage of sleep known
as rapid-eye movement, or REM.
Though some people claim to dream little or not at all, research shows that under
normal conditions each of us dreams several times a night. However, for reasons that
aren’t well understood, we tend not to remember a dream unless we wake up during one,
or very soon after one ends.
People have attempted to explain dreaming in various ways. In times past, dreams were
thought to be messages from the spiritual world. In modern times, however, competing
explanations for why we dream fall into one of two general categories: wis...
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