First brain image of a dream made

The contents of a man's dreams have been revealed in the Nov. 8 Current Biology. By recording the brain of a man who, unlike most people, has somewhat control over his dreams. The accomplishment brings scientists closer to understanding the functioning of the human brain's dream capacities.

“It’s really exciting that people have done this,” says sleep researcher Edward Pace-Schott at Massachusetts General Hospital in Charlestown and the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. “And it also brings back lucid dreaming as a very powerful scientific tool.”

Lucid dreaming is the rare power to control movements and behaviors while asleep. For the most part, the body is dead to the world. Most muscles are paralyzed and the eyes jitter. But also, at the same time, the lucid dreamer control his dreams and can change the scenes of his dreaming.

Czisch and his team were in for an experiment. They set out to catch a lucid's dreamer brain activities with an fMRI machine. Six lucid dreamers were asked to squeeze their hands during a dream (recorded with the fMRI machine) repeatedly. Czisch says it's rather an easy thing to do for a lucid dreamer if they're told what to do. If it's a random dream, he says, it's much harder.

Out of the 6, only 1 dreamer was able to succeed. The fMRI indicated increased activity in a region of the brain important for movement called the sensorimotor cortex when the dreamer squeezed his hands during the dream. When the dreamer squeezed his right hand, the left side of the brain's sensorimotor cortex showed an increase in activity. When he squeezed his left hand, it showed increased activity in the right side of the cortex.

The work is preliminary says Czisch. Because the results of the experiment come from a single dreamer, doing a predetermined task, they're not sure how a person having a self-generated dream would react. “To get real insight into a complete dream plot is a bit science fiction,” he says. But improving methods and experiments might eventually lead to a better understanding of the human brain's emotions, feelings, movements, thoughts and memories during dreams.

Discussion Questions:
1. Would you like your dreams to be viewed/explored by other people, or would you like to be able to see other people's dreams? Why?

2. Do you think trying to learn more about the subject (the way the brain works during dreaming) is worth it? Why or why not?