Where Do Dreams Come From?
Jacob's Dream Wikimedia Commons Dreamland might not require so much imagination after all. When we close our eyes and drift off to sleep, something in our mind spins us fanciful tales of teeth falling out, bouncing around in giant marshmallows in the sky, failing midterms in classes we've never taken, taking a walk in the park down the street that's also a spaceship. Common as they are, there's not a lot of definitive science on how we dream. Are dreams the work of the imagination, or the work of some reflex in the brain? A team of French researchers suggest at its most basic, dreaming is generated by the brainstem, the part of the brain that connects to the spinal cord and plays a role in regulating sleep--a "bottom-up" process rather than a result of the brain's higher functions. The study looked at patients with auto-activation deficit, a syndrome characterized...