A dream is a succession of images, emotions, and sensations that occurs involuntarily in the deepest phase of sleep. Scientists are unsure of why we dream although there have been a number of theories hypothesized over the years and seers have looked to dreams as omens and portents of things to come. All mammals experience REM (def. rapid eye movement) sleep and dream and you may assume that humans have the longest and most intensive REM states but you would be wrong in this assumption, falling somewhere in the middle of the road. If you want prolific dreamers, you need look no further than the armadillo and the opossum. You have to wonder what either of these species would have to dream about; flying like an eagle possibly? There is also some research to say that reptiles and birds also dream.
Although all of us dream, many of us do not remember our dreams when we wake up. We may only be left with a residual feeling or idea but not the whole thing. Regardless of the reasons for dreaming, is there a way of recording dreams? This may seem like a plotline in a science fiction book but scientists are getting closer to this than you would at first think. Neuroscientists and sleep researchers are now developing technologies that can record and then play back dreams. The greatest challenge to this end is the process of extracting the imagery from a human brain.
In 2011, researchers from the Gallant Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley had their subjects watch movie trailers and later recreated these visuals from their brain activity. These images were of low-resolution and incomplete, rough patterns but proved proof of concept (that brain activity could be recorded. Five years later, with improved technology , these images were a bit clearer prompting sleep and dream researchers to wonder if this process could be used to record dreams as well.
The success with this study has been the impetus for other scientists to jump on the bandwagon and do their own studies with this technology of recording brain activity which is continually being honed. A University of Wisconsin-Madison study has identified the part of the brain responsible for dreaming. They call this area the posterior cortical hot zone and its discovery can help researchers identify if a person is dreaming or not. This area is usually one of low-frequency activity but when a person is dreaming, it becomes one of high-frequency activity. This might as well be the brain waving a flag and saying, “I’m dreaming now!”
Scientists have also found that nerve impulses during waking and dreaming work similarly. Research done at the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Texas used an electromyogram to record nerve impulses and discovered that the same areas were stimulated in a dream state as when awake without the movement of the body. They are using this process to see if the same holds true for the mouth and lips in regards to speech.
All this study brings researchers closer to the possibility of recording brain activity and consequently dreams themselves. This is one of those areas of study that crosses over from one science to another; from neuroscience to computer programming and back again. Like our knowledge of the brain, technology to record the activity of the brain is evolving but one of the major blocks to having a viewable, understandable running movie is deciphering the data that is gathered from the brain itself. Researchers need to be able to make sense out of the data and lucid dreamers may be able to help with that. (Lucid dreaming is when the dreamer is aware that they are dreaming and can control activity within that dream.) These dreamers can help this research because they can be told to do specific things within their dreams and see what areas of the brain lights up with activity. This will help to record neural activity and see patterns to add to a database that can be used to write an algorithm to decode the data.
There are some drawbacks to the research being done though. Much of the data collected is done with an fMRI (def. functional magnetic resonance imaging) machine which, if you have ever been in one, is very noisy and is not conducive for sleeping and there are quite a few differences between the waking and the dreaming brain. This does not make for a perfect collection of data. Many do not remember their dreams either so when test subjects are woken up, they may not remember any of the details. The areas of the brain responsible for images and the areas responsible for language and speech are not the same so even if we can record images in the near future, the audio may be longer to figure out. Similar to the first moving pictures at the turn of the last century, dream movies may not be “talkies” for a while.
Researchers in this field are optimistic that they will have a simple dream recording device that can tell you what you dreamt about within a year or so but it will be longer for a running movie. Like any new technology, there will be starts and stops before we can sit down and replay or dreams and you have to wonder, will you sit your family down to watch them like you would show off your travel photos? Or post it to the social media platform of your choosing? Only time will tell.
–Janice Willson
