World of Dreams

Fact or fiction: Waking a sleepwalker is not a good idea? Read on.

There’s spaghetti in the bathroom sink, the laptop’s in the laundry basket, and please tell me that is not urine dripping down the refrigerator door.

Either a group of college kids took over the house for the night or there’s a sleepwalker on the loose. Sleepwalking, or somnambulism, is a disorder that happens when people do some activity besides snoozing while they’re still asleep. There are lots of potential ...

Large study found nearly 4 percent wander at night, often tied to mental woes.

Sleepwalkers on TV and in movies are often played for drama or laughs, but the phenomenon is surprisingly common in American households, a large, new study suggests.

In what they said is the first research in three decades on sleepwalking prevalence in the United States, scientists from Stanford University School of Medicine found that about 3.6 percent of U.S. adults are prone to sleepwalking, a higher proportion than ...

Staying awake after disturbing event weakened emotional response upon recall, study found.

Your emotional response to a disturbing image or traumatic event is weaker if you remain awake afterward, while sleep reinforces unpleasant emotional memories, according to new research.

The experiments involving 68 female and 38 male volunteers aged 18 to 30 also found that people who saw an unsettling image or traumatic event and then went to sleep are as upset as they originally were if they see the picture again ...

Are you a chatty Cathy when you’re sound asleep? Find out about the mystery of sleep talking, and what those sweet nothings you utter really mean.

Has your partner ever referred to a conversation that occurred the night before — and you can’t remember a thing you said? Unless it’s after a wild night out, the cause may be somniloquy, better known as sleep talking.

Sleep talking falls under the category of parasomnias, which are disruptive sleep disorders. Other parasomnias include sleepwalking, ...

In small study, computer programs and brain MRIs identified visual images during sleep.

Talk about mind reading. Researchers have discovered a potential way to decode your dreams, predicting the content of the visual imagery you’ve experienced on the basis of neural activity recorded during sleep.

Visual experiences you have when dreaming are detectable by the same type of brain activity that occurs when looking at actual images when you’re awake, the small new study suggests.

The scientists created decoding computer programs based on ...

What are Dreams?

Dreams happen during the rapid eye movement (REM) stage of sleep. In a typical night, you dream for a total of 2 hours, broken up by the sleep cycle. Researchers do not know much about how we dream or why. They do know that newborns dream and that depriving rats of REM sleep greatly shortens their lives. Other mammals and birds also have REM sleep stages, but cold-blooded animals such as turtles, lizards and fish do not.

REM Sleep ...

“Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.” – Henry David Thoreau

Dreams have fascinated philosophers for thousands of years, but only recently have dreams been subjected to empirical research and concentrated scientific study. Chances are that you’ve often found yourself puzzling over the mysterious content of a dream, or perhaps you’ve wondered why you dream at all.

First, let’s start by answering a basic question – What is a dream? A dream can include any of the images, thoughts and emotions that ...

If you dealt with anything unsettling today, new research reinforces the theory that you’ll feel better if you take a nap

If time heals old wounds, dreaming may help speed up the recovery process. According to researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, dreaming takes the “painful edge” off difficult memories by chemically dampening a stressful event’s impact. Here’s what you should know:

How does this work?

Researchers discovered that brain chemicals associated with stress either become inactive or slow down during REM ...