NARRATOR: Each night, as we close our eyes and slip away

from the waking world, we may enter an even richer one, the
elusive realm of dreams.

MALE RESEARCH SUBJECT 1: I was in a kitchen. I remember it

had really bright colors and a lot of sunshine, and I saw a bug
on the table, and I heard it say, "Hamburger, hamburger."

FEMALE RESEARCH SUBJECT 1: I was riding the subway, and I

noticed that I could suddenly see into things. And there was a
young woman, and in her purse she had handcuffs.

FEMALE RESEARCH SUBJECT 2: There were two lanes, so it was

a normal motorway, apart from the fact that all the cars had no
people in them.

MALE RESEARCH SUBJECT 2: I'm holding a big glass of milk, and

there's a head of lettuce in it.

ROBERT STICKGOLD (Harvard Medical School): I don't know

anybody who isn't fascinated by dreams. I mean they are
outrageous events in our lives.

NARRATOR: They can be bewildering, terrifying, inspiring, but

do they mean anything? Are dreams the nonsensical byproduct
of a sleeping brain or a window into our unconscious mind, rich
with revelations?
PATRICK MCNAMARA (Boston University): Why would Mother
Nature highly activate your brain, paralyze your body, sexually
activate you and force you to watch these things we call
dreams? Why? Why would Mother Nature do that?

NARRATOR: After more than a century of searching, scientists

may finally be nearing an answer, by literally watching dreams
unfold and testing their impact on both our sleeping and
waking lives.

MATTHEW WILSON (Massachusetts Institute of Technology):

Dreaming is a process, and not only is it useful, it might be
essential for making sense of the world.

NARRATOR: Up next on NOVA: What Are Dreams?

FEMALE RESEARCH SUBJECT 3: I was walking down this really

bizarre hallway, and every time I would open a door, there
would just be this blinding light.

MALE RESEARCH SUBJECT 3: So I take off and fly. And I'm

starting to accelerate faster, faster, faster, and I realize I was an
electron inside an R.C.A. circuit, moving around at the speed of
light.

MALE RESEARCH SUBJECT 4: It's dark outside; kind of raining;

very, very scary; ominous. And all the water puddles, if you
touch them, you catch on fire.
FEMALE RESEARCH SUBJECT 4: She was very overweight and
actually was growing a real beard.

NARRATOR: They're eerie, impossible and often, just plain

weird. Yet some say they've changed the world.

DEIRDRE BARRETT (Harvard Medical School): Dreams have

been responsible for two Nobel prizes, the invention of a
couple of major drugs, and innumerable novels, films and
works of visual art.

NARRATOR: Usually they fly through the mind unremembered.

Yet they may be key to understanding the mind itself.

PATRICK MCNAMARA: If you want to understand human

nature, the hum0an mind, what makes us tick, you need to look
at dreams.

NARRATOR: The scientist most associated with dreams is still

Sigmund Freud, who saw them as brimming with symbols,
mostly sexual. Such symbols took form as the sleeping brain
tried to disguise forbidden urges welling up from its
unconscious, though even Freud cautioned that this kind of
thinking could be taken too far.

HOWARD KATZ (Boston Psychoanalytic Institute): At some

point, he said you can be too literal. You can say every single
thing is standing for something sexual. And you know,
sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
NARRATOR: Today, advances in brain science have inspired
new theories about dreams, building on a discovery made years
after Freud's death, when science finally got a look at the
sleeping brain.

The breakthrough came in 1953, when Nathaniel Kleitman and

Eugene Aserinsky began recording people's brainwaves as they
slept through the night.

ROBERT STICKGOLD: They put electrodes onto the head that

could pick up the electrical activity of the brain underneath.
And they had known when people are awake, that signal looks
very fast and not too interesting—it looks almost like noise—
but that when people fall asleep, that you would sometimes
have the brain activity start to go up and down in a slow
pattern, and you could then tell whether someone was awake
or asleep; or so they thought.

NARRATOR: The researchers had assumed sleeping brains were

resting brains. But every 90 minutes or so, as their subjects
slumbered, something odd happened.

ROBERT STICKGOLD: Their eyes were closed, their head had

drooped; they didn't answer when you called them by name.
They were clearly asleep but the electrical activity of the brain
said they were awake.

NARRATOR: And it wasn't just their brainwaves that seemed

strange. They were sexually aroused. Their heart rates and
breathing had become irregular. Their eyes darted about
beneath shut lids.

It was these eye movements that gave the state its name:
Rapid Eye Movement, or REM sleep.

But what was REM sleep for? The answer seemed to come
from the sleepers themselves.

PATRICK MCNAMARA: During REM sleep, what the researchers

invariably found, when they woke up a subject, was the subject
would report, "Hey I'm dreaming, and I just had a vivid dream."

NARRATOR: So was REM sleep dream sleep? The idea seemed

more than plausible when you considered REM's most dramatic
characteristic.

ROBERT STICKGOLD: Another feature of REM sleep is that your

muscle tone just goes absolutely down to zero. You become
functionally paralyzed. If you're sitting up in a chair watching
TV, you know, and the head nods and falls and you fall asleep,
that's not REM sleep. If you fall into REM sleep, you would
literally roll off the chair onto the floor, because your body
becomes absolutely relaxed, almost paralyzed, in the sense that
you can't make your muscles actually work. And it becomes
absolutely calm and non-responsive.

NARRATOR: Nature, it appeared, had devised a special state of

paralysis to house our dreams, one in which they remained
internal experiences. It was a conclusion that seemed
impossible to deny, when researchers learned to switch the
paralysis off.

This cat looks as if it's awake; in fact, it's deep in REM sleep.

This dog appears to be running; it too is in REM sleep, and, like

the cat, dreaming.

To see these dreams played out, scientists disabled the part of

the brain that paralyzes muscles during REM sleep.

PATRICK MCNAMARA: And what we see when you do this, with

cats in particular, is that they can walk around during REM
sleep, and their behavior is not random, it's not chaotic. They're
not just doing any old crazy thing. They appear to be doing the
kinds of behaviors that cats like to do, like stalk a prey, you
know, play with a mouse or something. So presumably that's
what they dream about when they go into REM sleep, so that's
what we think is happening.

NARRATOR: But what about people? Could human dreams be

watched as well? Performing surgical experiments on human
subjects was, of course, unthinkable, but the discovery of a
new brain disease also made it unnecessary.

TINA CURSLEY (Wife of Research Subject): Well, it was me,

telling him he's got to go to the doctor's and sort this out,
because I'd have to jump out of bed quick.
NARRATOR: Tom Cursley has a condition known as REM sleep
disorder. It prevents the paralysis of REM sleep, so he acts out
his dreams.

TOM CURSLEY (Research Subject): I can picture, now, being in

this field, a river in the background, and I don't know, about a
dozen cows grazing the grass, and they slowly start coming
towards me and nudging me and push me out of the way.

TINA CURSLEY: He's shouting and raging about everywhere. The

bedside cabinet went over the other night, and he didn't even
know he'd knocked that over.

NARRATOR: Dr John Shneerson is an expert on this condition.

JOHN SHNEERSON (Papworth Hospital, Cambridge, England):

It's absolutely classical for the REM sleep behavior disorder. It's
just what happens. It starts off with movements that the
partner thinks is a bit unusual but nothing special, just kicking
and just a bad dream, but it becomes more frequent, more
intense and it can be dangerous for the partner and dangerous
for the dreamer. In fact a lot of people with this condition end
up with nothing in the bedroom at all. They take out all the
bedside tables, all the lamps, all the sharp corners, which might
injure themselves. They end up almost in a padded cell.

NARRATOR: Not all sufferers have nightmares. Here, a sleeper

puffs on his finger monitor, dreaming it's a cigarette.
JOHN SHNEERSON: Another patient was dreaming that there
were animals coming in the room, and when he woke up he
was on the mantelpiece and found it difficult to get off there. In
fact, he didn't know how he got up there. He must have been
very agile to get up there, very motivated to get that far.

NARRATOR: REM sleep disorder seemed to suggest that dreams

were important. Why else would nature go to such lengths to
let most of us dream safely?

Such a conclusion might have seemed obvious, but by the late

'70s, a new theory was roiling psychology. It came from
Harvard researchers Alan Hobson and Robert McCarley.

G. WILLIAM DOMHOFF (University of California, Santa Cruz):

And it stressed the fact that there's a particular part of our
brainstem that triggers REM sleep, sending up signals to the
higher parts of the brain that were kind of random and chaotic.

NARRATOR: Dreams, the researchers argued, were more

physiological than psychological: the result of our higher brain
doing the best it could to make sense of meaningless neural
impulses.

G. WILLIAM DOMHOFF: Now that led them to say that dreams

have some psychological coherence, some pattern, but they
have no purpose. And certainly not the psychological purpose
that Freud claimed for them.
NARRATOR: So are dreams basically gibberish, or, as Freud
maintained, a doorway to the unconscious or something else
entirely?

For the debate to move forward, scientists would have to make

yet another key discovery.

As most other people are heading home, Erica Harris is arriving

for work at Boston University. This is when dream researchers
frequently start their day.

ERICA HARRIS (Boston University): The experiment tonight

probably won't end 'til about 6:30 or 7:00 in the morning, when
we're finally done. It's very tiring, but we enjoy our work, so
we're looking forward to it.

NARRATOR: Also arriving is her guinea pig, Ross, a 19-year-old

student who has come here for a bad night's sleep.

TECHNICIAN: Hello.

ROSS (Sleep Study Subject): Oh, hi. I'm Ross.

TECHNICIAN: Hi, Ross.

NARRATOR: Over the next eight hours, they will focus on an

aspect of dreams only recently discovered.
ROSS: Hi.

ERICA HARRIS: We're so glad you could make it tonight.

This is to measure any different type of muscle movement that

he might have at his eyes or at his chin.

We need to measure the brainwaves, because the brainwaves

show us a different picture. They look different depending on
the different type of sleep that the person goes in.

NARRATOR: With this much wiring, it's unlikely a brainwave will

go unnoticed.

ERICA HARRIS: There are 26 different electrodes that Ross will

have on tonight. We're going to have a pretty good idea about
everything that's going on with him while he's sleeping.

NARRATOR: But even with all this technology, there is still only
one way to find out if Ross is dreaming.

ERICA HARRIS: Sweet dreams.

NARRATOR: Project leader Patrick McNamara explains the

challenge.

PATRICK MCNAMARA: There is no technology that allows us to

know a hundred percent certainty that a person is dreaming.
You can see the full panoply of characteristics that occur during
REM sleep, you know: the paralysis, the eyes darting back and
forth. You can put him under a neuroimaging scanner. You can
see the areas of the brain that light up during REM sleep light
up, and you can expect them to report a dream when you wake
them up, but they may not. Unfortunately, the best way to find
out if a person is dreaming is to wake them up and ask them.

NARRATOR: Despite this limitation, the experiment will probe a

surprise discovery of the recent past: sleep studies have
revealed that not only do we dream in REM sleep but during
non-REM sleep, as well. And these two dream states may be
fundamentally different, affecting us in different ways.

PATRICK MCNAMARA: So this should tell us something crucial

about the nature of the mind, because if you want to
understand what makes us tick, you need to look at dreams.

NARRATOR: It's now 11:00, and Ross has nodded off, which
means his brain has begun to cycle through the five stages of
sleep.

We start out with non-REM sleep, beginning with stage 1, light

sleep. As we pass into deep sleep, stages 3 and 4, our
brainwaves grow increasingly long and slow. Then we begin a
return journey, but don't quite make it. Just short of waking
comes REM sleep, after which we repeat the cycle, four or five
times in a night.
ERICA HARRIS: On this monitor, we are looking for him to
descend into the various stages of sleep, so we want him to
make his complete sleep cycle prior to us awakening him.

NARRATOR: Ross has completed one sleep cycle, which lasts

about 90 minutes.

Soon he is entering again into non-REM sleep.

ERICA HARRIS: Right now, what we can see is that he's in non-
REM sleep. And we know that because we see the shape of the
brainwaves where they're very close together, like this, and
then we see some that are very spiky. This is the beginning of
the transition to the stage in which we want to wake Ross up.

TECHNICIAN: Ross, wake up, it's time to do your packet.

NARRATOR: After awakening from non-REM sleep, Ross does

indeed report having a dream.

ROSS: I was with people I knew, no real friends, in specific, but I

was with people I knew, and we were trying to find
somewhere.

NARRATOR: It is not just that we dream in non-REM sleep. As

the experiment will reveal, these dreams are different from
REM dreams.
ERICA HARRIS: So the first thing that he's working on right now
is a mood questionnaire, and basically he might see three
letters like O, P, T, and he's supposed to complete some kind of
word for that.

NARRATOR: The words Ross chooses will reveal how he's

feeling about himself after non-REM dreaming. His answers
reflect positive emotions.

PATRICK MCNAMARA: We found, in our experiment, there was

a very reliable difference in self-concept, self-regard, and there
was an increase in positive regard of the self after awakenings
from non-REM.

NARRATOR: Ross goes back to sleep. The next time he's

awakened he will be well into REM sleep.

Five a.m.

TECHNICIAN: Ross, time to wake up.

NARRATOR: This time Ross comes up with one negative word

after another. McNamara speculates that this shift in mood,
detected after Ross's REM dream, can be traced to an ancient
structure, the amygdala, found in each hemisphere of our
brain.

PATRICK MCNAMARA: I think that we have more negative

emotions during REM-related dreams because during REM
sleep the amygdala is very highly activated, and the amygdala
specializes in handling unpleasant emotions like intense fear or
intense anger or aggression.

NARRATOR: Finally the night is over, but the experiment has

more to reveal. McNamara is beginning to connect the
proportion of REM and non-REM dreams with our mental
wellbeing.

It could be a factor in depression.

PATRICK MCNAMARA: Normally, we fall asleep through non-

REM sleep, but depressives, people with endogenous
depressant depression or severe depression, they go right to
REM, and then they stay in REM, and they spend too much time
in REM. So if REM sleep is associated with all this unpleasant
emotion and you get too much REM, then you are going to
have a lot of unpleasant emotion. We call that depression.

NARRATOR: At Harvard, meanwhile, Robert Stickgold is

focusing on the dreams of non-REM sleep. He, too, recruits
human subjects to sleep over in his lab, but first they get an
assignment.

ROBERT STICKGOLD: So John, here, is mostly just having a lot of

fun. He's learning how to play this game, Alpine Racer 2™,
which is a downhill skiing simulator.

He actually controls that character on the screen by moving his

feet, and he's learning a lot about how to do it. And what we
think is that as the brain goes to sleep, it's going to come back
to these images.

JOHN (Sleep Study Subject): It's intense. I'm trying to beat a

time, and I'm trying to stay in between these gates, and it's
difficult, but it's a lot of fun.

NARRATOR: That night, John is awakened repeatedly during

non-REM sleep and asked about his dreams. Early on, they're
simple re-enactments of the ski game. But as the night passes,
they begin to incorporate other memories.

NURSE: Please report now.

JOHN: I was walking through boot prints in the snow—already-

made boot prints—like, copying them, going into the ones,
stepping into the ones that were already stepped in, like
following somebody else's steps along in the snow.

ROBERT STICKGOLD: What he's dreaming about is how much

easier it is to walk through the snow, if you go exactly where
you stepped last time. I can just imagine the brain trying to say,
"Does what I know about walking in snow help me think about
skiing on snow?"

NARRATOR: Such a dream, Stickgold believes, does far more

than while away the night.
ROBERT STICKGOLD: And I think this is all about the function of
sleep and the role of dreaming in processing memories, that it
refines the memory, it improves the memory, it makes the
memory more useful for the future, and so when they come
back, they're going to be better.

NARRATOR: And John is better. The next day on the virtual

slopes, his performance has clearly improved.

JOHN: I was kind of hitting the wall, coming up on this part, but
I'll see if I can avoid it. Yeah, that's pretty good.

ROBERT STICKGOLD: We know that they are getting better

when they play again. And in other studies we have evidence
that when they dream about it, those people who dream about
it actually end up performing better the next time.

NARRATOR: If non-REM dreams help us learn, then what about

the dreams of REM sleep? What do they accomplish? And how
might the two kinds of dreaming work together?

At M.I.T., a scientist who eavesdrops on the dreams of rats may

be nearing an answer.

By placing electrodes in a rat's brain, Matt Wilson can read its

mind, seeing exactly how its brain cells, or neurons, fire, as it
experiences its world, in this case a maze.
MATT WILSON: Individual neurons will respond based upon
what the animal is doing, where it is in the maze. So wherever
the animal is, we see unique patterns of brain activity.

NARRATOR: Each of these patterns corresponds to a specific

place in the maze explored by the rat. But, remarkable as it is to
look in on a rodent's inner life, the big payoff comes later. As
the rat sleeps, the patterns recur, seen here as flashes of color
superimposed on the maze.

MATT WILSON: So the animal is asleep. It's not moving. It's not
interacting with the world. And yet we see a lot of structured
activity going on in the brain. And when we look in detail at
that activity, we see that these patterns are direct reflections of
patterns that we had seen when the animal was awake.

NARRATOR: Wilson is convinced he has found a way to watch a

rat dream and know what it's dreaming about; in this instance,
running a maze.

MATT WILSON: And I think that was really the moment of great
insight. Not simply that there was dreaming going on, but that
we had access to this.

NARRATOR: Like humans, rats have two distinct dream types,

and Wilson is homing in on their differences. During non-REM
sleep their dreams play out as brief bursts of neural activity,
which mirrors past experience compressed into seconds.
MATT WILSON: Now, when we get to REM sleep, now things
change dramatically. Memories are replayed, but they are not
compressed, they're not accelerated, they don't occur in these
small fragments. They are played out as though the animal
were actually experiencing moving through a world, but that
world is being generated from the inside.

NARRATOR: In fact, REM dreams can be five times longer than

non-REM dreams. And in human beings, at least, they are
anything but a simple replay of the past.

MATT WILSON: So the speculation is that during non-REM

sleep, the brain is taking the past and trying to figure out how
that might relate to the future, and in REM, actually trying to
experience the future, move into the future.

NARRATOR: The dreams of REM, in other words, may be

simulations, which allow us to face challenges and test
possibilities.

ROBERT STICKGOLD: My sense is that when we're asleep and

when we're dreaming, we are actually conscious and figuring
out what's important about what happened to us and how that
relates to everything else that's happened to us in the past and
figuring out what that means about our future.

MATT WILSON: And when you think about the challenge that
animals, that we as humans and the brain in general faces, it is
the unknown of the future. And in REM, we may have the
opportunity to step into that future world with no risk, because
the consequences are simply things don't work out as you
might have expected, and then you wake up.

So these states may be what are essential for allowing us, as

individuals, to reach our maximal level of potential.

NARRATOR: When dreams begin testing scenarios, the results

often seem ludicrous.

MALE RESEARCH SUBJECT 1: I was in a kitchen. I remember it

had really bright colors and a lot of sunshine, and I saw a bug
on the table, and I heard it say, "Hamburger, hamburger."

FEMALE RESEARCH SUBJECT 1: I was in a field, and I could see

what looked like hundreds of silver and purple flowers. And as I
approached I realized that they were actually parasols, and
then they would make a sound like a gong.

NARRATOR: But as preposterous as some dreams seem, a few

may have changed the world.

DEIRDRE BARRETT: Dreams have been responsible for two

Nobel prizes, the invention of a couple of major drugs, other
scientific discoveries, several important political events, and
innumerable novels, films and works of visual art, so they've
been very important in our society.

NARRATOR: Deirdre Barrett of Harvard explores the power of

dreams to give us insights we might never otherwise have.
DEIRDRE BARRETT: We can see things much more clearly when
we think about them in dreams, and it also helps us think
outside the box. Our associations are looser and more intuitive
and less linear.

NARRATOR: The classic symbol of science, the periodic table of

the elements, is said to have come to the Russian chemist
Dmitri Mendeleev during a dream. In 1844, American inventor
Elias Howe was trying to design his first sewing machine, but he
couldn't work out how to make it hold the needle. One night he
dreamed of being attacked by cannibals with spears.

DEIRDRE BARRETT: And as he woke up in terror, the last thing

he saw was that all of their spears had the hole at the pointed
tip of the spear, and he realized that's where you put the hole
in a sewing machine needle.

NARRATOR: And the story goes that Dr. Frankenstein and his
monster were dreamed up by Mary Shelley.

Or were they? Not everyone agrees.

G. WILLIAM DOMHOFF: Many of the claims about great

discoveries during dreams are very hard to document. But what
we always have to remember is these people were intensely
thinking about these issues. So there may have been some
discoveries based on reflecting on dreams, but that is waking
consciousness, reflecting on the dream.
NARRATOR: But even if famous creators achieved their
breakthroughs after waking, dreams can still claim some of the
credit, according to sleep researcher Sara Mednick.

SARA MEDNICK (University of California, San Diego): What

stage do you think this is?

RESEARCHER: Looks like stage 2, actually.

SARA MEDNICK: Right, because there are sleep spindles.

NARRATOR: In a recent experiment, she recruited volunteers to

play a series of word games that demand creative leaps.

SARA MEDNICK: We define creativity as putting together

disparate ideas in new and useful combinations. So what we
have is three different words. And we have people trying to
find a fourth word that goes with those words. And so what
they have to do is find a new connection that's not their direct
associate, but a more remote associate.

NARRATOR: Before playing, volunteers, like Tristan, are shown

examples.

RESEARCHER: Try these next two: surprise, line, birthday.

TRISTAN (Sleep Study Subject): Um, present?

RESEARCHER: No, very close. The answer is "party." So: surprise
party, party line, birthday party.

NARRATOR: After the game, Tristan's next assignment is to nap.

Mednick monitors his sleep cycles and eye movements. Sixty
minutes later, he appears to be entering REM sleep.

SARA MEDNICK: So, here, we have a lot of rapid eye

movements. You can see this is indicating he's probably having
a dream right now.

NARRATOR: Only a third of the volunteers take naps like these.

The others either rest quietly or are awakened before entering
REM sleep. Then everyone plays a new word game.

SARA MEDNICK: I was looking for a REM result for creativity. I

definitely thought we'd be able to find it. I was surprised by the
magnitude.

NARRATOR: Those who had REM sleep scored 40 percent

higher. But quiet rest or non-REM sleep produced no benefit
whatsoever.

SARA MEDNICK: The reason why we think that REM sleep helps
you with creativity is because REM sleep is a very active time in
your brain. Sometimes your brain can even be more active than
during waking. And you actually have these different areas of
the brain that are speaking to each other. So it's actually able to
start to free associate amongst its own ideas and memories.
NARRATOR: Clearly REM sleep can boost creativity, but do REM
dreams have anything to do with it?

SARA MEDNICK: The dreams that we have during REM sleep,

they're very wild. They're very fanciful. They're clearly the brain
having a period of loose associations, where you are able to put
connections together, between new and old ideas, finding new
solutions to new problems.

NARRATOR: This ability to harness the creative power of

dreams is not just the preserve of genius. It seems that with a
little REM sleep, many of us can also do it.
NARRATOR
MALE RESEARCH SUBJECT 1
FEMALE RESEARCH SUBJECT 1
MALE RESEARCH SUBJECT 2
ROBERT STICKGOLD
PATRICK MCNAMARA
MATTHEW WILSON
FEMALE RESEARCH SUBJECT 3
MALE RESEARCH SUBJECT 3
MALE RESEARCH SUBJECT 4
FEMALE RESEARCH SUBJECT 4
DEIRDRE BARRETT
HOWARD KATZ
TINA CURSLEY
TOM CURSLEY
JOHN SHNEERSON
G. WILLIAM DOMHOFF
ERICA HARRIS
TECHNICIAN
ROSS
JOHN
NURSE
MATT WILSON
SARA MEDNICK
RESEARCHER
TRISTAN