Thread: The biology of dreams

Exploring The World of Lucid Dreaming by Dr. Stephen LaBerge (aka EWOLD) explains it better than any other source I know of.

And if you don't have the means to get ahold of EWOLD right away, I'd reccomend checking out the DV Dream Content Tutorial. It's less about neurotransmitters than it is about how the brain constructs a dream environment, but I found it really informative.

I know that the chemical DMT is produced by the pineal gland during the REM cycle and that it is often referred to as the "third eye." In some animals a physical third eye is actually present

Thank you very much. I found the book in pdf-form and it helps quite a bit.

Psychologically, many things are going on in your brain during sleep. Neurons begin firing in random and obscure patterns. These neurons are also active during the day. They are responsible for vision, thought, smell, tough...all of the things you experience during the day.

So, because of this random firing, we are experiencing thoughts, visions, and all our senses just as we would in our waking life. Since our brain is always trying to make sense of things, we add story lines and meanings to dreams in order to do our best to understand. Dreams really are an amazing thing, as not even our own brain REALLY understands what is going on.

Why, you may ask, are these neurons firing randomly? You can look at it this way, dreams are a way for our brain to defrag itself, just as a computer defrags its hard drive. Important ideas and thoughts are placed in the right area, unneeded ideas and thoughts are discarded. Since we experience millions upon millions of sensory experiences daily, we need to do a sort "spring cleaning" every night. If we didn't dream, we would not be able to clean out this clutter. We would probably become slow and sick...just as a computer would with a shotty hard drive.

I hope I explained it how you wanted to hear!

Well for one, see my signature.

As for how dream content is created, it mainly takes place in the brain stem. In the brain stem, there is this region called Pons. The Pons send electrical signals called PGO-waves to the Fore-brain where it is further interpreted based on the dream.

In the picture, the darker area (near the bottom) is the brain stem. Near the top of it, there is this little bump (the Pons). The larger part of the brain (with all the little wrinkles and such) is the whole fore-brain.

Spoiler for Brain Picture:

Hope this helps.

As for neurotransmission, I know the active NT's are dopamine and serotonin but I'm not fully sure where they are specifically activated.

Anymore questions?

It's a fairly recent area of research - and one that I'm hoping to enter once I've completed my neuroscience degree. There is still a large amount of uncertainty surrounding what happens in the brain during sleep and dreaming. I recommend reading "Dreaming: An Introduction To The Science of Sleep" by J. Allan Hobson. Very interesting and provides quite a bit of scientific background if I remember correctly. Available on amazon http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dreaming-Int.../dp/0192803042

Thanks for answering. I might just write some more pages.