You dream for two hours every night, but for something so common, it’s a remarkably enigmatic process. Only in the past few decades, with the advance of technology like fMRIs that lets us record and visualize activity in the brain, have neuroscientists begun to figure out how and why we experience these reveries. While sleepy interludes seem to rely on many of the same mental processes we use while awake, researchers are still trying to understand the way they work together during slumber. Here’s how we think our brains drive our nocturnal hallucinations.
The almond-shaped amygdala helps generate feelings like fear, anger, and anxiety. It and other emotional domains are more rowdy during REM sleep, which could explain why strong reactions happen frequently when we doze. We may rely on this process to dull the sting of difficult memories.
