Anglický text článku
Every night, while your body lies still, your brain stages one of the strangest shows on Earth. We call these night-time stories dreams, and humans have puzzled over their meaning for thousands of years. Yet only in the last few decades have scientists begun to grasp what is actually going on.
The most vivid dreams tend to happen during a stage of sleep known as REM, which stands for rapid eye movement. During this stage, your eyes dart around behind closed lids while the rest of your body remains almost completely paralysed. Your brain, on the other hand, becomes nearly as active as it is when you are wide awake.
Researchers have discovered that the regions tied to emotion and memory light up, while the area that keeps our thinking in check largely shuts down. This is why a dream can feel intense and utterly real, even when it makes no sense whatsoever. Many scientists believe that the sleeping brain is busy sorting through the day, deciding which memories are worth keeping and which can be thrown away.
If dreaming matters so much, why do we forget most of our dreams within minutes of waking up? According to one theory, the chemicals needed to lock in new memories are simply switched off during REM sleep itself. That is why, if you want to hold on to a dream, you have to write it down the moment you open your eyes.
Nobody has yet cracked the mystery of why we dream, and the debate is far from settled. But the next time you surface from a strange adventure, bear in mind that your brain has been working hard all night long. In a way, dreaming may well be the price we pay for having such a restless, creative mind.