all dreams stories

Waking up to how we sleep and dream

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:42:25 -0400

The Oct. 27, 2005 issue of the prestigious science journal Nature devotes almost 40 pages to bringing readers up-to-date on what happens during sleep. Three of the articles are by Harvard Medical School scientists who discuss such things as an on-off sleep switch, and learning while we sleep.

Clifford Saper, James Jackson Putnam Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience, and his colleagues at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center study key nerve circuits that switch us from waking to sleeping and back. Two small clusters of nerve cells in the hypothalamus, a cherry-size area behind the eyes, shut down our arousal circuits when we sleep. The switch is turned back on by the time of day and the length of time spent awake before going to bed.

Investigating phenomenon of sleep

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:42:05 -0400

Alexander Schier's transparent fish are helping him understand the basic secrets of human development: how early embryonic cells communicate so that some develop into heart tissue, some into brain cells, and others into tissues that form the rest of the body.

Zebrafish, though striped as adults, are transparent when embryos, making them attractive to researchers because scientists can literally look inside them and watch how they develop.

Schier is using his fish model to investigate the phenomenon of sleep. Though all of us do it, nobody really understands why. The need for sleep varies widely in the animal kingdom, but science hasn't yet figured out why shutting down our waking consciousness for such a large part of every day is so crucial to our well-being.

Schier suspects the need for sleep is linked to repair and restoration and makes us more ready to face the challenges of the coming day.

Schier and members of his lab are observing the fish's behavior. The fish are active for 14 hours per day and go through the zebrafish equivalent of sleep, where their activity is reduced and responses to stimuli slowed, for 10 hours.

Researchers are first observing the fish's normal sleeping behavior and keeping an eye out for mutants - fish who either sleep more or less than others. Once the mutants are identified, the investigation will turn to the genetic code of those fish, where researchers will look for genes that are different from those of "normal" fish.

"We don't really know why we have to sleep, why animals have to rest," Schier said. "[Sleep regulation] is a major question in human health."

Researchers learn to control dreams

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:04:48 -0400

For years, scientists have been stymied in their quest to understand dreams because they are unique events that cannot be replicated. Robert Stickgold and his Harvard Medical School colleagues reported in the Oct. 13, 2000 issue of Science that they were able to get 17 different people to see the same dream images. "Here we have a case where with high reliability we can get people to have predictable dreams," said Stickgold, assistant professor of psychiatry based at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. The researchers elicited the carbon-copy images by training 27 subjects to play the computer game Tetris over the course of three days. The game involves assembling geometric puzzle pieces. The researchers then monitored the subjects' dreams on the first two evenings.