Hi there, it's Matt here and welcome back to the podcast once again and to the second in this

multi-part series talking all about the science of REM sleep dreaming.

In the first episode in this series we learned about how your brain is able to dream in the way that it is. In other words, what is the

neurological signature that allows us to understand how we dream? Today we're

going to explore what the science has to say not only about

how we dream at the brain level but what it is that we dream about. In other words, what have we learned about the origin of our dreams?

And we'll even discuss whether or not brain scanners can eavesdrop on the sleeping brain and give us a read out of what people are

actually dreaming about, which is in some ways a bit of a scary thought wouldn't you say?

But let's start with one of the oldest questions in all of sleep research.

Were do dreams come from? Well, the ancient Egyptians, they believed that dreams were sent down from the gods on high.

The Greeks actually shared a very similar contention believing that dreams were the visitation

from the gods offering some kind of divine information. Aristotle by the way, he was a notable exception in this regard.

He cleaved to the idea that dreams have their origins,

not up in the heavens but in the reality of our recent waking experience.

Yet it was really Sigmund Freud who in the 19th and 20th centuries situated dreams without a shadow of doubt within the brain itself.

In other words, within the individuals themselves and not from elsewhere, not from other beings.

And he did this in his seminal book called The Interpretation of Dreams published in 1899.

So it was Freud who in some ways made dreams a clear domain of brain science or what would become neuroscience.

And we must thank Freud for that remarkable shift in our thinking.

However, Freud was in some way 50% right and a hundred percent wrong.

And thereafter his theory plunged into a mass of scientific unproevability.

Now I'm going to simplify this and I apologize to people who will probably get a wee bit upset by that.

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