Science has yet to uncover the answer to why we experience dreams. It has, however, discovered a myriad of other things about them. Discussed in this episode: The cardinal features of dreaming, rapid and non-rapid eye-movement sleep, lucid dreaming, the history of dream research, Sigmund Freud's theories of dreaming, Hobson and McCarley's Activation-Synthesis theory of dreaming, advancements in neuroscience that inform present-day dream research, neurophysiological mechanisms of sleep and dreams, and current theories that attempt to explain why we dream.

Further reading: J. Allan Hobson, "Dreaming: A Very Short Introduction" (Oxford, 2002), Matthew Walker, "Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams" (Penguin, 2017).

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