Every night you enter a state of mind where hallucinations, delusion, disorientation, emotions, and amnesia are normal. If any human were to experience all of these things while awake, we would call it psychotic, but when we experience it while we're sleeping, it's called dreaming.

While drifting off into dream world may be fun (or sad, or scary), it's curious why our body produces this strange, mind-altering process in the first place.

In today's episode, we answer the question: Why do we dream? Enjoy the episode and sweet dreams!

Have any questions or comments about this episode? We'd love to hear from you in the "Comment" section!

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Resources:

• Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, PhD
• Brain Basics: Understanding Sleep
• Overnight Therapy? The Role of Sleep in Emotional Brain Processing
• The human emotional brain without sleep — a prefrontal amygdala disconnect
• REM latency and the recovery from depression: getting over divorce
• Relation of dreams to waking concerns
• Role of REM sleep and dream affect in overnight mood regulation: a study of normal volunteers
• Sleep deprivation impairs the accurate recognition of human emotions
• Changes in emotional responses to aversive pictures across periods rich in slow-wave sleep versus rapid eye movement sleep

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