"To sleep, perchance to dream," Hamlet mused. But to what end?
Psychologists like Freud and Jung have long cashed in on the potency of dreams and how they may reflect our inner emotional lives. But new research suggests dreams may simply be the brain, well, taking a jog.
Just as a morning run can help tune up the body, dreaming may be the brain's way of tuning up the mind while conscious thoughts aren’t dominating the circuits.
"It helps explain a lot of things, like why people forget so many dreams," Dr. J. Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist and longtime sleep researcher at Harvard told the New York Times.
The study seems like a refreshingly simple take on what has a long been such a heavily-analyzed field.
In fact, I had the weirdest dream last night. But now I like to think it was just my brain going for a jog.
Read the New York Times article here.
Tags: Sleep
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