We dream loads more than we thought – and forget most of it

You dream more than you know. A new way to detect dreaming has confirmed that it doesn’t only occur during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, and has shown why we often don’t remember our dreams. “There is much more dreaming going on than we remember,” says Tore Nielsen at the University of Montreal, Canada. “It’s hours and hours of mental experiences and we remember a few minutes. ”During sleep, low-frequency brainwaves are detectable across the brain. Now Francesca Siclari at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her colleagues have discovered that a decrease in these waves in an area at the back of the brain is a sign that someone is dreaming.