Brain

How the brain constructs
dreams
Abstract
Deep inside the temporal lobe of the brain, the hippocampus has a
central role in our ability to remember, imagine and dream.
Research organism: Human
Our most vivid dreams are a remarkable replication of reality,

combining disparate objects, actions and perceptions into a richly
detailed hallucinatory experience. How does our brain accomplish
this? It has long been suspected that the hippocampus contributes
to dreaming, in part due to its close association with memory:
according to one estimate, about half of all dreams contain at least
one element originating from a specific experience while the
subject was awake. Although these dreams are rarely a faithful
replication of any one memory, fragments of various recent
experiences intermingle with other memories (usually related
remote and semantic memories) to create a novel dream. Given all
this, one might guess that dreams are created by those regions of
the brain responsible for memory. However, studies dating back to
the 1960s have suggested that patients with a damaged
hippocampus still dream and, somewhat amazingly, such patients
can have dreams involving recent experiences of which they have
no conscious memory.
But are the dreams of patients with damage to hippocampus truly

‘normal’? Or alternatively, might such damage, while not
preventing dreams, alter the form in which they are expressed?
Indeed, there is reason to think that the hippocampus supports
crucial aspects of dream construction beyond the simple insertion
of memories. Recent work in the cognitive neurosciences has
established that the hippocampus, in addition to being involved in
the formation of memories, is also part of a brain system that is
involved in using memory to construct novel imagined scenarios
and simulate possible future events. As a result, patients without a
hippocampus find it difficult to imagine scenes that are coherent,
possibly because the hippocampus is responsible for combining
different elements of memory into a spatially coherent whole.
The whole brain is active during dreams, from the brain stem to
the cortex. Most dreams occur during REM (rapid eye movement)
sleep. This is part of the sleep-wake cycle and is controlled by the
reticular activating system whose circuits run from the brain stem
through the thalamus to the cortex.
The limbic system in the mid-brain deals with emotions in both
waking and dreaming and includes the amygdala, which is mostly
associated with fear and is especially active during dreams.
The cortex is responsible for the content of dreams, including the
monsters we flee from, the people we meet, or the experience of
flying. Since we are highly visual animals the visual cortex, right at
the back of the brain, is especially active, but so are many other
parts of the cortex.
Least active are some parts of the frontal lobes, and this may
explain why we can be so uncritical during dreams, accepting the
crazy events as though they are real – until we wake up.
As with many studies of rare neurological patients, the latest work

must be interpreted with caution due to the small sample size. For
example, patient dreams were not significantly shorter than control
dreams, leading to an apparently selective deficit in specific types
of details reported (such as spatial details and sensory details),
rather than a general deficit in the length of the dream. On
average, however, the control dreams contained more than twice
the number of informative words as the patient dreams, and the
lack of a statistical difference between the two groups may be a
mere artifact of the low sample size.
Nonetheless, these observations and a handful of similar studies

are helping us to understand how the hippocampus contributes to
the dreaming process. The work of Spanò et al. – who are based
at UCL, the Royal Free Hospital in London, University Hospital
Bonn and the universities of Arizona and Oxford – suggests
hippocampal damage disrupts dreaming in ways that mirror how it
also disrupts imagination. This suggests that, rather than being an
entirely distinct phenomenon, dreaming is a part of a continuum of
spontaneous, constructive thought and imagery continuously
generated across the sleep and waking states.

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Brain

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How the brain constructs

Research organism: Human

Our most vivid dreams are a remarkable replication of reality,

But are the dreams of patients with damage to hippocampus truly

As with many studies of rare neurological patients, the latest work

Nonetheless, these observations and a handful of similar studies

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