Doctors Know What You’re Dreaming About, According To Research

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You sleep peacefully at night knowing your thoughts are your own, right? Not anymore. There’s research that shows that medical professionals can analyze your dreams based on your brain activity.

A recent study, which was published in Nature Neuroscience, focused on 32 participants whose brain activity was monitored through the night. Doctors woke up participants at regular intervals during the night to ask them if they remembered their dreams. If the participant could remember, the researchers would go back to the period before they woke up to review the patterns of the mind. To do this, they used an electroencephalograph (EEG), which measures activity in the brain.

So what actually came out of this study?

After reading the EEG reports, researchers found that each participant’s “cortical hot zone” — or the area in the back of the brain that sends out high-frequency signals when someone is deep sleep — lit up up hot at the specific times the participants said they were dreaming. The pattern became clear: the study could pin down the points in the dream when the participant was most active.

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This study was just the first step in understanding what a person’s dreaming about during sleep. The same researchers conducted a follow-up study that pinpointed certain activities in the brain that correlated with specific stimuli in the dream, like recognizing a face or hearing someone speak.

So essentially, researchers could see an outline of what you were dreaming about — if you were interacting with people, when you were moving around and when you were hearing someone speak to you — which is cool and terrifying at the same time.

We don’t know how to feel, honestly, but sure, science, do your thing.