When we sleep, our brains go offline. We drift away from consciousness. The noise and the static quiet. Our brains shift in and out of the frontal lobe. We enter into something called slow-wave sleep, and beyond that, REM sleep—the deepest level of sleep, the state in which we dream. Ironically, our brains are nearly as active during REM sleep as they are during waking life, with remarkable bursts of electrical activity.

