When Brains Dream Quotes

“in proportion to the dreams that we recall spontaneously, we have many more dreams stored in our memories; but we don’t recall our stored dreams unless some event reminds us of them. And we don’t know how long these dream memories stay ready to be recalled”
― Antonio Zadra, When Brains Dream: Understanding the Science and Mystery of Our Dreaming Minds

“One reason centers on all of those dreams that we don’t remember. We know that our brains store memories of many dreams that we don’t recall in the morning. You wake up with no dream recall, get in the shower, turn on the water, and suddenly remember that you dreamt about being in the shower. Or later in the day you see a cat run out in front of a car and say, “Oh! I dreamt about a cat last night,” and the entire dream comes back to you.”
― Antonio Zadra, When Brains Dream: Understanding the Science and Mystery of Our Dreaming Minds

“no one writes to a friend or researcher to say, “I dreamt of a huge industrial explosion two months ago and guess what? I’m still waiting for it to happen!” We only remember—and talk about—the dreams that appear to have come true. Most of us forget the ones that didn’t.”
― Antonio Zadra, When Brains Dream: Understanding the Science and Mystery of Our Dreaming Minds

“Antonio Damasio, a professor of neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy at the University of Southern California, argues that this creation of narratives is one of the greatest powers of consciousness. We cannot, he argues, construct narratives outside of consciousness. And without the capacity to construct them, we wouldn’t be able to recall the past, imagine the future, or plan ahead—abilities that make us human.”
― Antonio Zadra, When Brains Dream: Understanding the Science and Mystery of Our Dreaming Minds

“Dreaming creates narratives that unfold in our minds across time and allows us to experience the thoughts, sensations, and emotions engendered by those narratives. Dreaming, like waking consciousness, allows us to imagine sequences of events, to plan, to plot, to explore.”
― Antonio Zadra, When Brains Dream: Understanding the Science and Mystery of Our Dreaming Minds

“We dream in both REM and non-REM sleep, but the most bizarre, emotional, and unlikely dreams—and arguably those that seem most meaningful to us—occur in REM sleep.”
― Antonio Zadra, When Brains Dream: Understanding the Science and Mystery of Our Dreaming Minds

“Unless you’re taking a test in school or testifying in court, remembering things perfectly is rarely the point, and it’s unlikely that our memory systems evolved with a goal of “total recall.” Instead, evolution aimed for a system that remembered what would be most useful in the future.”
― Antonio Zadra, When Brains Dream: Understanding the Science and Mystery of Our Dreaming Minds

“Dreams don’t replay memories exactly; they create a narrative that has the same gist as some recent memory and could have the same title.”
― Antonio Zadra, When Brains Dream: Understanding the Science and Mystery of Our Dreaming Minds

“Dreams,” Freud explained, “are the guardians of sleep.” 3”
― Antonio Zadra, When Brains Dream: Understanding the Science and Mystery of Our Dreaming Minds

“Freud saw dreaming as a relief valve for pathological desires. Jung, on the other hand, believed that dreams played a vital compensatory role in the development of a person’s personality by presenting the dreamer with unconscious material that needed to be recognized (and integrated) for the dreamer to achieve a more balanced sense of self.”
― Antonio Zadra, When Brains Dream: Understanding the Science and Mystery of Our Dreaming Minds

“One of the reasons infants need to nap appears to be that, unlike adults, infants can’t maintain new memories long enough to wait all day before they sleep on them. This might even be the reason they get so crabby when they don’t get their nap. Infants are nonstop learning machines, and without periodic naps to allow their sleeping brains to process the new information their little brains are taking in, they get overloaded. They start feeling burned out, the same way adults do who have taken in too much information without a break.”
― Antonio Zadra, When Brains Dream: Understanding the Science and Mystery of Our Dreaming Minds

“That’s why we need to sleep. We spend the waking day attending to our surroundings, taking in new information and storing it away, waiting until we sleep to review and revise this information and figure out what it means.”
― Antonio Zadra, When Brains Dream: Understanding the Science and Mystery of Our Dreaming Minds

“there must be an absolutely unavoidable requirement for sleep. It can’t be a function that simply requires lying down, closing the eyes, or being relaxed. Humans can do all these things without being asleep. Instead, these critical functions must require us to be cut off from the outside world, unaware of what is happening around us, and truly asleep. Offline memory processing precisely fits the bill. Our brains are not like DVRs, which can record an ongoing TV show while playing back an older recording to the screen. We cannot simultaneously pay attention to new sensory information and replay or analyze previously stored memories. It has to be one or the other.”
― Antonio Zadra, When Brains Dream: Understanding the Science and Mystery of Our Dreaming Minds

“Dolphins and whales evolved the ability to have only half of their brain sleep at a time, switching from one side of the brain to the other every hour or so.”
― Antonio Zadra, When Brains Dream: Understanding the Science and Mystery of Our Dreaming Minds

“From an evolutionary perspective, some of the best evidence that such a critical function exists may come from dolphins, whales, and some species of birds. Dolphins have a serious problem: If they were to fall asleep, they would stop swimming, sink, and drown. They can’t afford to sleep. If sleep had housekeeping functions only, this wouldn’t be a problem. Evolution could relatively easily produce a dolphin that simply didn’t sleep.”
― Antonio Zadra, When Brains Dream: Understanding the Science and Mystery of Our Dreaming Minds

“Sleep appears to play an important role in the cleansing of unwanted waste products from the brain, including β-amyloid, a protein whose accumulation in the spaces between nerve cells is a major determinant in the development of Alzheimer’s disease.”
― Antonio Zadra, When Brains Dream: Understanding the Science and Mystery of Our Dreaming Minds