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Peter Fazekas and Morten Overgaard interviewed for The Atlantic

The Dreams You Can’t Remember Might Never Have Occurred. Is it possible to dream of nothing?

24.04.2019 | Henriette Blæsild Vuust

Where do our minds go at night? For more than a century, discussions of dreams have tended to revolve around the interpretation of our dreams’ contents. Do they reflect our unconscious anxieties? Are they an attempt to simulate threats, training us to cope with future challenges? Or are they simply the result of our mental housekeeping, as the sleeping brain reactivates our memories and processes them for long-term storage? In each case, the focus has been on the more immersive, surreal flights of fancy that occupy the sleeping brain.

Read article from The Atlantic where a new study from Sleep Medicine Reviews by researchers Peter Fazekas, University of Antwerp, Georgina Nemeth, Eotvos Lorand University, and Morten Overgaard, Aarhus University suggest that white dreams are better understood as a diminished form of consciousness. According to this hypothesis, white dreaming is a bit like watching a badly tuned TV, with the volume muted: The sleeper really is dreaming, but the signal is too weak to establish any definite details beyond the vaguest impressions.

Link to article in The Atlantic ...


Peter Fazekas, Georgina Nemeth, Morten Overgaard:

White dreams are made of colours: What studying contentless dreams can teach about the neural basis of dreaming and conscious experiences

Link to article in Sleep Medicine Reviews ...

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