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What Are Dreams For? | The New Yorker

newyorker.com · 3,358 words · saved by 1 readers

Converging lines of research suggest that we might be misunderstanding something we do every night of our lives.

Save this story Save this story In the late nineteen-nineties, a neuroscientist named Mark Blumberg stood in a lab at the University of Iowa watching a litter of sleeping rats. Blumberg was then on the cusp of forty; the rats were newborns, and jerked and spasmed as they slept. Blumberg knew that the animals were fine. He had often seen his dogs twitch their paws while asleep. People, he knew, also twitch during sleep: our muscles contract to make small, sharp movements, and our closed eyes dart from side to side in a phenomenon known as rapid eye movement, or REM . It’s typically during REM s

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