Your eyes may track what you are looking at in your dreams
Mouse brain cells and lucid dreamers point toward sleeping eyes moving differently when looking versus imagining.
Stuff You Should Know · Our Big Fat Dream EpisodeEvidence suggests your eyes during rapid eye movement sleep, the stage where the most intense dreams happen, are not darting randomly. They seem to look at things in your dream.
Researchers tested the idea in two ways. In mice, eye direction cells in the brain fired in sync with where the animals' eyes pointed during REM sleep. Since the mice could not report their dreams, the link is inferred, but it strongly suggests the eyes were following dream action.
In people, scientists asked lucid dreamers, people who know they are dreaming while still asleep, to trace a circle in their dream. When they merely imagined the circle, their sleeping eyes moved in short, jerky steps, just as waking eyes do when imagining. When they watched their dream thumb do the tracing, their eyes moved smoothly, just as waking eyes do when really looking.
Questions people ask
What is REM sleep?
REM stands for rapid eye movement, and it usually starts about 90 minutes to two hours after you fall asleep. Your brain is very active, your body is essentially paralyzed so you do not act out your dreams, and it is when your most vivid and memorable dreams happen.
Do we only dream in REM sleep?
No. Dreaming also happens in non-REM sleep, though those dreams tend to be less intense and harder to remember. Researchers think almost everyone dreams several times a night, for a total of a couple of hours, but they do not know for sure and the exact length is uncertain.