ABSTRACT
After briefly surveying the basics of waking, sleeping, and dreaming, this chapter turns from physiology to experience. Dreams are often bizarre, with incongruity, uncertainty, and sudden scene changes, possibly due to failed feature binding. Studies of dream recall and content reveal sex differences in content and show how children’s dreams develop along with their cognitive abilities. Dream events correlate with eye movements, and timing in dreams is roughly equivalent to that in waking. It is even becoming possible to know what someone is dreaming about from their brain activity. But are dreams conscious experiences? Answers based on different theories of consciousness are considered. Beyond dreaming, strange experiences on the borders of sleep include hypnagogic hallucinations, sleep paralysis, and false awakenings. In lucid dreams, you know you are dreaming, and expert lucid dreamers can use eye movements to report on their dreams in real time, making possible many useful experiments. Out-of-body and near-death experiences have long been thought to entail a soul or astral body separating from the physical body, but neuroscientific evidence points to a breakdown in the body schema at the temporoparietal junction. Out-of-body illusions induced in virtual reality are revealing other connections between these experiences and our sense of self.
