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Dreams are a strange state of mind: you experience things in your sleep that seem so clear and real, as if you were there up close.

Some people can even actively control their dreams and shape them themselves.

It's called lucid dreaming. But then you wake up and realize that it wasn't that real after all.

That is precisely why dreams and what happens in the brain are an incredibly exciting field of research.

So far, scientists have assumed that we dream in order, among other things, to consolidate memories and to maintain our emotional balance.

So dreams are probably important so that we are fine and not completely freaked out.

But what influences our dreams has not yet been clarified.

According to a study (2020) by the French university ENS, our ambient noise and how the brain processes them may have something to do with it.

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The research group behind the study found that our brains at least one time filter out the noises that are most likely to wake us up while we are dreaming.

To do this, the scientists used an EEG to measure the brain activity in the auditory cortex - i.e. in the hearing center - of a total of 18 test subjects in various sleep phases.

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Before the study participants went to sleep, two recordings were played to them at the same time.

One contained normal speech while the other consisted of nonsensical noises.

As expected, the two sound currents in the auditory cortex were separated and processed in the brain at the same time.

But something else happened in my sleep

Source: Getty Images / Thomas Barwick

Even when the study participants were just dozing, that is, between being awake and sleeping, the brain changed the way in which it perceived sounds.

In dreamless deep sleep, the processing of normal language in the auditory cortex was intensified.

This could indicate that the brain is paying more attention to these sounds.

So maybe learning in sleep does work after all?

However, once the sleepers were in the REM sleep phase, when dreams usually occur, the brain suppressed normal voice recording.

However, the nonsense noises that could not be located were still processed by the auditory cortex.

This in turn indicates that mere background noise is unlikely to disturb a dream.

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Sleep research has long known that people in phasic REM sleep, i.e. while they are dreaming, are much more difficult to wake up.

The study results of the French researchers could now provide the decisive clue why: While the brain actively pays attention to noises in the environment during most sleep phases, this does not occur in REM sleep.

This article was first published in June 2020.