The Science of Sleep and the Dreaming Brain

The experience of dreaming is nearly universal, yet its origins and purpose remain one of the great unanswered questions in science. 

On average, every individual spends about two hours each night traveling through seemingly real experiences that bubble up from the subconscious. Despite this ubiquity, dream recall is surprisingly low, with most people remembering only about two dreams per week. In rare cases, roughly one in every 250 people has never recalled a single dream.

Dreams largely arise during the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) phase of the sleep cycle, though not entirely. Sleep is a natural process conserved across evolution in nearly all animals with a brain, and the REM cycle repeats about four to six times per night, with each period lasting roughly 90 minutes.

Modern science has evolved from crude mid-1900s methods—like taping participants' eyes open—to using advanced techniques such as MRIs and the electroencephalogram (EEG), which link dreams to observable brain functions. Research suggests that during dream sleep, the brain connects new information learned during the day with already-stored memories, creating a "revised mind-wide web of associations." This process, blending emotion-driven visual imagery and memory consolidation, is theorized to help us make sense of experiences, regulate emotions, and prepare for future situations.5 Specific brain structures are involved in this process. 

The hippocampus, a region critical for memory formation, plays a major role in dreaming; studies show that people with damage to this area still dream, but their narratives lack the richness of detail described by others.

 The body is designed to prevent us from acting out our dreams through temporary paralysis of skeletal muscles (known as REM atonia). Failures in this process lead to certain phenomena, such as sleepwalking (somnambulism) which occurs most frequently in children, but only during the deeper stages of non-REM sleep when the protective muscle paralysis is absent. 

Sleep Paralysis is a well-known phenomenon that occurs when the brain awakens early but the body fails to "unfreeze" in sync, often resulting in terrifying hallucinations.

In contrast, lucid dreaming is a state where the dreamer is aware they are dreaming and can even control their actions. About 20% of people experience this at least once a month, though most people never report the experience. This heightened state is associated with increased activity in the frontal lobes, the brain regions responsible for decision-making and attention management, and may involve the emergence of a collaborative brain network. 

 Nightmares, considered parasomnias (undesirable events experienced during sleep), are unpredictable but have been linked to factors such as stress, anxiety, and trauma.

For most of recorded history, dreams were considered divine in origin, with the earliest record of dream interpretation dating back to Ancient Sumer. The first venture into modern theory was by the ancient Greek philosopher Heracleitus, who proposed that dreams were created within the mind. This idea was formalized with the rise of psychoanalysis in the late 1800s.

Famed Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud believed dreams were symbolic expressions of desire and that interpreting their content—often using free association—could reveal truths about one's psyche. Separately, psychologist Carl Jung proposed the controversial idea of the 'collective unconscious,' a universal part of the unconscious mind containing innate elements called archetypes (like the Hero or the Shadow) that shape dreams across cultures.

However, the interpretation of dream patterns must also account for a cognitive bias called pareidolia, which is the tendency to find meaning and assume a generative force behind patterns produced by randomness. 

 Finally, while the question of whether animals dream depends on one's definition, studies on sleeping cats, rats, fish, and finches show their brains fire as if performing actions from waking life, and even spiders and insects exhibit REM-like sleep.

The Next Y2K Problem

Y2K, short for “Year 2000,” was a potential computer bug caused by how dates were formatted in older software. To save memory space, early computers used two-digit years—like “97” for 1997—which in the new millennium risked misreading “00” as 1900 instead of 2000, potentially disrupting systems that depended on accurate dates (read 101).

Though a kind of panic occurred in 1999, the Y2K issue surfaced in technical literature as early as 1984. Long before it became a global concern, researchers were already flagging the two-digit date flaw. A 1984 book, "Computers in Crisis," outlined how the year 2000 rollover could break financial, governmental, and technical systems if left unaddressed.

In the late 1990s, many feared this glitch could cause widespread failures in banking systems, power grids, transportation networks, and other critical infrastructure. This idea took hold of the public imagination, spawning doomsday predictions, a booming survivalist market, and a massive global push to audit and repair vulnerable systems before the deadline—work that cost an estimated $300B-$500B. 

Because of the extensive preparations, Y2K passed without significant disruptions, however, its legacy endures. The crisis helped modernize global IT systems, accelerated the outsourcing of programming jobs, and exposed society’s dependence on digital infrastructure—prompting long-term shifts in cybersecurity and software maintenance.

The Year 2038 problem is the next potential computer time rollover bug. Many older systems store time as a signed 32-bit integer counting seconds since Jan. 1, 1970. That counter maxes out on Jan. 19, 2038—overflowing into negative time and sending clocks back to 1901, potentially crashing any older software that depends on accurate dates. The Y2K38 bug is also known as the end of 32-bit Unix time and the year 2038 problem.

Times of Day

Why did humans need fixed times of the day, like "noon" and "midnight"? 

I was wondering about these terms and writing a post for my origins blog, and came across additional information beyond etymologies that I'll post here.

There are several answers to why humans needed fixed times of the day. We love to organize things, and communal life included religious rituals, markets, work schedules, and meetings, and those needed a shared system of timekeeping. 

Times of day allowed long-distance coordination as societies expanded and trade increased, people needed consistent points of reference—even if the Sun wasn’t visible.

Things like contracts, taxes, leases, transportation, and recordkeeping all require clear definitions of when one day ends and another begins. 

These official - and eventually precise - times of day enabled scientific and navigational progress since astronomy, calendars, and navigation at sea relied heavily on precise solar measurements—especially noon.

fixed times of day like noon and midnight to organize life around the natural rhythms of light, darkness, and the movement of the Sun. These terms didn’t appear all at once—they evolved over thousands of years as people developed more precise ways to measure time. 

Noon originally meant the moment when the Sun reached its highest point in the sky. This is now called "solar noon." This was a natural reference point for early societies: The Sun’s highest point was a dependable daily marker. It divided the daylight into “before” and “after.” Farmers, travelers, priests, and traders could all use it to coordinate activities. 

In ancient civilizations — Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome — solar noon was the anchor for their earliest "clocks" (like sundials). Even when mechanical clocks arrived in the Middle Ages, they were adjusted every so often to match the actual solar noon. 

 The word shifted over time: In medieval Latin and Old English, nona meant the ninth hour after sunrise (about 3 p.m.). Over centuries, the prayer schedules of monks shifted, and by the 14th–15th century, English speakers were using noon to mean 12:00.

Midnight is the natural opposite of noon, and after noon was defined as the midpoint of the daylight period; it made sense to divide the entire 24-hour cycle into two halves. Midnight became the point exactly opposite solar noon. A convenient boundary between one day and the next, and it was a reference point for the start of calendars, laws, and later, timetables. 

Before mechanical clocks, people didn’t think much about precise (hours and minutes), and night was divided into “watches,” or segments, mainly for keeping guard. Mechanical clocks (1300s onward) made a precise 12:00 a.m. possible. When time zones were standardized in the 19th century for railroads, midnight officially became the start of the civil day.

Time in Three Dimensions

This is way beyond my high school and college science, but I find this kind of theorheticaal physics fascinating. Physicist Gunther Kletetschka proposes a radical shift in how we understand reality. The universe may have not one, but three dimensions of time. This 3D time framework could help solve one of physics’ biggest problems — reconciling quantum mechanics with general relativity.

I was taught in school to think of time as a single river that always flows in one direction. Kletetschka offers a very different idea. What if time actually has three separate directions, much like the three directions of space? In his view, each “axis” of time operates at a different scale — one for the tiny quantum world, one for everyday life, and one for the vast structure of the universe.

By splitting time this way, his math can connect phenomena that usually don’t fit well together — from the strange behavior of particles to the way the universe expands — all without breaking the familiar idea of cause and effect.

One reason this theory is gaining attention is that it doesn’t just sound interesting; it matches real numbers. It correctly reproduces the known masses of particles such as electrons and muons, and even offers predictions for things we haven’t measured precisely yet, like the masses of neutrinos and the exact speed of certain gravitational waves. Those predictions mean scientists can actually test the theory in the future.

Kletetschka also flips our usual picture of space-time. Instead of imagining space and time woven together as equals, he suggests that time is the fundamental “canvas,” and space forms on top of it — more like the paint than the canvas. If this idea holds up, it could lead to an entirely new way of understanding the universe and how everything in it fits together.

Don't get to far off course. Having three directions of time doesn’t mean time travel or rewinding the past. Instead, it means that different processes can unfold along different time paths, allowing for multiple outcomes without violating the flow of cause and effect.

What makes the proposal especially intriguing is its goal: unifying the two major pillars of modern physics. Quantum mechanics explains the very small, while general relativity explains the very large — and the two theories don’t naturally agree with each other. By rebuilding the foundation around three-dimensional time, Kletetschka hopes to create a model that works smoothly for both.

Unlike many past theoretical attempts that stayed theoretical, this theory points directly to experiments that could confirm or reject it. That makes it a serious candidate in the ongoing quest for a single, unified understanding of how reality works. If the theory is eventually proven correct, it would mean that matter, energy, and even the forces of nature are all expressions of how three-dimensional time bends and flows. It could spark a major shift in how we imagine the cosmos and our place within it.

"...results have not yet been accepted by the broader scientific community. The theory is still in the early stages of scrutiny..."

And what does this have to do with consciousness? 

 

Always a good idea to be a bit skeptical of new theories...

Gunther Kletetschka, "Three-Dimensional Time: A Mathematical Framework for Fundamental Physics", Reports in Advances of Physical Sciences Link DOI: 10.1142/S2424942425500045