The dreams of Mary Shelley, author of "Frankenstein," involved a pale student kneeling beside a corpse that was jerking back to life. Paul McCartney's contained the melody of "Yesterday," while director James Cameron's inspired the "Terminator" films.
With their eerie mixture of the familiar and the bizarre, it is easy to look for meaning in these nightly wanderings. But why do our brains take these journeys, and why do they contain such outlandish twists and turns?
Unfortunately for armchair psychoanalysts, Sigmund Freud's attempts to interpret dreams remain hotly disputed. Nevertheless, neuroscientists and psychologists have recently made big strides in understanding the way the brain builds our dreams and the factors that shape those curious stories. Along the way, they have found startling hints that our use of technology may be permanently changing the nature of this fundamental human experience.