At the start of the 21st century, scientists had little idea why we sleep, leading J. Allan Hobson at Harvard Medical School to quip that the only known function of sleep was to cure sleepiness. But 20 years later, we know a lot more. It turns out that for every two hours a person is awake and interacting with the world, the #brain on average needs to go “offline” for an hour—disconnected from the outside world—to process and contextualize those experiences. Sleep benefits memory in myriad ways. For simple procedural skills—how to ride a bicycle or distinguish between different coins in one’s pocket—a night of sleep or an afternoon nap following learning leads to a dramatic improvement in performance. Sleep also stabilizes verbal memories, reducing their susceptibility to interference and decay, processes that all too easily lead to forgetting.

But the action of sleep can be more sophisticated than simply strengthening and stabilizing memories. It can lead to the selective retention of emotional memories, or even of #emotional components of a scene, while allowing other memories and parts of a scene to fade. It can enhance our ability to extract the gist from a list of words, or the rules governing a complex probabilistic game. It can lead to insights ranging from finding the single word that logically connects three apparently unrelated words, to discovering an unexpected rule that allows for the more efficient solving of mathematical problems. It can facilitate the integration of new information into existing networks of related information. And it has been shown to help infants gain language skills. Disruptions of normal sleep in neurologic and psychiatric disorders can lead to a failure of these processes. As we describe in our upcoming book When Brains Dream, dreams appear to be part of this ongoing memory processing, and their occurrence and content can predict subsequent memory improvement. While there is a vigorous debate over whether the actual conscious experiencing of dreams while they occur serves a function, we believe that it does, and that it is similar to that proposed for waking consciousness

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