Into the Dream Lab: Michelle Carr chronicles sleep studies that map common nightmares

Michelle Carr, an academic turned dream researcher, recounts how a single lucid-sleep episode in 2008 prompted a career spent watching people sleep and waking them at precise moments to record their dreams. Her new book, Into the Dream Lab (Profile Books, £18.99, 368 pages), draws on hundreds of nights in laboratories around the world to argue that many of the dreams people report are remarkably similar, regardless of background.

Carr describes the episode that set her on the path: she opened her eyes during sleep, saw her body still lying there, and recognised she was dreaming. That dissonant but vivid experience raised questions about the slumbering brain's capacity to produce realistic, emotionally charged scenarios. To explore those questions, Carr joined sleep researchers in multiple countries, observing sleepers and interrupting REM cycles to ask participants what they had been dreaming.

Across the studies she reviews, Carr reports that up to 70% of people describe a set of recurring dream themes. Frequently cited motifs include being chased or falling, finding oneself naked or inappropriately dressed, and discovering secret passageways or hidden rooms within a familiar house. Recurring dreams also often follow a life-course pattern: a teenager who dreams of missing an exam may revisit that dream in later decades. Carr highlights one particularly common nightmare—waking to find oneself exposed, or “caught starkers”—as an example of a cross-cultural pattern.

While documenting these shared elements, Carr stresses how much remains unknown about the origins and functions of dreaming. The book focuses on systematic observation and first-person reports rather than offering definitive answers about biological purpose or psychological meaning. Her accounts emphasise both methodological advances in sleep laboratories and the limits of interpretation when linking dream content to waking-life causes.

Into the Dream Lab situates Carr’s fieldwork within ongoing scientific efforts to map sleep stages and correlate brain activity with subjective reports. The practice of waking sleepers at targeted moments to capture dream narratives is shown to yield richer data than retrospective questionnaires, but Carr cautions that such laboratory conditions cannot fully reproduce the messy variability of natural sleep.

The book will appeal to readers interested in the science of sleep and the phenomenology of dreaming. It contributes to a growing literature that documents patterns across populations while underlining the need for more research to explain why similar dream motifs recur and how nightmares might be alleviated. Carr’s work demonstrates that systematic, empirical attention to dreams can reveal shared features of the sleeping mind, even as core questions about their origin and function remain unresolved.