If your ambition is to become an expert on dreams, like Professor Robert Stickgold of Harvard University, then he has some advice: don’t tell anyone.
“At parties I’ve learnt to say I study sleep,” he says on the phone from his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “If I say I study dreams, the next six words out of their mouth are invariably: ‘I had the most amazing dream.’”
You see, Robert doesn’t really care that you dreamt that all your teeth fell out. What he cares about is what exactly the brain is doing when we’re asleep and why. Dreams are a part of that and much of the rest is still a mystery. Things have improved enormously since another Harvard professor joked 20 years ago that the only known function of sleep was to cure sleepiness, but still.
It’s all in your head
The mystery of sleep is what 75-year-old Robert, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, has spent his career
