The Science of Nightmares | Tumble Episode
Do we remember our dreams more than our nightmares, and how would a scientist even find out? In this Halloween episode, 9-year-old Lennon’s question takes us to a sleep lab at UMass Amherst, where sleep scientist Rebecca Spencer studies how kids sleep. Along the way, Rebecca shows us the wire-covered caps that let scientists watch brains while people sleep, and explains why your body is paralyzed every night during REM sleep. Is Lennon’s hypothesis right? Listen and find out!
🎧 Listen to the Episode
🎃 What Kids Will Learn
What a sleep lab is actually like, from the hotel-style bedrooms to the control room where scientists watch brain activity on screens.
How scientists study something as fleeting as a dream using complex instruments as well as asking people questions.
What we know about dreams and nightmares, and how we remember them.
🔎About The Featured Expert
Dr. Rebecca Spencer is a professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she runs a sleep lab that studies how sleep shapes the way our brains learn and remember. Her research looks at how sleep helps lock in new memories and skills, and how that process changes as we age, from young children to older adults. She earned her PhD in neuroscience from Purdue University, then spent six years as a postdoctoral fellow and research scientist at UC Berkeley’s Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, including an NIH Pathways to Independence Award. Rebecca joined UMass Amherst in 2008 and became a full professor in 2018. You can learn more about her lab’s work at somneurolab.com.
🧑🏫 Classroom & Home Resources
📜 Science and Engineering Practices: Asking Questions and Defining Problems, Planning and Carrying Out Investigations
🧩 Crosscutting Concepts: Patterns, Cause and Effect
📚 Learn More:
Explore the research at Rebecca’s UMass Amherst sleep lab, including studies on whether preschoolers’ naps help them learn, and a look at the sleep lab’s bedrooms and control room
Read How learning happens in the brains of sleeping babes from Knowable Magazine, where Rebecca explains her experiments showing that kids who nap after story time remember the story better
Read Nightmares from Nemours KidsHealth, a kid-friendly guide to what nightmares are, what can trigger them, and how keeping a dream journal can help you understand what your mind does at night
💬 Discussion Questions
Did you agree with how Lennon thought she could test her hypothesis at the end of the episode? Can you think of another way to find out the answer to her question?
Which do you remember better: your dreams or your nightmares? Why?
Do you think it would be scary to be in a sleep experiment? Why or why not?
🎧 More Episodes About Sleep & Dreams: Do Dreams Have Meaning?, The Sleep Camp Experiment, The Magic Memory Molecule with Andre Fenton
📚 For Teachers: Explore our Audio Courses for NGSS-aligned science learning.
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