yessiree - I do indeed, I have dreamt like this since a very young child...

sometimes awesome -sometimes weirdooville,
scarydreaming is not resting -it is running from or away from preconceived
bad guys...monsters...etc.

http://www.answers.com/topic/allan-hobson

a newspaper interview w/ dr.allan hobson:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...5BC0A9649C8B63

There is exquisite control of sleep by the brain. In mammals, sleep is one of the key bodily functions controlled by the body clock in the hypothalamus. By these means it is also tied to the rhythm of body temperature, such that sleep occurs as body temperature falls and waking occurs when body temperature is highest. For most animals, including humans, these peaks in alertness and energy availability occur during the daylight hours, but animals (like rats) that rely more on smell than on vision are active at night and sleep in the daytime. In very hot climates humans may also shift their activity into the darker, cooler night and have a siesta during the forbiddingly hot period of the early afternoon.

The body clock times the occurrence of sleep via its direct nervous connection between the hypothalamus and other subcortical structures in the lower brain. Of particular importance are those collections of brain cells in the brain stem which manufacture and liberate from their endings two brain chemicals, noradrenaline (norepinephrine) and serotonin, which appear to have energizing effects needed for the waking functions of the brain and the body. In order for sleep to occur the activity of these brain cells must be quelled by the mechanism of inhibition. As their activity is more and more completely diminished, another group of cells becomes increasingly active and liberates more and more molecules of another chemical (acetylcholine), which appears to mediate restorative functions throughout the body and the brain. It is the reciprocal interaction of the two cell groups that appears to provide the basis of the cyclic alternation of NREM and REM sleep and their functional differentiation.

Functions of sleep

Sleep is vitally necessary. Recent experiments on the effects of prolonged sleep deprivation give hints as to why even short-term sleep loss is so disabling and why it is so vigorously compensated by the brain. If sleep deprivation is extended beyond two weeks, rats develop a distinctive group of signs that inevitably leads to their demise. Their skin breaks down and they show an increasing craving for food but cannot maintain their body weight no matter how much they eat. At the same time they develop more and more determined heat-seeking behaviour, as they cannot control their body temperatures when exposed to normal variation in environmental temperature. Short of these extreme effects, more modest sleep deprivation has been shown to create a wide variety of difficulties. Taken together these suggest that sleep may normally play an important role in the maintenance of such important bodily functions as the immune response and metabolic balance, as well as such critical mental functions as attentiveness, learning and memory, and emotional equilibrium. Shakespeare may have been correct when he said that sleep ‘knits up the raveled sleeve of care’, but he was underestimating the more active developmental and survival functions of sleep.

— J. Allan Hobson