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Dreaming. REM sleep is understood to be a critical component of sleep in all mammals, including humans. Credit: © Anton Maltsev / Fotolia

For decades, scientists have fiercely debated whether rapid eye movement (REM) sleep – the phase where dreams appear – is directly involved in memory formation. Now researchers provide evidence that REM sleep does, indeed, play this role – at least in mice. “We already knew that newly acquired information is stored into different types of memories, spatial or emotional, before being consolidated or integrated,” says Sylvain Williams, a researcher and professor of psychiatry at McGill.

“How the brain performs this process has remained unclear – until now...