Unraveling the mysteries of sleep

As far as we’ve come in medical and scientific research, sleep seems to be an area that we just can’t pin down. We might understand the stages of sleep and what REM sleep is - kind of - but there are still a lot of unanswered questions, or questions that we hear a variety of answers to. How much sleep do you really need? Do sleep aids like melatonin really help? What happens in our brains when we dream? Why does it seem to be harder to sleep as we get older? Why do we need sleep in the first place? We pose all those questions and more to Dr. Philip Gehrman, Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, who specializes in Behavioral Sleep Medicine.