A team of researchers has found a pattern of brain activity that seems to reveal not only when the brain is generating a dream but something about the content of that dream, reports NPR.

“When subjects were having [dream] experiences during sleep, there was a region in the back of the brain that tended to be very active, as if this region was a little bit more awake,” says Francesca Siclari, a researcher at the Center for Research and Investigation in Sleep at Lausanne University Hospital in Switzerland.