![]() "They usually have insomnia and feel like their sleep quality is poor overall. "I never saw a patient who came in for only lack of dreaming," says Baron. Otherwise, the issue isn't whether or not you're dreaming - it's whether or not you're sleeping well enough in the first place. Point being: If like me, you consider yourself to be a good sleeper and still rarely experience dreams, you're probably just sleeping through them. ![]() In a 2016 interview with Sleep Review Magazine by The Journal for Sleep Scientists, Dement describes his study that initially linked dream disruption to dream recall: "It was very clear from the awakenings that when you’re dreaming, about 80 percent of the time, the subject would remember a vivid dream from the awakening," he says. Like I mentioned earlier, my internal clock has a strong grip on my body. On top of that, the time I fall asleep (usually midnight) and the time I wake up (seven or eight in the morning) is pretty consistent, too. I consistently sleep seven or eight hours a night, and my sleep is mostly undisturbed despite the never-ending flux of car horns and sirens in my neighborhood. Hearing this sent a pang of relief racing through me - I realized I must be having enough REM sleep, and not remembering my dreams doesn't really matter. As Baron explains: "People are probably having REM sleep even if they don't remember it." Still, there's a really important distinction between not dreaming at all and simply not being able to remember your dreams. By his logic, less REM sleep equals fewer possibilities for dreams to occur. The last REM cycle of the night, which happens in the final few hours of sleep, is when Pelayo says a majority of dreams happen.īecause of this, he says people like me who aren't recalling many dreams ought to examine the amount and timing of REM sleep they're getting to gauge why that is. You usually have multiple REM cycles overnight wherein your eyes twitch, you breathe heavily, and your muscles relax into an almost paralytic state. You likely already know a little bit about REM sleep from your middle-school science textbooks. In other words, dreaming "allows us to re-process upsetting memories in a safer, calmer environment." It also helps the brain "cogitate vast swaths of acquired knowledge and then extract overarching rules and commonalities," just as Pelayo and Baron summarize. "Dreaming has the potential to help people de-escalate emotional reactivity, probably because the emotional content of dreams is paired with a decrease in brain noradrenaline," he writes in UC Berkeley's Greater Good Magazine. He delves deeper into his findings of the benefits of dreaming in his book, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, but in short, he equates dreaming to emotional therapy. He's also the founder and director of the Center for Human Sleep Science. That theory on dreaming's purpose is heralded by Matthew Walker, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. "It is thought that REM sleep is involved in re-activating memories and helping cement pathways in the brain between short-term and long-term memory formation," she explains. Kelly Baron, a clinical psychologist and associate professor in the division of public health at the University of Utah, offers a similar sentiment on the purpose of dreams, which mostly occur during rapid eye movement (or REM) sleep. Dreaming would be a part of that process. ![]() If that person moved to another area where there are no lions but plenty of domestic cats, their brain would need to forget certain details about lions in order to make room for new ones about other cats. Therefore, that person would need to remember specific characteristics of a lion, like its smell, so that they can avoid the danger of running into one. A person living around lions would likely categorize cats as dangerous. He gives the example of a person who lives around lions (strange, I know, but bear with me). What Pelayo means is that, in layman's terms, your brain needs to be able to reprioritize information depending on how relevant it is to you at a given time.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |