Alternatively, they may act to soothe the harsh impact of emotional trauma. This might explain why people often report being chased or attacked in their dreams. One is that dreams may have an evolutionary function, to test us in scenarios that are important to our survival. This could be down to brain activity – those of us who tend to remember dreams have greater activity while asleep and awake in two parts of the brain involved in promoting images and storing memories than people who don’t remember their dreams. Everybody dreams but we don’t all remember them. We know this from experiments which involve waking people up at different stages during the night. Some people insist that they never dream, but they are wrong. Some evidence suggests that this is indeed the case. Incidentally, many people have wondered if in REM sleep our eyes are moving to “look” at dream images. If we cut short REM sleep, we lose these experiences. REM sleep is where the classic dreams occur, those with bizarre juxtapositions, physically impossible feats, disturbing, moving and puzzling experiences. Dreams that occur in deep sleep tend to be unemotional, non-vivid, concerned with simple things, and hard to remember. Recent experiments have shown that we dream throughout our sleep, and not just in REM sleep, but we forget most of them. They discovered REM sleep and its association with dreaming. The study of dreams – which for centuries was more of an exercise in imaginative explanation than anything approaching science – started properly in 1953, when Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman at the University of Chicago hooked volunteers up to EEGs and woke them up during different sleep stages. That means we can’t access specific memories of things that happened in the past while we dream. Memories of life events – so-called episodic memories – are stored in a part of the brain called the hippocampus, and in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep signals coming out of the hippocampus are shut off. There’s a good reason why dreams are so skittish and peculiar. We explore this troubling issue in depth here, but for now, let’s address some common questions about the night-time hallucinations we call dreams. Your friends will thank you for it. Dreams are much more important than you might think – and we seem to be having less of them. But if you understand what goes on inside the brain as dreams take their course, things start to make a lot more sense – and should make for more interesting dinner conversation than unburdening yourself about your mind’s nocturnal adventures. False awakening: Dreaming about waking up.Dreams are so strange and carry so much significance to us that we often feel the need to tell people about them, sometimes at tedious length. Management of nightmares in patients with posttraumatic stress disorder: current perspectives. False awakenings in light of the dream protoconsciousness theory: a study in lucid dreamers. Relationships between sleep paralysis and sleep quality: current insights. Insight and dissociation in lucid dreaming and psychosis. Voss U, D’Agostino A, Kolibius L, Klimke A, Scarone S, Hobson JA. My dream, my rules: can lucid dreaming treat nightmares? Front Psychol. Philadelphia: Saunders 2011.ĭe Macêdo TCF, Ferreira GH, De Almondes KM, Kirov R, Mota-Rolim SA. In: Principles and Practice of Sleep Medicine (5th Edition). Idiopathic nightmares and dream disturbances associated with sleep-wake transitions.
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