Rose knows dreams can be very important to sleep easy. According to a recent paper published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience a psychiatrist and long time sleep researcher at Harvard, Dr. J. Allan Hobson, disputed that the main function of rapid-eye-movement sleep or REM when most dreaming occurs, is physiological. The brain is foreseeing sight, sounds and emotions of waking. He explains “It helps explain a lot of things, like why people forget so many dreams. It’s like jogging; the body doesn’t remember every step, but it knows it has exercised. It has been tuned up. It’s the same idea here: dreams are tuning the mind for conscious awareness.”Deriving on his work and others, he states that dreaming is a parallel state of consciousness that is continually operating but normally suppressed during waking hours. This might explain why we drift off during the day and daydream.
“Most people who have studied dreams start out with some predetermined psychological ideas and try to make dreaming fit those,” said Dr. Mark Mahowald, a neurologist who is director of the sleep disorders program at Hennepin County Medical Center, in Minneapolis. “What I like about this new paper is that he doesn’t make any assumptions about what dreaming is doing.”
This innovative approach about dreaming is partial based on the finding about REM sleep. Studies have found that REM is detectable in humans, other warm-blooded mammals and birds. REM makes its appearance very early in life — in the third trimester for humans, well before a developing child has experienced dreaming. The fetus may be visualizing something long before their eyes ever open. Objects and emotions in their dreams come later in life.
Many people can remember their dreams and enjoy trying to figure out what they mean. A recent study of more than 1,000 people, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Harvard found strong preconceptions in the interpretations of dreams. For instance, the participants tended to attach more significance to a negative dream if it was about something they disliked and more to a positive dream if it was about a loved one. Negative dreams cause the person to wake during the night and harder for them to fall back asleep without visualizing the nightmare when they close their eyes. If you can’t get to back to sleep within 15 – 20 minutes, it is best to get up and do something like read or watch TV to divert your mind on other subject matter.
Scientists know this because some people have the ability to watch their own dreams as observers, without waking up. This state of consciousness, called lucid dreaming, is itself something a mystery —but one in which Dr. Hobson finds strong support for his argument for dreams as a physiological warm-up before waking.
Lucid dreaming occurs during the period when you are not fully awake, but some people experience lucid dreams while sleepwalking and night terrors which represents muscle activity and non-REM sleep. The sleep disorder, narcolepsy, shows that people are in a state of REM during normal daytime wakefulness.
In the journal Sleep, Ursula Voss of J. W. Goethe at the University in Frankfurt led a team that analyzed brain waves during REM sleep, waking and lucid dreaming. It found that lucid dreaming had elements of REM and of waking — they also concluded that when you close your eyes at night you will experience a flash of your last dream. Researchers have found if you are able to remember and reconstruct a (positive) lucid dream it will help you to fall asleep easy.
Paradox Lost - Midnight in the Battleground of Sleep and Dreams - Violent Moving Nightmares, REM Sleep Behavior Disorder
Good Evening,
Rose Sheepskill
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