Why are dreams important
The Purpose of Dreams and Why They Are Important To Our Health
The Purpose of Dreams and Why They Are Important To Our Health Skip to contentFind the perfect mattress, bed or accessories
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The Purpose of Dreams: What They are, why we Have Them, and How They Tell us About our Sleep
By City Mattress Staff
Dreams are a normal part of healthy sleep. Whether you remember them or not, everyone dreams for a total of about two hours per night. Dreams can actually occur during any stage of sleep, although they’re most vivid during the REM phase. The purpose of dreams has been a subject of speculation for thousands of years. In fact, even in 2019, experts still have more questions than answers. That is why they are so fascinating! Here is what we know so far:
Dreams and CreativityDreams can act as your creative muse. One theory for why we dream is that it helps facilitate our creative tendencies. Without the logic filter or restrictions to your creative flow you might normally have, your thoughts and ideas can run wild when you’re sleeping! Artists of all kind credit dreams with inspiring some of their best work. Mary Shelley’s book Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson’s book Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Beatles song “Yesterday,’ and Stephen King’s famous tale Misery are just a few examples. In addition to creative works of art, the Periodic Table, the sewing machine needle, the shape and structure of DNA, and Jack Nicklaus’s golf swing were all conceived in dreams as well.
Dreams help you “train” your fight-or-flight reflexes. The amygdala is the part of your brain associated with your survival instincts, also known as the “fight-or-flight response.” Maybe not so coincidentally, this is also one of the areas of the brain that is most active during dreaming.
One popular theory states that because the amygdala is more active during sleep than in your waking life, it may be the brain’s way of preparing you to deal with a threat one day. It is also worth noting that the brainstem sends out nerve signals during REM sleep that relax your muscles. That way you don’t try to run or punch in your sleep to act out your dreams. It is almost like your brain is running through a simulation, so you’re prepared to deal with anything life throws at you. After all, you’ve “practiced” for it all!
Dreams enable your thoughts and everyday experiences to be transferred to your memory. One widely held theory about the purpose of dreams is that they help you store important memories and things you’ve learned while you sort through complicated thoughts and feelings. Scientific studies have shown that if you learn new information and sleep on it, you’ll be able to recall it better than if asked to remember that information without the benefit of sleep.
How dreams affect memory storage and recall isn’t one hundred percent understood yet. The current theory by experts is that dreams allow the brain to more efficiently store important information while blocking out unneeded stimuli that could interfere with memory and learning.
Dreams can tell you a thing or two about your health. It probably comes as no surprise that your dreams often mirror the status of your mental health. For example, many sleepers have a stressful week at work and then dream they showed up to high school unprepared for class long after they’ve left school. If you’re a diabetic, having vivid dreams may indicate a sudden drop in blood sugar, known as Hypoglycemia. If you find yourself waking up from a nightmare in a cold sweat, it could be a sign that you have the flu or a similar illness coming on. Feverish dreams can serve as a warning to the rest of your body that your body temperature is too high.
If you are not remembering any dreams for weeks or even months, this can be a sign you are not reaching REM and therefore not getting a good night of sleep. This lack of dreams could signal that something is interrupting your sleep cycle. Sleep apnea is a condition in which breathing is briefly and frequently interrupted, causing the brain to wake up the body in order to restart breathing. You may be waking up frequently because you’re getting too hot, or you feel uncomfortable and need to change positions. All of these issues affecting your sleep cycle breaking up, and therefore causing a lack of dreams, can be helped by sleeping on a better mattress!
For many people, a better mattress can be a big part of the solution to any sleep-related issue. While in a City Mattress store, you will have the opportunity to lay on and try out several different mattresses, produced by a variety of brands, made from different materials, and all with their own unique feel. You then choose the one that feels best to you.
As quickly as tomorrow night, you’ll be sleeping soundly through the entire eight hours, entering REM on a regular cycle, and having pleasant dreams.
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Why Your Brain Needs to Dream
We often hear stories of people who’ve learned from their dreams or been inspired by them. Think of Paul McCartney’s story of how his hit song “Yesterday” came to him in a dream or of Mendeleev’s dream-inspired construction of the periodic table of elements.
But, while many of us may feel that our dreams have special meaning or a useful purpose, science has been more skeptical of that claim. Instead of being harbingers of creativity or some kind of message from our unconscious, some scientists have considered dreaming to be an unintended consequence of sleep—a byproduct of evolution without benefit.
Sleep itself is a different story. Scientists have known for a while now that shorter sleep is tied to dangerous diseases, like heart disease and stroke. There is mounting evidence that sleep deprivation leads to a higher risk of obesity and Alzheimer’s disease. Large population studies reflect a saddening truth—the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. Not only that, sleep helps us to hold onto our memories and to learn facts and skills faster, making it important for everyone including infants, students, athletes, pilots, and doctors.
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Much of this I outline in my new book, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, which summarizes the many findings we have about sleep and its function in our lives.
But what about dreaming? Does it also have a purpose?
Recent work in my neuroscience lab and the work of other scientists has shown that dreams may have a very particular function important to our well-being.
Here are the two main ways dreams help us.
Dreaming is like overnight therapy
It’s said that time heals all wounds, but my research suggests that time spent in dream sleep is what heals. REM-sleep dreaming appears to take the painful sting out of difficult, even traumatic, emotional episodes experienced during the day, offering emotional resolution when you awake the next morning.
REM sleep is the only time when our brain is completely devoid of the anxiety-triggering molecule noradrenaline. At the same time, key emotional and memory-related structures of the brain are reactivated during REM sleep as we dream. This means that emotional memory reactivation is occurring in a brain free of a key stress chemical, which allows us to re-process upsetting memories in a safer, calmer environment.
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How do we know this is so? In one study in my sleep center, healthy young adult participants were divided into two groups to watch a set of emotion-inducing images while inside an MRI scanner. Twelve hours later, they were shown the same emotional images—but for half the participants, the twelve hours were in the same day, while for the other half the twelve hours were separated by an evening of sleep.
Those who slept in between the two sessions reported a significant decrease in how emotional they felt in response to seeing those images again, and their MRI scans showed a significant reduction in reactivity in the amygdala, the emotional center of the brain that creates painful feelings. Moreover, there was a reengagement of the rational prefrontal cortex of the brain after sleep that helped maintain a dampening influence on emotional reactivity. In contrast, those who remained awake across the day showed no such dissolving of emotional reactivity over time.
That in itself doesn’t say anything about the role of dreaming. But we had recorded each participant’s sleep during the intervening night between the two test sessions, and we found that specific brain activity that reflected a drop in stress-related brain chemistry during the dream state determined the success of overnight therapy from one individual to the next.
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. Support for this idea came from a study done by Murray Raskind on vets with PTSD, who often suffer debilitating nightmares. When given the drug Prazosin—a medication that lowers blood pressure and also acts as a blocker of the brain stress chemical noradrenaline—the vets in his study had fewer nightmares and fewer PTSD symptoms than those given a placebo. Newer studies suggest this effect can be shown in children and adolescents with nightmares, as well, though the research on this is still in its infancy.
The evidence points toward an important function of dreams: to help us take the sting out of our painful emotional experiences during the hours we are asleep, so that we can learn from them and carry on with our lives.
Dreaming enhances creativity and problem-solving
It’s been shown that deep non-REM sleep strengthens individual memories. But REM sleep is when those memories can be fused and blended together in abstract and highly novel ways. During the dreaming state, your brain will cogitate vast swaths of acquired knowledge and then extract overarching rules and commonalties, creating a mindset that can help us divine solutions to previously impenetrable problems.
How do we know dreaming and not just sleep is important to this process?
In one study, we tested this by waking up participants during the night—during both non-REM sleep and dreaming sleep—and gave them very short tests: solving anagram puzzles, where you try to unscramble letters to form a word (e.
g., OSEOG = GOOSE). First, participants were tested beforehand, just to familiarize them with the test. Then, we monitored their sleep and woke them up at different points of the night to perform the test. When woken during non-REM sleep, they were not particularly creative—they could solve very few puzzles. But, when we woke up participants during REM sleep, they were able to solve 15-35 percent more puzzles than when they were awake. Not only that, participants woken while dreaming reported that the solution just “popped” into their heads, as if it were effortless.
In another study, I and my colleagues taught participants a series of relational facts—such as, A>B, B>C, C>D, and so on—and tested their understanding by asking them questions (e.g., Is B>D or not?). Afterwards, we compared their performance on this test before and after a full night’s sleep, and also after they’d had a 60- to 90-minute nap that included REM sleep. Those who’d slept or had a long nap performed much better on this test than when they were awake, as if they’d put together disparate pieces of a jigsaw puzzle in their sleep.
Some may consider this trivial, but it is one of the key operations differentiating your brain from your computer. It also underlies the difference between knowledge (retention of individual facts) and wisdom (knowing what they all mean when you fit them together). The latter seems to be the work of REM-sleep dreaming.
“It’s said that time heals all wounds, but my research suggests that time spent in dream sleep is what heals”
―Dr. Matthew Walker
Dreaming improves creative problem solving, too, according to another study. Participants learned to navigate a virtual maze using trial and error and aided by the placement of unique objects—like Christmas trees—at certain junctions in the maze. After this learning session, the group was split in two, with half napping and half watching a video for 90 minutes. Nappers were occasionally awoken to ask about the content of their dreams; those watching a video were also asked about thoughts going through their minds.
Afterwards, the participants again tried to solve the maze, and those who napped were significantly better at it than those who didn’t, as expected. But the nappers who reported dreaming about the maze were 10 times better at the task than those who napped and didn’t dream about the maze. There’s a reason you’ve never been told to stay awake on a problem.
Looking at the content of these dreams, it was clear that the participants didn’t dream a precise replay of the learning experience while awake. Instead, they were cherry-picking salient fragments of the learning experience and attempting to place them within the catalog of preexisting knowledge. This is how dreaming helps us be more creative.
While the benefits of dreaming are real, too many of us have problems getting a full eight hours of sleep and lose out on these advantages. Alternatively, we may think we’re the exception to the rule—that we’re one of those people who doesn’t happen to need a lot of sleep. But nothing could be further from the truth.
Research clearly shows that people who overestimate their ability to get by on less sleep are sadly wrong.
Five ways to enhance your sleep
This essay was adapted from Matthew Walker's new book, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams (Scribner, 2017, 368 pages).
So how can we be sure to get enough sleep and experience a dream state? While we may be tempted to use sleeping pills to get to sleep, this has been shown to be detrimental to dreaming. Instead of taking pills, here are some simple ways to enhance your sleep:
1. Make sure your room is dark and that you are not looking at bright light sources—i.e., computer screens and cell phones—in the last hour or two before going to bed. You may even want to start dimming lights in your house in the earlier parts of the evening, which helps to stimulate sleepiness.
2. Go to bed and wake up at approximately the same time every day.
This helps signal to your body a regular time for sleeping. It’s no use trying to sleep in a lot on weekends. There is no way to make up for regular sleep loss during the week.
3. Keep the temperature in your house cool at night—maybe even cooler than you think it should be, like around 65 degrees. Your body temperature needs to drop at night for sleep, and a lower room temperature helps signal your brain that it’s time to sleep.
4. If you have trouble falling asleep, or wake in the night feeling restless, don’t stay in bed awake. That trains the brain that your bed is not a place for sleeping. Instead, get up and read a book under dim light in a different room. Don’t look at your computer or cell phone. When sleepiness returns, then go back to bed. Or if you don’t want to get out of bed, try meditating. Studies suggest it helps individuals fall asleep faster, and also improves sleep quality.
5. Don’t have caffeine late in the day or an alcohol-infused nightcap. Both of these interfere with sleep—either keeping you awake or stimulating frequent wake-ups during the night.
Sleep is the single most effective thing we can do to rest our brain and physical health each day. Atop of sleep, dreaming provides essential emotional first aid and a unique form of informational alchemy. If we wish to be as healthy, happy, and creative as possible, these are facts well worth waking up to.
Dream: why it is so important to make your dreams come true
“Dreaming is not harmful,” we have been repeating since childhood like a mantra. This attitude, unfortunately, remained with many in adulthood. Meanwhile, in difficult moments of emotional burnout and depression, the very cherished desire that a person carefully keeps in his heart saves. It doesn't matter if you secretly yearn for a skydiving or mini-vacation in the mountains, the main thing is to give yourself the opportunity to make this dream come true. We found the answer to the question of how it is right to dream so that everything comes true in the book by Elena Rezanova “It's the norm!” publishing house MIF.
We share an excerpt below.
How not to deal with dreams
Dreams only lead to the wrong place if you break safety rules. Yes, imagine, there are such people, and they, like the flight safety rules, are written - no, not in blood - they are written in the wake of mistakes and disasters.
A dream, even one that has been with you for ten years, is also a hypothesis. She needs to be checked. The main mistake is to dream for a long time, decide, then finally give up everything, burn bridges and start realizing. Exactly this was the story of Alexander, who dreamed of a restaurant for a long time and put everything on it. Sergey acted in the same way: he quit his job to become a writer, and after two years of honest (and fruitless) attempts, he felt himself in an even greater impasse.
We think that if we devote ourselves completely to our dream, only then will we have a great life. But as Elizabeth Gilbert so beautifully said in The Big Magic, the surest way to kill any dream is to make it pay its bills.
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Well". Liz herself maintained parallel sources of income for a long time, because she “did not want to burden her literary vocation and hang on it the responsibility to support me financially. There is nothing shameful about working. Another shameful thing is to scare off your own talent by demanding that you take care of yourself.
In the approach "dream - dare - win" the saddest outcome is the realization that you have come to the wrong place, and, as a result, disappointment in yourself and refusal to change in the future. The person appears to be thrown back. That's why it's a losing proposition.
Actually, in the approach "dream - be afraid - do nothing" there is even less good. Again a losing proposition.
And what is the winning one?
Implement! But wisely. Because any dream - even if it's a false insight or a viral dream - is a huge potential and an indication of what you are missing right now.
Unlived impressions and lost experience
It turns out that a dream (not even related to work) is the point from which changes can start.
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And this is a great alternative to walking in a vicious circle and underrealization. In my opinion, underrealization consists of two components: lost impressions and unlived meanings.
How to understand these components?
I offer two techniques to help you explore and fill the gaps in these resources.
Making up for missing impressions: the exercise "100 things worth doing while you're alive."
Make your own list. Most likely, these will be the very impressions that you are missing right now - inspiring bright moments shelved in anticipation of a brighter future. But even now they can become a source of a bright present. No delay! The list may include items that are difficult to implement (climb Machu Picchu or walk the red carpet in Cannes), and easy to do (go hiking with the kids on the weekend or attend a dessert-making master class).
Sometimes complex things just seem so. One listener of my lectures shared that she would like to one day feel like a soldier of Jane, but this is unrealistic, not to join the army. The next day, she was sent a link to Soldier Jane's Camp website, with a group of girls running through the mud on the front page, just as ordered. A ten-day program where you can feel like a soldier of Jane to the fullest.
Why dreams cannot be ignored
Once a dream has arisen, it cannot simply be ignored or put aside. Let me remind you: a dream is energy. It is bad if it circulates somewhere in a closed space, because from there it will begin to send signals, remind of itself and cause a feeling that something is missing.
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But if you understand your dreams and use them to learn right now to have a positive experience, you will gain a lot of useful things.
First, exit from the vicious circle.
You go to a new, unexplored space and try / test something there, while operating in a territory that is safe for yourself. Dreams are a wonderful test of the hypotheses I wrote about earlier. To test the dream of a restaurant, you can plan for a long time, get into debt and buy a restaurant, or you can get a job there on your next vacation. It will be the beginning of something new or just an interesting experience. Both are great.
Second, state change. You no longer remember about life with “extinguished headlights”, energy, drive are added, wings grow. And with them we can do a lot. After all, the feeling of flight and happiness is not a reward at the finish line (first success, then happiness) - it is a charge that gives us the strength to move forward (first happiness, then success).
Thirdly, is a way to know yourself and discover new facets. "You can't read a label while sitting inside a jar," wrote Steven Kotler and Jamie Weale in Stealing Fire.
New experience is the territory of discovery. Remember: after new exercises, muscles hurt that we did not know about.
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Fourth, is more complete implementation. It is unlikely that your unique and multifaceted abilities can be packaged into one thing. Our interests and potential are enough for several careers, we can implement them in parallel or sequentially. It is called differently: “portfolio-career”, “hybrid career”, “career-kaleidoscope”, but the meaning is the same - a combination. Surely you are familiar with the terms "scanners" by Barbara Sher and "multipotentials" by Emily Vapnick. So they call people who cannot find themselves in one thing. Many people think that this special category is different from traditional professionals, but over time I came to the conclusion that this is about us all. I have not heard from anyone: "I want to find one thing, unchanged, for the rest of my life.
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And finally, the fifth: you will feel even more fully that you are the author of your own life.
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Why is it so important to dream? 5 truths about dreams
A person begins to dream in early childhood - in the preschool period, when his imagination is actively formed and developed. Children's dreams are often illusory - they may not come true, but nevertheless, this does not bring disappointment to children, because they live in the current of the present time, and not in the future.
For them, there is a present moment, and a dream in it. They do not live in the future, but in the present.
An adult, mature person often denies himself such pleasure as a dream. And it’s completely in vain, because at this level of maturity, a dream can become the strongest charge of energy for its implementation. Why is it so important to dream? Let's look at 5 truths about dreams to make everything clear.
A dream is an image of reality.
And not what we see at the moment, but what it can become. Our brain is able to generate an image of the desired reality, and if we take it as a basis, then the dream will be transferred in temporary space, becoming a reality with the help of human efforts. Dreams based on human desires are like a project to build a house. At first, the architect (our mind) sees everything only as an image on paper (in the case of a dream, in the imagination), but in time everything materializes thanks to efforts. Therefore, it is important to dream, because our images of reality can be transferred and materialized if we only want to.
A dream is a charge of energy.
A dream not only forms an image of the desired reality. Thanks to her, a person who has accepted his dream and decided to materialize it receives a powerful boost of energy that just needs to be directed in the right direction so that everything becomes in reality the same as in a dream. A dream can fill you with inspiration for its realization. This is not just an image that is out of reach. If a dream does not give rise to energy, then it is just an illusion.
A dream makes a person active!
This is also an important function of the human dream - it gives strength to become active. But, not just active, but focused on results. Dreaming is useful for everyone who wants to see themselves as active and productive, has no right to deny themselves dreams, because they produce such an effect!
A dream helps to resist the pressure of circumstances!
Every person who at least once set himself a significant goal faced the pressure of circumstances that were quite difficult to resist.
