Title : Dreams could be as vital to life as breathing, scientists claim
link : Dreams could be as vital to life as breathing, scientists claim
Dreams could be as vital to life as breathing, scientists claim
Is being 'dream deprived' making you miserable? Dreams could be as vital to life as breathing, scientists claim, and learning to remember them is the first step to a healthier mind
- From the Greeks to Freud, mankind has always been curious about dreams
- We are only now starting to recognise their importance for our health
- Harnessing the power of dreams is a skill anyone can learn
We’ve all been there. Tossing and turning through a sleepless night, anxiety levels rising as the hours slide by. In fact, insomnia affects a third of UK adults on a regular basis.
We spend millions on sleep aids and remedies, and yet the more obsessed we become, the more we worry. With good reason, too.
We know that a good night’s rest reduces anxiety, keeps us focused and even helps to prevent heart disease and certain cancers. And yet sleep scientists are only just beginning to appreciate that dreaming, too, plays a key role in providing those benefits.
From the ancient Greeks to Sigmund Freud, mankind has long pondered the significance of dreams. I first became fascinated by them as a student and have spent the past three years researching their power.
Insomnia affects a third of UK adults on a regular basis and millions are spent on sleep aids and remedies in the UK
But only now are we, as a society, starting to recognise their vital importance to our health.
Some scientists believe that dreaming is as fundamental to human life as breathing.
Harnessing the power of dreams all starts with learning how to remember them. And the good news is, it’s a skill that anyone can acquire…
Why ‘sleeping on it’ really does work
Dreams are an essential part of our body’s in-built mechanism for maintenance and repair. But they are crucial, too, to our mental health, which is why dream deprivation can be associated with depression and anxiety.
They help us learn new skills, find answers to complicated problems and process stressful situations so we can deal with them calmly. They are like subconscious homework, repeating and refining what we’ve learned during the day, so we get better at it, even in our sleep.
The oft-repeated advice that we should ‘sleep on it’ when wrestling with a dilemma is rooted in hard science.
One dream researcher gave 500 students copies of brain-teasers and instructions not to look at them until before bed, when they were to spend 15 minutes trying to solve the problems.
In the morning they wrote down whatever dreams they could remember and tried the riddles again.
The first puzzle was a sequence of letters: O, T, T, F, F with the students asked to predict how the series continued.
One student dreamed about strolling through an art gallery counting the pictures on the wall: ‘One, two, three, four, five.’ When he came to the places where the sixth and seventh paintings should have been, he found only vacant frames.
In the morning he realised that the letters represent the first letters used in spelling out the numerical sequence. S for six and S for seven was – of course – the continuation of the pattern. In all, the researcher found that of 1,148 dream reports, 87 referred to the problem and seven contained the answer.
Dreams are an essential part of our body’s in-built mechanism for maintenance and repair and are crucial for mental health
Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett tried a more personal experiment. She asked students to choose a problem in their life and, every night for a week, to spend 15 minutes thinking about it before bed.
They recorded their dreams in the morning. Over the course of the week, half dreamed about their problem and a quarter came up with a solution in their sleep.
When we dream we allow ourselves to consider ideas we might otherwise dismiss. When we’re conscious, we tend to be inhibited by society’s conventions.
But in dreams, our brains are working in a wider network of associations, drawing on memories from the past as well as recent experiences, turning up long buried thoughts and truths that we might, while conscious, try to quash.
If we ignore our dreams, we waste a real opportunity.
On average, we spend a third of our lives asleep, and about 20 to 25 per cent of that time in REM (rapid eye movement sleep, which is one of the five distinct phases of sleep through which the brain cycles at night).
And this is the phase of sleep where most dreaming takes place. So if you live until you’re 75, you’ll spend five years dreaming. And if we know how to remember and understand our dreams, that’s five years of solving problems, learning skills, and dealing with stresses.
In fact, many sleep experts now think improving your ability to recollect and interpret dreams is key to a happier, more tranquil existence.
Dreams can help us cope with universal struggles, such as coming to terms with death. Mourning is messy and individual, but for most people, the work of grieving continues in sleep. In vivid, unforgettable dreams, the dead come back to us.
In a 2014 study of nearly 300 mourners at a New York hospice, 58 per cent could recall at least one dream about the person who had died. Although they were not always pleasant, the dreams usually helped mourners accept their loss, led to heightened feeling of spirituality and an overall sense of well-being.
And dreaming is vital to our physical health, too. Animals deprived of REM sleep suffer many of the same symptoms as animals that aren’t allowed to sleep at all. Rats die after about four to six weeks with REM, but after only two to three if denied sleep altogether.
Tricks that can help you remember your dreams
For many, simply deciding you want to remember dreams is enough and reminding yourself of this intention as you fall asleep can yield a wealth of memories in the morning.
It helps not to drink too much before bed, since alcohol suppresses REM sleep.
The easiest, most effective way to boost dream recall is to keep a dream journal and write in it first thing in the morning.
Do it as soon as you become conscious. You can write your dreams down or record them into a voice recorder – before making coffee, before looking at your phone, before getting out of bed; even, if possible, before properly opening your eyes.
Any bodily motion or engagement with the physical world can erase your memories from the night.
If these methods aren’t working, you could try resuscitating a memory by re-enacting the poses you held in your sleep.
We pass through a series of body postures as we sleep – you might fall asleep on your side, but wake up on your back with an arm hanging down the side of the bed, for example.
Going through each of these positions can help unlock memories of the dream that occurred during your sleep.
Another approach is to set your alarm to go off at the end of an REM stage of sleep.
Each sleep cycle – in which we pass between Non-Rapid Eye Movement, when our eyes are still, and REM, when our eyeballs flick left and right and our most vivid dreams occur – lasts around 90 minutes. REM comes at the end.
When people are woken during REM sleep, they can usually remember their dreams. It’s best, then, to time the alarm to go off at the end of an REM stage – so by a multiple of 90 minutes after going to sleep.
If you turn off your light at 10.45pm, and are normally asleep by 11pm, try setting your alarm for 6.30am or 8am.
If you’re still struggling to remember anything at all, there is one last trick you can try.
Plan to wake up at strategic intervals throughout the night, towards the end of REM phases.
So if you sleep for eight hours, you might set an alarm to go off after three REM cycles (about four and a half hours into the night). Every time you wake up – even in the middle of the night – you should take notes.
Even brief bullet points from the middle of the night can trigger detailed memories of your dream the next day.
What your nightmares are trying to tell you
We’ve all had dreams about turning up to work naked, getting lost on the way to a job interview, or sleeping through an alarm on the day of an important meeting.
These dreams are unsettling – but one theory says they’re actually our mind’s way of helping us prepare for similar pitfalls in real life.
If we’ve dreamed about sleeping through an alarm, we’ll probably set two; if we’re worried about getting somewhere on time, we’re more likely to plan a route in advance.
Still, most of the emotions we experience in dreams are negative. The most common ones include fear, helplessness, anxiety and guilt – and nightmares can be disabling. Unfortunately, there’s no failsafe way to tame them. Various drugs have been prescribed over the years, but they have proved unreliable and have side effects.
But one way to tackle nightmares is to become conscious, so you can wake yourself up or even banish your dream foes. This is known as lucid dreaming. When people lucid dream they become aware they are dreaming and can take some control over the plot, making it easier to capitalise on all the benefits that dreams offer us.
The dream ‘directors’ who do it as a hobby
Most people experience a lucid dream at some point in their lives, but only about ten to 20 per cent of us have them regularly. For some in that minority, lucid dreaming is so pleasurable it becomes a hobby.
Those who master it can dream about specific problems, probe the recesses of their own unconscious and practise new skills.
Like much else in life, it takes time and effort.
Good dream recall is one of the prerequisites for lucid dreaming, as is a hyper-awareness of our surroundings. According to Stephen LaBerge, a world expert on the subject, aspiring lucid dreamers should make a habit of asking themselves at regular intervals throughout the day whether they are awake or asleep. Because daytime routines work their way into dreams, they should pose the same question in their sleep.
Hopefully, they will respond that they are asleep, and a lucid dream will commence.
LaBerge has used this technique to successfully teach thousands of people to become lucid dreamers.
Other tricks to induce lucid dreams include meditating before bed and – as with remembering your dreams – waking up at strategic points in the night.
The more time you spend thinking about dreams, the more you’ll unite your sleeping and waking worlds, bringing conscious thought into dreams.
Unravel the symbols to unlock your secrets
If you go online, you can find websites claiming to explain your dreams – they’ll tell you that losing your teeth means you’ve experienced a recent hardship, and that sort of thing.
To interpret our dreams properly however, we have to understand what different concepts mean to us.
For one person a cat might represent cosiness and home, while for another it might represent a malevolent force.
Some people find that discussing their dreams with a therapist, or even just with friends, can help them unravel the symbols within.
If dreams are so important, why do they often seem incomprehensible? Garbled metaphors and disjointed images are more interesting to think about – mysteries are always more compelling than straightforward lessons.
Because while there is an amazing range in how different people dream, there is a surprising constancy in each individual’s dreams over the course of a life – we each express our fears and fixations in our own vocabulary, returning to the same symbols and characters over the years.
Once we learn the language of our own dreams, we can recognise when something shifts.
We can draw hope from signs that we are on the mend, such as when a pattern changes or when we start to assert ourselves more.
We might even be able to identify problems we haven’t consciously recognised before.
Research has linked suicidal thoughts to a loss of dreaming or a drop in dream recall, and dreaming about traumatic events can help us heal, while artists, musicians and writers from Beethoven to Dali credit dreams with some of their most famous creations.
© Alice Robb, 2019
Adapted from Why We Dream, by Alice Robb, published by Picador, priced £20. Offer price £16 (20 per cent discount, with free p&p) until April 14. Order at mailshop.co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640. Spend £30 on books and get free premium delivery.
Thus Article Dreams could be as vital to life as breathing, scientists claim
You are now reading the article Dreams could be as vital to life as breathing, scientists claim with the link address https://coneknews.blogspot.com/2019/04/dreams-could-be-as-vital-to-life-as.html
0 Response to "Dreams could be as vital to life as breathing, scientists claim"
Post a Comment