The Science Of Dreams

Routinely Psychotic: REM-Sleep Dreaming

  • REM sleep accounts for the hallucinogenic, emotional , and bizarre experiences with a rich narrative.
  • REM sleep is a state characterized by strong activation in visual, motor, emotional, and autobiographical memory regions of the brain, yet a relative deactivation in regions that control rational thought.
  • MRI scans be used to predict with significant accuracy the content of your dreams by matching images of brain activity to baseline templates.
  • Dreams are not a wholesale replay of our waking lives.
  • Daytime emotions, however, do have some influence over the emotional themes of our dreams.

Dreaming As Overnight Therapy

  • REM sleep helps us divorce emotion from experience. We can therefore learn and usefully recall salient life events without being crippled by the emotional baggage that those painful experiences originally carried.
  • Dreaming about difficult life events helps people gain clinical resolution from their despair.
  • Like a master piano tuner, REM sleep readjusts the brain’s emotional instrument at night to pitch-perfect precision.

Dream Creativity And Dream Control

  • Sleep builds connections between distantly related informational elements that are not obvious in the light of waking day.
  • Relational memory processing receives an accelerated boost from REM sleep.
  • Like an insightful interviewer, dreaming takes the approach of interrogating our recent autobiographical experience and skillfully positioning it within the context of past experiences and accomplishments, building a rich tapestry of meaning.
  • Lucid dreaming is possible. Some people can control when and what they dream while they are dreaming.



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