Dreams

  Dreams can be entertaining, disturbing, or downright bizarre. We all dream, even if we don't remember it the next day.

What Are Dreams?

Dreams are basically stories and images that our mind creates while we sleep. They can be vivid. They can make you feel happy, sad, or scared. And they may seem confusing or perfectly rational.

Dreams can happen at any time during sleep. But you have your most vivid dreams during a phase called REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, when your brain is most active. Some experts say we dream at least four to six times a night.

Nightmares

A nightmare is a bad dream. It’s common in both children and adults. Often, it happens because of:

• Stress, conflict, and fear
• Trauma
• Emotional problems
• Medication or drug use
• Illness

Why Do We Dream?

There are many theories about why we dream, but no one knows for sure. Some researchers say dreams have no purpose or meaning. Others say we need dreams for our mental, emotional, and physical health.

How Long Do Dreams Last?

REM sleep lasts only a few minutes early in the night but gets longer as we sleep. Later in the night, it might last more than 30 minutes. So you might spend half an hour in a single dream.

Why Are Dreams Hard to Remember?

Researchers don't know for sure why dreams are easily forgotten. Maybe we’re designed to forget our dreams because if we remembered them all, we might not be able to tell dreams from real memories.

Also, it could be harder to remember dreams because during REM sleep, our body may shut down systems in our brain that create memories. We may remember only those dreams that happen just before we wake, when certain brain activities are turned back on.

Some say it’s not that our minds forget dreams but that we don't know how to access them. Dreams may be stored in our memory, waiting to be recalled. This may explain why you suddenly remember a dream later in the day: Something may have happened to trigger the memory.

Remind yourself to remember. If you make a decision to remember your dreams, you’re more likely to remember them in the morning. Before you go to sleep, remind yourself that you want to remember your dream.

Fast facts on dreams

We may not remember dreaming, but everyone is thought to dream between 3 and 6 times per night

It is thought that each dream lasts between 5 to 20 minutes.

Around 95 percent of dreams are forgotten by the time a person gets out of bed.

Dreaming can help you learn and develop long-term memories.

Blind people dream more with other sensory components compared with sighted people.

Interpretations:

What goes through our minds just before we fall asleep could affect the content of our dreams.

For example, during exam time, students may dream about course content. People in a relationship may dream of their partner. Web developers may see programming code.

These circumstantial observations suggest that elements from the everyday re-emerge in dream-like imagery during the transition from wakefulness to sleep.

Memories:

The concept of ‘repression’ dates back to Freud. Freud maintained that undesirable memories could become suppressed in the mind. Dreams ease repression by allowing these memories to be reinstated.

A study showed that sleep does not helpTrusted Source people forget unwanted memories. Instead, REM sleep might even counteract the voluntary suppression of memories, making them more accessible for retrieval.

Two types of temporal effects characterize the incorporation of memories into dreams:

the day-residue effect, involving immediate incorporations of events from the preceding day

the dream-lag effect, involving incorporations delayed by about a week.

Dream lag:

Dream-lag is when the images, experiences, or people that emerge in dreams are images, experiences, or people you have seen recently, perhaps the previous day or a week before.

The idea is that certain types of experiences take a week to become encoded into long-term memory, and some of the images from the consolidation process will appear in a dream.

Events experienced while awake are said to feature in 1 to 2 percent of dream reports, although 65 percent of dream reports reflect aspects of recent waking life experiences.

Dreams and the senses:

Dreams were evaluated in people experiencing different types of headache. Results showed people with migraine had increased frequency of dreams involving taste and smell.

This may suggest Trusted Source that the role of some cerebral structures, such as amygdala and hypothalamus, are involved in migraine mechanisms as well as in the biology of sleep and dreaming.

Music in dreams is rarely studied in scientific literature. However, in a study of 35 professional musicians and 30 non-musicians, the musicians experiencedTrusted Source twice as many dreams featuring music, when compared with non-musicians.

Musical dream frequency was related to the age of commencement of musical instruction but not to the daily load of musical activity. Nearly half of the recalled music was non-standard, suggesting that original music can be created in dreams.