Do you Dream while Sleeping? Most people dream when they sleep. Neuroscience and psychological studies have unraveled the reality and science of dreams. According to researchers, dreams are the mystifying and fascinating aspects of sleep. However, the clarification about the reality of dream while sleeping is still not well known. There is a need for more work to resolve the fundamental question, Why Do We Dream?
This is the day’s topic to find the true basis for dreaming while sleeping because, despite advanced scientific knowledge, this question is still a subject of significant debate.
If you are trying to find out simple meanings or explanations about the purpose of dreams, you will have to do more research. This blog article will let you know the recent advancements in this regard. You can learn about the types of dreams and their content, their effects on sleep, the potential effects of nightmares, the basics of dreams, and the steps that you may take to have sweet dreams when you sleep.
What Do You Mean by Dream While Sleeping?
Dreams are imaginary thoughts or feelings that occur when you sleep and in this dreaming procedure, all of your senses are involved. The dreams you see while sleeping may be of different colors. Some people also dream in black and white and blind people have more dreams with strong effects of the sound, taste, and colors, than ordinary people. According to studies, dreams contents are of various types and vary from person to person but there are some general properties of dreaming including:
- Dreaming is an involuntary action.
- Dreams provoke your emotions with high intensity.
- Dream content is closely linked with the elements of your waking life.
- The contents of dreams are mostly coherent and illogical.
- Dream is a first-person perspective.
- Dreaming content includes the people around you, who interact with you directly or indirectly.
Although these features are not fixed as universal truths, studies support these properties to some extent in most cases of dreaming while sleeping.
Why Do You Dream?
Sleep experts often go through a debate about why we dream. Different theories are discussed to find out the purpose of dreaming when you sleep. The main purposes according to researchers and sleep experts are:
Incidental Activity of Your Brain: According to this theory, dreaming is a meaningless activity of the brain that has no purpose. It is just a by-product of the brain.
Emotional Processing: The brain manages your moods and emotions through different techniques and dreaming is the ability of your brain to engage and rehearse your feelings in different imagined contexts. The brain performs this activity as a part of its job.
Memory Development: When you dream, it is associated with consolidation of memory. Dreaming is recognized as an important cognitive function of your brain that not only develops your memory but also strengthens your informational recall.
Instant Replay: The brain usually reviews and analyzes recent events while dreaming is a form of distorted instant replay through which events are analyzed.
Mental Housekeeping: The cleaning phase of the brain is also recognized as dreaming because the brain straightens up or cleanses away unnecessary or partial information through dreams.
However, experiments to discover what is happening in the brain during sleep are continuing. Despite all the work and experiments by sleep experts and neuroscience experts, it is not possible to conclusively prove any theory for why do we dream.
When Do You Dream?
You can dream during any stage of sleep and have estimated duration to be around two hours per night. But at the (REM) rapid eye movement stage, your dreams may be more prolific and intense. During this stage, your brain ramps up considerably as compared to the non-REM stages of sleep. This feature helps to explain different types of dreams during various stages of sleep. During the REM sleep stage, your dreams are more fantastical and vivid but usually, they become bizarre even though they involve elements of waking life.
On the other hand, during non-REM stages, your dreams tend to involve coherent content that is based on your memories and thoughts grounded in a specific time and place. You would have observe that the dreaming tends to be concentrated in the hours before waking up which means the majority of REM sleep happens during the second half of a normal sleep duration. It explains the fact that REM sleep is not distributed evenly through the night.
Do Your Dreams Have Meanings?
Interpreting dreams and finding out their meanings are matters of considerable controversy. There are different views of psychologists that explain the truth of dreaming. According to a group of psychologists, dreams are a way to gain insight into a person’s everyday life and psyche. Another group of experts believe that the dream contents are too inconsistent or bewildering to rely on their meaning.
All experts agree that dreams usually involve content that links back to the waking experience although this content is often misrepresented or changed. Let’s try to comprehend the concept with an example!
Whenever you dream while sleeping, after waking up you describe your dream by referring to those people who are recognized by you even if their appearance was distorted in your dream. Sometimes it is obvious from your dreams that the meanings of real-life details somehow appear in dreams, though it is far from settled. The “continuity hypothesis” represents an idea that explains the reality of dreaming. The theory states that dreams and waking life are intertwined with one another and thus involve overlapping themes and content.
On the other hand, the “ discontinuity hypothesis” suggests that thinking during wakefulness and dreams are structurally distinct.
But it is hard to conclude, based on existing evidence, that there is a definitive way to interpret and understand the meanings of dreams in waking life. You must keep in mind that the analysis of dreams is a component of psychological or personal self-reflection.
Types of Dreams
Dreams are of various types including Vivid dreams and Lucid dreams.
The former involves realistic and clear dream content while the latter one occurs when you are in a dream while being actively aware that you are dreaming.
Bad dreams are another type of dream that involves distressing and bothersome content while Recurring dreams are composed of the same imagery repeating in multiple dreams over time.
Sometimes, normal dreams also have certain types of content that are identifiable. Most commonly, people dream about some common themes in dreams like being chased, flying, unable to find a safe place, or falling.
Dreams VS. Nightmares
Dreams are some thoughts or feelings that your mind hears or sees while sleeping. They are often linked with your real-life incidents but sometimes get strange. While dreaming you may not believe that you are awake. This tends to happen during a false awakening.
A nightmare is a horrible dream that causes you to end your sleep and wake you up from sleep. These are considered frightening and extremely unpleasant events that your mind sees during sleep.
So the definition clears that scary, threatening, or bothersome dreams are referred to as nightmares. These are normal and usually interfere with your peaceful sleep causing bad moods, irritability and impaired thinking during daytime activities.
Do Dreams Affect Your Sleep?
Dreaming is a usual part of a healthy sleep pattern and researchers believe that this is completely a normal activity that usually doesn’t disturb your sleep and has no negative impacts on your cognitive ability.
But nightmares are exceptional cases of dreaming. Because they can cause disturbance during your sleep and may become problematic as they involve awakening during the sleep. Stress-causing dreams may cause a lack of sleep and affect your sleep quality. You may get affected by insufficient sleep. In such conditions, whenever you fall asleep, the prior deprivation of sleep induces REM sleep rebound that worsens your nightmares. This worse condition affects your sleep cycle and causes a chronic sleep problem called insomnia.
So people who have nightmares more than once a week, must have a proper sleep schedule or try to change their way of thinking. Talk to a sleep expert to manage fragmented sleep and daytime sleepiness. Sleep specialist doctors will review the symptoms to identify the potential causes and treatments for their disturbed sleep patterns.
How can you remember your Dreams?
If you want to interpret your dreams, the first step is to remember these dreams. The ability to recall dreams varies from person to person and mostly depends on age. Experts recommend that there is no guaranteed way to recall your dreams but still, some tips to recall them are here for you:
Avoid an Abrupt Awakening: A peaceful awakening in the morning may support a slow snap awake and you come out of the dream slowly, making it easier to recall the details of the dream. Avoiding an abrupt awakening will save you from a quick snap awake. Don’t set a sharp sound as alarm.
First, Think about Your Dream after Waking Up: Forgetting the dreams is a matter of just a blink of an eye. So you must make them remember after waking up. Even before saying good morning or going to the washroom, close your eyes and try to replay the dream that you have seen during sleep.
Use an App On Hand or a Journal to Track Your Dream Content: To keep your dreams in your memory, you must have a quick method to record them. Even if you wake up in the middle of the night due to a dream, keep a pen and journal near you to record the details of your dream. For this purpose, you can also use an app on your smartphone to create an organized dream journal.
How to Stop Nightmares?
If you are afraid of going to sleep due to frequent nightmares you should talk to your doctor. Doctors may help diagnose if it is a simple nightmare disorder or any other severe condition. Treatment of nightmare disorder is essential because low-quality sleep can disturb your cognitive ability and you may feel difficulty in performing your routine tasks during the daytime due to lack of sleep during the night.
Its treatment needs to overcome the negative thoughts provoked by anxiety, stress, or despair. It starts with talk therapy in which doctors try to diminish negative thinking from your mind that is the main cause of worsened nightmares.
They attempt different types of talk therapy to reduce fears, stress, and worries. Through talk therapy, you may re-frame your emotional reaction to negative imagery.The next step is to improve sleep hygiene. Sleep hygiene includes the environment of your bedroom including temperature, bedding material, light intensity, and calmness. Good sleep hygiene can improve your sleep quality and you can have a sound sleep even if you have nightmares. Some crucial tips for a healthy sleep include:
Follow A Regular Sleep Schedule: Your sleep-wake cycle has a great impact on your life activities. So Take care of your circadian rhythm. Follow a regular sleep schedule daily. Go to sleep at the same time and awake at the same time including weekends or holidays.
Block Out Distractions in the Bedroom: Try to make your bedroom a peaceful place by setting your bedroom temperature at a cooler degree. Use curtains to block lights coming from outside. Maintain a quiet environment or use eye masks. Keep your pillows, and bedding soft and cozy. These practices will invite you to have a good sleep and you may easily avoid awakening for no reason.
Avoid Mobile or TV Content: Before going to bed, stop watching movies or content that causes anxiety or fear in your mind. Avoid mobile phones. Keep it on silent mode. These practices will help to prevent negative thinking.
Limit Caffeinated Drinks or Products before Going to Bed: Caffeinated drinks or alcohol cause concentrated REM sleep in the night, increasing the risk of nightmares. They are strong stimulants and can throw off your sleep cycle and make your mind active when you want to doze off.
Wind Down Each Night: Add physical activity or workouts into your daily routine because doing exercise during the daytime helps you sleep better at night. But don’t do it near your bedtime. In the evening just try to keep your body and mind relaxed by deep breathing or light stretching.
Conclusion
Dream is a way your brain adapts to process the emotions you experience in the day. Dreams provide you with an effective way of emotional release, permitting you to confront the feelings you might have suppressed.
Humans sleep at night and have dreams. Even though dreaming while sleeping is a universal truth, scientists are still striving to understand the phenomenon. We have no exact information about what happens when we close our eyes at night.
According to some theories, humans spend at least two hours a night in dreaming, yet they don’t remember most of the dreams.
If anyone becomes successful in remembering dreams, it will be fun for them but sometimes the dreams are scary and unsettling. That’s a nightmare. That disturbs the sleep pattern and quality. These nightmares can be controlled by limiting negative thinking.
