Dreaming

Dreaming, which occurs during the rapid eye movement (REM) sleep cycle, promotes creativity and creative problem-solving. At this time, new information is integrated into older data and novel connections between the old and the new are built, allowing new solutions to emerge. Dreaming is also important for psychological well-being and can be likened to overnight therapy, as it eases the emotional sting of painful experiences.

Sleep is required for:

• Maintaining metabolic homeostasis in your brain;
• Maintaining biological homeostasis;
• Removal of toxic waste from your brain through the glymphatic system.

During REM sleep in general, and dreaming specifically, recently learned information is integrated together with a catalog of autobiographical data from previous experiences, building novel connections between the old and the new. Non-REM sleep and REM sleep appear to contribute to creative problem-solving in different albeit complementary ways. It seems the non-REM sleep portion known as slow-wave sleep (which is vastly different from the light phase non-REM sleep that makes up most of the night) is a time during which your brain replays memories that are thematically related in one way or another and organizes new information into useful categories or thematic schemas.

Dreaming is essentially a time when we all become flagrantly psychotic. The reasons for this rather extreme-sounding diagnosis are fivefold:

1. When dreaming, you see things that aren’t there, so you’re basically hallucinating
2. While in the dream, you believe things that cannot possibly be true, which means you’re delusional
3. While dreaming, you are confused about time, place and the identity of the people involved, so you’re suffering from disorientation
4. Emotions fluctuate wildly while dreaming, a condition known as being affectively labile
5. Lastly, upon waking, you forget most if not all of your dream experience, so you’re suffering from amnesia
6. Any one of these, if experienced while awake, would be cause to seek psychiatric treatment. During sleep, however, these states appear to be part of completely normal biological and psychological processes.

Otto Loewi, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his discovery that the primary language of nerve cell communication is chemical, not electrical, as previously thought. The elegantly simple scientific experiment that led to Loewi’s award-winning discovery came to him in a dream.

1. Sleep increases, by about 250 percent, your ability to gain insights that would otherwise remain elusive. Tests also reveal that simply dreaming about performing an activity increases your actual physical performance tenfold. As old and new memories are integrated to form a new whole, new possible futures are also imagined. (This is what you actually perceive as “the action” of your dream.) The sum total of these processes allows you to see the meaning of life events.

2. You can think of dream sleep as emotional first aid. It’s not time that heals all wounds, but it’s time during dream sleep that provides you with emotional convalescence.

1. Sleeping

1. Using psychological techniques

1. Excessive dreaming during sleep