Dream On

Is all that we see or seem

But a dream within a dream?

—Edgar Allan Poe

In a normal year, 30-40% of adults in the U.S. report they’ve struggled with insomnia. This past year was hardly normal. In fact, the term coronasomnia was coined as a result of of this oh-so-common malady.

If you’ve had difficulty sleeping lately, you know how maddening this can be. Maybe like me, you used various substances to assist you in that effort. Perhaps these sleep aids helped you fall or stay asleep. The downside is that many of these substances—whether prescribed or not—can be addictive and may mess up your REM (rapid eye-movement) sleep. REM, schmem, you may say—at least I’m getting some shut eye.

Not long ago, I noticed I wasn’t dreaming and thought I might be dreaming but just not remembering my dreams. Research provides another explanation. Most of our dreaming occurs during REM sleep. What’s more, REM sleep is needed to keep the brain healthy. Lack of REM sleep has also been linked to dementia. Ok, now the researchers got my attention.

The Benefit of Being Chased

Keeping our wits about us as we age is certainly an important objective but being able to cope with current stressors is also a worthwhile goal. Here’s where dreaming plays an important function.  As unsettling as those anxiety dreams are about being chased or not being able to deliver what you promised, they serve a purpose.

Through brain imaging, researchers from the University of Geneva and the University of Wisconsin identified the areas of the brain that were activated when people experienced fear in their dreams. The researchers discovered that when those people were awoken, the brain areas that manage emotions reacted to a variety of fear-inducing situations significantly better.

The researchers concluded that experiencing frightening situations in our sleep enables us to respond to fear and anxiety more effectively in our wakeful lives. The researchers distinguished between moderately fearful dreams and nightmares that disrupt sleep, however, citing that nightmares that cause us to wake up are not beneficial for our well-being.

Lucid Dreaming

Analyzing one’s dreams for therapeutic purposes was popularized by Sigmund Freud in the early 1900’s. Although folks have been working with their dreams for centuries and various psychotherapeutic modalities have used dream therapy, the medical community has been slow to embrace its helpfulness in treating anxiety disorders. Nevertheless, we continue to be fascinated by our dreams and the lessons we can learn from them.

Lucid dreaming (LD) is not a new concept; it was first introduced in 1913 but remains controversial. Simply put, it’s a state of dreaming that allows you to exert free choice. Although you’re dreaming, you can manipulate the outcome. Some scientists refer to LD as an “in between” state of being not awake but not fully asleep.

How LD works is that if someone is chasing you in your dream, you can tell your pursuer to go away; or if you’re dreaming about losing something vital (such as your teeth, your car or your wallet), you can reassure yourself that you still have all those items; or if you’re immersed in water and unable to swim, you can change the outcome so that you’re floating effortlessly.

The benefit of LD is that it may facilitate problem-solving and reduce anxiety; the danger is that it can be exhausting if you wake up multiple times during the night or force yourself to stay half-asleep. Lucid or not, acknowledging that our anxiety dreams serve a useful function is sleep-inducing in itself.

Segmented Sleep

One of the challenges for those of us who sleep in short increments (otherwise known as maintenance insomnia) is that our modern society isn’t structured to adapt to an erratic sleep schedule. Unlike contemporary men and women, our cave-dwelling cousins weren’t expected to sleep through the night. They ceased working at dusk, slept for a few hours, got up and tended the fire or performed another chore and, perhaps, fell back asleep a few hours later.

Even after cave dwellers became home dwellers, some evidence exists that segmented sleeping was still the norm. By the Industrial Revolution, however, our sleep regimes changed. Factory schedules required that we compress our sleep into a single cycle so we could clock in at the prescribed time.

That expectation continues today. We’re expected to sleep continuously through the night and be ready to meet the day after 8 hours or so. Fretting over not sleeping through the night, then, is a rather recent worry in our evolution.

Very possibly our ancestors were more in tune with their natural circadian rhythms than we are and more aware of their dreams. What we know, for sure, is that stressing over sleep and artificially inducing it has its drawbacks. For now, I’m going to follow the lead of my cave cousins. Although I don’t plan to nestle into a pile of straw on the floor, I’m trying to accept my rhythms and learn from my dreams.