Have you ever had a crazy dream and wake up the next day trying to recall different facts? Why do we dream what we dream and most importantly, does it mean something?  Our dreams generally occur 80% of the time in the stage of sleep called REM sleep. REM also known as rapid eye movement sleep is actually the second category of sleep that we fall in to, the first is known as non-REM. REM is about 20-25% of a nights sleep, and is the most important form of sleep that we can obtain. During REM sleep our body appears completely normal, our eyes dart around in our head, and all of our large muscles becomes paralyzed.

During REM sleep we are continually dreaming. The dreams that we tend to have entail more story like quality which then are more visual, vivid, and emotional vs non-REM dreams. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that dreaming at night is actually a stress reliever, it can “take some of the edge off from difficult memories” and act almost as a therapy.

While researching different topics of what dreams may mean, I came across an interesting article that briefly describes a main focus of a dream and then relates it to a meaning. For example, if you have a dream about babies it could possibly represent a new project happening in your life, or a potential growth in a certain area of your life.

A study was conducted on every day thoughts and experiences and how they affect our dreams.  Thirty five adults were divided into two different groups which each viewed emotional images two different times but 12 hours apart, while a MRI scanner was measuring any type of brain activity happening within. One group viewed the images in the morning then again later in the evening while staying awake in between both exposures to the images. The other group viewed the first set at night then went to sleep, woke up the next morning and viewed the second set. The people who slept in between seeing the images had significantly less of an impact from the images than the ones who stayed up the whole time. These results had indicated that dreaming decreased the stress and emotional effect of the images. They also had found that during the sleep “certain electrical activity patterns decreased, showing that reduced levels of stress neurochemicals in the brain soothed emotional reactions to the previous day’s experiences.” -Yasmin Anwar

If you would like to interpret your own dreams, I would suggest keeping your own dream journal next to your bed at night and writing down anything you remember anytime you wake up. The next morning you can go through it and maybe certain words will trigger what the rest of the dream  was about and you can put some interesting conclusions together for yourself.

Sources:

DreamsCloud. “14 Common Dreams and Symbols and Why They’re Important.” The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 13 Jan. 2014. Web. 08 Oct. 2015.

“Dream Sleep Takes Sting out of Painful Memories.” Berkeley News. N.p., 23 Nov. 2011. Web. 08 Oct. 2015.