Sleep is such an important part of our daily lives, yet we don't really pay much attention to it. We wake up, do all we need to do throughout the day and then back to sleep we go. Do we ever really think in depth about sleeping? No, it just happens. So why do we sleep? Why can't we go through our day without spending a certain amount of hours sleeping? What would happen if we didn't sleep?
Sleep has quite a large impact on how we function. Sleeping allows us to recuperate after all the activities we've done throughout the day. It gives us a chance to relax. Sleep plays a very important role on our brain development. We need it to maintain normal levels of psychological skills like our memory, speech, creative and flexible thinking. If we didn't sleep, we wouldn't be able to function properly. Our attention span would shorten noticeably, it would be very difficult to concentrate, and we’d be forgetful, grumpy and very dazed. That's what happens when you don't sleep. So what happens when you do sleep?
There are four different stages of sleep; light sleep, true sleep and two stages of deep sleep. During light sleep, we are asleep but awake at the same time. Our muscle activity is slowing down and that's when we may twitch at times. During this stage, we can be awakened very easily. Any slight noise or little movement could wake us. Within only ten minutes of that stage, we reach the true sleep stage. This stage lasts about twenty minutes. Your heart rate slows down, as well as your breathing pattern. This counts as the largest part of human sleeping time. This is followed by the last two stages, deep sleep. In the first stage of deep sleep there are delta waves produced by the brain. Delta waves have high amplitude and low frequency. At this point, your heart rate and breathing are at their lowest levels. The next stage contains limited muscle activity and rhythmic breathing. This is the stage where some children experience night terrors, bed wetting or even sleep walking. If one is awakened during this stage, you do not adjust right away and are feeling quite groggy. You'll be disoriented for several minutes after waking up.
There is also REM sleep. Which is rapid eye movement during your sleep. This happens about seventy to ninety minutes after you fall asleep. Three to five REM episodes occur throughout the night. We may not be conscious but our mind is very active. Believe it or not, it's often more active than when we are awake. This is when most dreams occur. Our breathing rate and blood pressure rise and our eyes dart around. Our bodies are practically paralyzed. Many believe this is nature's way of holding us back from acting out our dreams. All these stages begin again after you've experienced REM sleep.
With sleep, come dreams. Which are often pushed aside. Once again, part of our every day life that we don’t pay much attention to. Some people pay a lot of attention to their dreams, as others just pass right by them. Some believe that dreams have meaning. So what are dreams? Why do we dream? Do they mean anything?
Dreams are said to be the experience of visualized images, sounds, or other sensations during sleep. The things that happen in your dreams are most likely not able to happen in reality and are not usually controlled by the dreamer. There’s only one exception, which is lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming is when a dreamer realizes that they are dreaming, and is sometimes able to change the reality around them in the dream. Dreamers can experience very strong emotions when dreaming. Frightening or upsetting dreams are called nightmares.
The absolute reason we dream isn’t quite known yet but there has been some tests done which give us at least some information towards it. There are two sets of ideas on why we sleep: physiological and psychological.
Physiological deals with how the body works. Some scientists have suggested that maybe we dream to exercise our brains. Messages are constantly moving among all your brain cells to keep you moving, digesting, thinking…etc when you’re awake. So when you’re sleeping, dreams are exercising the pathways between all the brain cells. To help this make sense, studies have shown that your brain waves during REM sleep are a lot like your brain waves when you’re awake. Although, during other parts of sleep, the brain waves look very different, but during those times, you aren’t in REM sleep so you aren’t dreaming as solidly.
The psychological set of ideas has to do with your thoughts and feelings. Most dreams are actually about immediate concerns in our lives. As crazy as it sounds, some dreams can actually help us learn more about ourselves. Other dreams may just be practice to prepare us with dealing with problems in the daytime.
Dreams can be about several different things like fears, hopes, wishes, plans or worries. They could be about left over things that have been unsettled in the day. Or even concerns we couldn't quite handle. Dreams are also thought to be prophetic, meaning they can predict upcoming events in the future.
Sigmund Freud was one of the people that were very interested in interpreting dreams. He considered that dreams contained symbols of things that are hidden deep within our minds and memories. One of Freud’s important discoveries was that buried emotions in the unconscious surface in disguised form during a dreaming state, and the remembered fragments of a dream can help uncover the buried feelings. Many people have derived insights into themselves from studying their own dreams, and most people currently consider dreams emotionally significant.
There are many different types of dreams: repetitive dreams, predictive dreams, nightmares and lucid dreaming. Repetitive dreams are dreams that are reoccurring, or repeated. These dreams are fairly common and is said that they are very important to whoever is dreaming them. It is carrying a message that is well worth recovering. If the reoccurring dream has happened since you were very young then it probably ties into an aspect of your personality, which has been a problem to you throughout your whole life. The reoccurring dream will disappear once the issue is recognized that the dream is confronting and trying to get you to confront as well. However, a reoccurring dream may also link into a current problem or preoccupation.
Predictive dreams, or prophetic dreams, are dreams that predict something that could happen in the near future. Some often treat these dreams with a great amount of caution, but there’s no need to worry. The dream may not actually come true; it may actually be your fears, among other things, causing you to have some sort of worrisome dream. Statistics have shown that most of these dreams are mainly just coincidence, even though you think the dream is predicting the future. When we think of dream interpretations, common sense should always be important. It is only in the present century that it’s been made clear to pay attention to our dreams and discover how they can help us.
Nightmares, the good old frightening dreams that cause trauma in the middle of the night. They are not the product of any physical activity like overeating or overdrinking like people have thought in the past. It is the effect of some sort of waking anxiety that is so perceptive that it is dragged into your dreams. Children experience nightmares the most due to all their anxieties in their growing life, trying to get used to the world. There is nothing to really worry about when it comes to nightmares, unless they occur night after night. The problem is probably more serious and the waking problem that is prompting them should be looked for. Something that seems simple like loneliness or jealousy can easily be turned inward into nightmares. Adults that experience reoccurring nightmares should be carefully looked upon as well.
Last but not least, lucid dreaming. Which is known as dreaming while knowing you are doing so. This usually occurs in the middle of a dream when the dreamer discovers that the events that are happening are not in the physical reality.
There are two levels of lucid dreaming: high and low. A dreamer experiencing a high level of lucidity is fully aware that they are in bed, sleeping and everything they are experiencing is all just a creation of the mind. They realize they cannot suffer any physical harm due to anything that happens in the dream.
A dreamer experiencing a lower level of lucidity is not fully aware that what they are going through is a sole creation of their mind. This would allow the dreamer to do activities such as flying, or what interests them the most at the time because they don’t realize they are actually lying in bed sleeping. Regardless, the dreamer may still see physical threats and other characters in the dream, to be completely realistic.
Being able to control a dream and being lucid, does not always link together. You could be able to control a dream but not know you are actually dreaming. It’s also possible to be completely aware you are having the dream, but have little control in the dream. Although, the dreamer of a highly lucid dream has the choice to either participate in the dream, or be the creator of it. That would be much more enjoyable.
In conclusion, sleep and dreams can be very tricky but where would we be without them? We need sleep to function properly and the dreams just happen to tag along with it. However, the dreams can be very helpful if you pay attention to them. So the two of them combined allow us to appreciate them as part of our daily lives.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/sleep/articles/whatissleep.shtml
http://www.wsu.edu/DrUniverse/dreams.html
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_2/freud.html
http://library.thinkquest.org/C005545/english/dream/types.htm
