During sleep, the heart rate and breathing slow, allowing the body to repair and rejuvenate itself, and dreaming during sleep helps to balance the person psychologically.
Stages of Sleep
We all go through various stages of sleep and repeat the cycle several times a night. These stages are:
- Stage One:Drowsiness. This is when you are still awake but starting to relax and your eyes are closed. If someone were to rouse you from this stage, you wouldn’t think you had had any sleep.
- Stage Two:Light sleep. This is when you have periods of muscle relaxation and spontaneous muscle activity. Your temperature and heart rate decrease in preparation for deep sleep.
- Stage Three:Deep sleep. Your brain waves slow down.
- Stage Four:Deep sleep. This is similar to stage three, except more intensified.
- Non-REM Sleep:This is when your body will go through all four stages of sleep again, a few minutes each stage.
- REM Sleep:Known as rapid eye movement sleep, your eyes move rapidly from side to side. Your heart rate, brain waves and breathing speed up and your muscles may twitch, although you will be essentially paralysed. You dream during this stage of sleep and it is because of this that the muscle paralysis occurs. It prevents you from acting out your dreams and injuring yourself in your sleep.
What is the Point of Dreaming?
Dreams have various functions. They can help you maintain your mental health and avoid disorders like depression. They can confront problems faced by the dreamer and may even provide him with solutions to his problem. They may even show glimpses of future events.
Processing Dreams:These are the most common type of dream. This is where your brain simply does a "clear out" of all the activities you have done during the day, and shifts through your memories. These can include problem solving dreams, for instance, if you have misplaced your car keys, you might dream where to find them.
Balancing Dreams: The psychologist Sigmund Freud, coined the term "wish fulfillment’ in relation to dreams, to describe those dreams which balance us out emotionally. If you’ve split up from your partner and want to reunite, you might dream this as dreams are a way of expressing our deepest wants and desires, hence the term wish fulfillment.
He theorized that if a person was going through a traumatic time, they would have nice dreams in order to help them cope with bad times. Likewise, if a person has no problems, they might dream something distressing, to give them a mix of both experiences.
Nightmares are also balancing dreams, as they force the dreamer to confront their fears.
Pre-Cognitive Dreams: These are the rarest type of dream, but sometimes do happen. A person can dream something that hasn’t happened yet, or see symbols or images which relate to a future event, for instance, dreaming of flooding and then finding you have a leak in your kitchen and that you have to call the plumber.
Dreams can be very creative. The composer Mozart actually dreamt up some of his melodies! If you want to remember any of your great ideas, why not keep a notepad by your bed? Dreaming isn’t frivolous, there’s a real science behind your dreams.
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