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Humans have been fascinated by dreams. Ancient civilizations considered what we see in our sleep to be powerful messages from deities or an essential way to make sense of waking life.

Rubin Naiman is a fellow with the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and clinical assistant professor of medicine at the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona.

We know that dreams are important in our waking lives. Science shows that brain scans light up with activity when people dream, and there are physical responses that seem hardwired to encourage it, including body systems that render you unconscious, paralyze you, and then wipe your memory of the dream state. The question remains, to what end? If our body is supposed to be resting and restoring, why does your brain serve up scenarios that are seemingly meaningless?

Here are some of the reasons why you dream and the things that happen in your waking life that can influence them.

What is a dream?

The head sleep specialist and neuroscientist at Wesper said that a healthy sleep cycle rotates through four stages. Your body gradually relaxes as stages one through three flow through a light, medium, and deep state of rest. When you're awake, your brain looks active, but when you're asleep, it looks less active. Dreams can occur in different stages of sleep as well, but most people who wake up during REM sleep will report having dreams.

A few physical changes happen during this part of our sleep cycle. The body and mind are not the same.

First off, measures like your heart rate, breathing rate, and blood pressure start bouncing all over the place, looking like what happens when we are awake.

A small percentage of the population has REM sleep behavior disorder or a breakdown of the REM atonia process. People with the condition usually find out when they go to the doctor's office because of violent movements during sleep.

There is the brain during REM sleep. There are some key differences between it and wakefulness.

The parts of your brain that are responsible for logic and reasoning stop communicating with the parts that are involved in emotion, creativity, and memory.

Why don’t you remember your dreams?

The reason your dreams don't make sense is because of the brain-to-brain divide. With our logic centers switched off, unrealistic scenarios like being able to fly feel real.

You might struggle to remember dreams.

When we are in REM sleep, the brain works on our memory centers, but we don't actually use them.

If you remember your dream even if it is fleeting, that means you probably woke up in the middle of the REM stage.

So, why do we dream?

Our understanding of why we dream has evolved over time. Sigmund Freud believed dreams were messages from our own subconscious and that they were reflections of our deepest desires and unfulfilled wishes.

There was a hypothesis. The theory was developed in the 70s and says that dreams are just random images from our brain. Any symbolism we impose on them is subjective.

We have two extremes. One is psychological and the other biological.

Today's leading theories are more in the middle of the spectrum.

You dream to form long-term memories

Each day is full of new experiences and information that gets temporarily stored in our short-term memory. The transfer of short-term information into long-term memory requires your brain to consolidate the initial experience. This happens during REM sleep.

She said that this sequence of neurons firing doesn't necessarily follow a narrative or storyline from our perspective.

Even if dreams don't make sense, they do play an important role in learning and memory. People learning a new physical skill, like playing tennis, perform better after sleeping than they do when awake, according to research.

If you memorize the information and get some sleep, you're more likely to remember it, according to the research.

You dream to process emotions

Alan Eiser, a clinical lecturer at the University of Michigan Medical School, said that dreams can be used to deal with difficult issues in a person's life.

REM sleep is like our brain's gut in that it is responsible for making critical decisions about what it allows in the body.

It takes a little more effort on the part of the gut to digest experiences that are difficult to digest.

It has been known for 50 or 60 years that damaged dream patterns are associated with clinical depression.

There is a theory behind emotional digestion. The study shows that the neurotransmitters associated with stress and anxiety start to plummet during REM sleep. Our brain may be better equipped to process difficult experiences if we don't have these chemicals.

Dreaming may help you manage your stress response

We thinkREM sleep may help your brain deal with stress. She said to think of it as a full brain restart after your brain has been using a lot of energy. If you don't get enough sleep, things that wouldn't bother you suddenly set you off.

Dreams can be used to deal with stress. According to a study published in the Journal of Sleep Research, REM sleep has high levels of activity in the amygdala, the part of the brain associated with our fight-or-flight reaction. While research is ongoing, this activity could be the brain's way of preparing you emotionally to respond to stresses in waking life.

What affects dreams?

We don't know a lot about dreams.

We don't understand why certain dreams are so common in the general population.

Some ways that behavior influences the brain's REM sleep may impact your dreams.

Medication

It's important to know that certain antidepressants suppress REM sleep early in the night.

Sertraline, fluoxetine, and duloxetine are drugs that are included in the list of drugs that are referred to as "srbis", orselective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.

Steroids, blood pressure medication, and drugs used to treat Parkinson's disease are just some of the potential side effects of a laundry list of prescriptions.

Health conditions

Everyone has bad or anxious dreams from time to time, whether it's a fight with your partner, a big deadline, or a first date.

It may be tied to your mental health, but other sleep disorders can cause nightmares.

People with anxiety or depression are more likely to have bad dreams. A study in the journal Scientific Reports found that people who had more peace of mind in their waking life had more positive dreams. People with anxiety had more dreams with negative emotions.

Post-traumatic stress disorder can cause nightmares, which involve reliving a traumatic event. They are a symptom of night terrors, which is when people wake up screaming in intense fear but don't remember the episodes in the morning.

About 20% to 30% of children have nightmares, compared with 5% to 8% of adults.

Stress

Stress affects the areas of the brain that are active during REM sleep.

Scientists believe that during REM sleep, the areas of our brain that are used to deal with stress can be found. If you add more stress or an anxiety disorder, it could result in more bad dreams.

Not enough sleep

Research shows that your brain tries to catch up on its REM cycles if you pull a few all-nighters recently. The REM rebound effect refers to how the REM sleep pattern changes when we have been sleep deprived, which can cause more vivid, wild dreams.

Too much sleep

Overindulging your snooze button could affect your dreams. The study looked at why people have nightmares.

The team found that people who slept more than nine hours a night had more frequent nightmares.

Exercise

Some research suggests that regular exercise might lower the risk of nightmares and even dreaming in general by increasing the amount of time spent in deep, REM sleep and decreasing the time spent in depression.

Like most things in life, balance is important. According to a recent study, people with low activity levels can experience poor sleep quality.

Your period

If you get a period, you can thank your hormones for weird dreams in the premenstrual phase.

According to research published in the Journal of Sleep Medicine and Disorders, hormone fluctuations can affect sleep patterns. This can mean less time in dreamland, but it can also wake you up more frequently, so you remember your dreams more vividly.

There may be a silver lining to these disruptions. Most people experience more pleasant dreams when their hormones bounce around before their period, according to a study. If you take a hormonal contraceptive, you are more likely to recall your dreams.

Alcohol

Alcohol suppresses REM sleep early in your slumber, which can lead to more extreme dreams later in your sleep cycle, if you have a nightcap.

People tend to get a REM rebound with vivid dreams at the end of the night.

The REM rebound effect is what makes withdrawal from alcohol and drugs associated with nightmares.

Cannabis

Marijuana users commonly report using the drug as a sleep aid, but consistent use actually suppresses dream states, and recent research adds some context to this understanding.

Users of cannabis were more likely to say they slept less than six hours a night or more than nine hours a night compared to non users, according to a study published in Regional Anesthesia and Pain Medicine.

It's not clear if the cannabis use was the cause of the sleep patterns, the result, or unrelated, but those longer and shorter sleep patterns could be linked to more vivid dreams.

The rebound effect may lead to some pretty strange, vivid dreams if you quit.

Sleep hygiene

According to the experts, good sleep hygiene promotes good dream hygiene. Making lifestyle changes that promote sleep can help dreams as well.

If you don't follow good sleep hygiene, you can limit your brain.

This can result in undercutting the amount of sleep you get.

How do you build better sleep hygiene? If you want to get a good night's sleep, stay away from alcohol, sugar, and caffeine before bed, and don't lie in bed staring at a screen, because the blue light it emits can keep your body from preparing.

One thing that seems certain is that dreams are important to our well-being.

REM sleep is the least understood sleep stage, and it's difficult to remember.

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