well it's of course possible that there is no function for dreaming there is no benefit of dreaming it's simply what we call an epiphenomenon but that's [Music] depending on your definition of dreaming we dream in all stages of sleep but for most of us when we speak about dreams what we're really talking about are the dreams that come from rapid eye movements these bizarre strange narrative hallucinogenic emotion-filled memory filled experiences at night my sister and i we are underground in the subway station and we're walking up the stairs and as we are entering the city
it's total chaos the ways that we study dreaming at the sleep center involve lots of different types of techniques some of them involve us placing electrodes on the top of your head so that we can measure the brainwave activity and we can watch to see when you go into the dream state i see literally rapid eye movements i see that the muscle tone in the body has decreased i look for classic wave forms and this is how i recognize what rem sleep is a lot of the vivid dreams happen in rem sleep there are at
least two different benefits of dreaming the first is emotional first aid that it's during dream sleep at night that sleep and particularly dreams act almost like a nocturnal soothing bomb so we can think of dreaming almost as a form of overnight therapy and in fact the american entrepreneur e joseph kosman really nailed it when he said that the best bridge between despair and hope is a good night of sleep when there are experiences in waking life that we're unable to relate to those themes will show up in our dream life and if we don't turn
our attention to it that tension builds so there's this little kind of tap on the door so the knock gets louder and louder until we have no other recourse but to turn our attention to it we wake up and we just begin talking about it with other people it's total chaos there are people running and screaming and protecting their loved ones and we are basically dodging these planes there are so many of them they look like vintage fire airplanes with the big propellers on both sides and they're just dropping bombs onto people on the ground
all over the city and we are just running to avoid them a second benefit of rem sleep dreaming is informational alchemy memory association that is during rem sleep dreaming where we start to collide all of the recent information that we've learned with all of our vast back catalog of stored information one of the theories behind dreams is that the brain is doing us a favor when we're going to bed by filtering out pieces of information memories that we don't think we need and keeping the most important things in we wake up with a revised mind
wide web of associations capable of defining solutions to previously impenetrable problems and so it's probably no coincidence that you've never been told to stay awake on a problem instead you're told to sleep on a problem dreams have to reach an emotional threshold very often what we remember about dreams is images or experiences that are emotionally evocative unless the dream reaches that kind of emotionally evocative threshold it can get lost we're running to a place and we kind of hide behind one of the planes that have fallen and i'm just looking at her and she's looking
at me and it blacks out because the plane landed on us and that's the end of the tree [Music] what can we do to try to increase the likelihood that we will remember a dream when you wake up don't jump out of bed and don't try to immediately start writing down a dream instead just lie there and bring the dream back to mind because as we all know when we wake up the dream starts to almost evaporate and only when you feel as though you've captured a good amount of that dream should you then get
up and start voice memo recording the dream or writing down the dream [Music] you
