Dare to Dream
Dreaming isn’t just a free movie you get to watch while you sleep
Dreaming has many meanings and connotations in our world today. If you’re a person with grand vision and creative thoughts, you’re likely to be labelled as a dreamer by those around you. Forever concocting an endless torrent of ideas that may seem impractical or out-of-this-world to the average person. If you’re someone who gets distracted easily and finds your mind wandering away from your physical surroundings, your peers might see you as a day-dreamer; constantly living as if in your own dream-world despite your obviously-waking state. Or, maybe you’re fond of your time with the more traditional and uncontrollable form of dreaming — the one where your brain mashes together all the information you’ve ever accumulated in the most rambunctious possible ways with concepts that sometimes stretch the absolute limits of your imagination.
This article is the kick-off to an intermittent series we’re starting on a topic I find intriguing, and happens to be closely related to the general theme of our blog: dreaming. Personally, I’m quite fond of all three examples I’ve outlined above: the literal interpretation of dreaming as a biproduct of sleep, the — somewhat ironically and amusingly — more abstract concept of dreaming as a state of mind for those that tend to spend a little less time in what most people refer to as “reality”, and “dreamer” as associated with those whose train-of-thought tends toward a slightly more non-linear path; particularly in problem-solving, creative, or artistic matters.
I’m fond of all three because I find dreaming at night to be incredibly entertaining, and the biological cause and theories/research behind it to be fascinating. While at the same time, I love to destress and unwind by letting my mind soar through the clouds from time-to-time, and anyone that knows me well will attest to the fact that my imagination and problem-solving approach tend to be quite non-linear in nature. Sometimes my ideas can seem wildly impossible, which isn’t necessarily the best way to approach a problem. But, sometimes the seemingly impossible solution that a more pragmatic person may not even be able to comprehend, let-alone conceive, could be the most revolutionary way to do something.
A simple example of how this out-of-the-box thinking can change the world is the invention of the microwave oven in 1945. An American self-taught engineer, Percy Spencer, was performing experiments with active radar, and noticed a candy bar in his pocket started melting. You don’t need to be an engineer or a physicist to know that radar is not generally used for cooking food, and yet this man decided to pursue his hunch and proceed to experiment by using it to cook other foods. I don’t want to speak for the entire world here, but I’m going to go on a limb and say the average person wouldn’t feel something melting near their groin and decide it was a golden opportunity to try making popcorn in a new way.
Day-dreaming doesn’t tend to have a massively practical place in society, besides perhaps lending aid to creative, out-of-the-box thinking; however, the dreaming we all do every night certainly does. That’s right, we all dream, whether you remember it or not — if you’re entering REM sleep and you’re not influenced by any drugs (some of which actually can impact your ability to dream), your brain is dreaming.
Though the dreaming you’re most likely to remember happens largely in REM sleep — sometimes known as paradoxical sleep because, though your body is being paralyzed by your brain, your brain is nearly as active as if you were awake — you do actually dream somewhat in the first stage of sleep. In this lightest sleep stage, we experience something quite akin to that socially-awkward little day-dreaming phenomenon. Your brain and body slip in-and-out of consciousness, sometimes accompanied by slight spasms or twitches of the body that may wake you back up. At this point, whatever thoughts you had as you slide into slumber become mixed and malleable, often creating a dreamscape of whatever you were thinking of at the time, and whatever your brain chooses from its expansive library of your entire life.
These experiences are known as hypnogogic hallucinations, and can often make you think you’re hearing or seeing something so vividly that you wake up, not immediately able to realize it was a figment of your imagination. This type of dream is often very hard to remember and makes far less sense than the more pronounced and identifiable dreams that happen during REM sleep.
The REM stage tends to be shorter in the first two-thirds of the night, but increases in duration with each full cycle of the sleep stages your body goes through. This extension of the REM stage close to your natural waking period explains why most people tend to feel like they only dream right before waking up. Alternatively, since many people tend to rely on alarms, they’re awoken before they complete the final REM cycle, meaning you literally have been woken up from a dream. Unfortunately, being woken during this cycle is quite detrimental, and is usually met with immense grogginess and some disorientation.
We don’t really have much more than theories yet, but researchers know that REM is the most important sleep stage. We’ll dive more into the biological and psychological aspects of dreaming later in the series, along with some breakthroughs in modern science, so be sure to stay tuned!
