In Your Dreams
Nighttime dreams. How sweet, bizarre or terrifying they can be. We are with a real, imagined or sough-after lover. We are falling, flying, running, or running in place. We triumph or fail. We are nude, or experiencing some other or otherworldly scenario.
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Sometimes we wake in the midst of our dreams when we are having a nightmare and realize there is no escape or hope for us. Some of us remember all of our nightly dreams vividly and with great detail, while others have vague, faint or no memories of their nighttime dreams. Though many ideas and beliefs regarding dreams have been suggested throughout antiquity, modern-day researchers are still uncertain exactly why we dream.
In 1953 Eugene Aserinsky, a graduate student in physiology, and Nathaniel Kleitman, PhD, chair of physiology at the University of Chicago, discovered the phenomenon of rapid eye movement (REM) during a series of sleep studies. Study participants who were awakened during REM sleep recalled bizarre and vivid dreams. If awakened while eyes were motionless (non-REM sleep), participants rarely recalled dreaming.
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Before the REM discovery, most scientists believed that the brain was inactive during sleep. The Chicago researchers proved that the brain is indeed active during sleep, a finding that helped establish the sleep science discipline, which has led to the diagnosis and treatment of 84 known or suspected sleep disorders.
A few years after the REM discovery, Michel Jouvet, MD, of Claude Bernard University in Lyon, France, recognized that brain activity during REM sleep resembles that of wakefulness. He called REM “paradoxical sleep” because of the fact that such cognitive activity is accompanied by muscular paralysis. He referred to non-REM sleep, a time of reduced brain activation, as “quiet sleep,” in which there is no muscular inhibition.
Yet the reasons as to why we dream when we sleep remains a mystery. Rosalind Cartwright, PhD, Professor and Chairman, Department of Psychology at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. Dr. Cartwright believes that dreams are the mechanism whereby the brain incorporates memories, solves problems and deals with emotions. In this way, she maintains, dreams are essential for our emotional health.
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