Brain basics: Understanding sleep. Updated August 13, National Sleep Foundation. How often do we dream? Rasch B, Born J. Physiological Reviews. Becchetti A, Amadeo A. Why we forget our dreams: Acetylcholine and norepinephrine in wakefulness and REM sleep. Behav Brain Sci. Dream recall frequency is associated with medial prefrontal cortex white-matter density. Front Psychol. Murzyn E. Do we only dream in colour?
A comparison of reported dream colour in younger and older adults with different experiences of black and white media. Conscious Cogn. Schwitzgebel E. Do people still report dreaming in black and white? An attempt to replicate a questionnaire from Percept Mot Skills.
Mathes J, Schredl M. Gender differences in dream content: Are they related to personality? International Journal of Dream Research. William Domhoff G, Schneider A. Similarities and differences in dream content at the cross-cultural, gender, and individual levels. Consciousness and Cognition. Do all mammals dream? J Comp Neurol. Lucid dreaming incidence: A quality effects meta-analysis of 50 years of research. The dreams of college men and women in and A comparison of dream contents and sex differences.
Information processing during sleep: The effect of olfactory stimuli on dream content and dream emotions. Journal of Sleep Research. Domhoff GW, Schneider A. Rapid Eye Movements Rems and visual dream recall in both congenitally blind and sighted subjects.
SPIE; Farooq M, Anjum F. Sleep paralysis. StatPearls Publishing; Typical dreams: Stability and gender differences. J Psychol. Your Privacy Rights. To change or withdraw your consent choices for VerywellMind. At any time, you can update your settings through the "EU Privacy" link at the bottom of any page. Neuroscientists are interested in the structures involved in dream production, dream organization, and narratability.
However, psychoanalysis concentrates on the meaning of dreams and placing them in the context of relationships in the history of the dreamer. Reports of dreams tend to be full of emotional and vivid experiences that contain themes, concerns, dream figures, and objects that correspond closely to waking life.
Nightmares are distressing dreams that cause the dreamer to feel a number of disturbing emotions. Common reactions to a nightmare include fear and anxiety. Lucid dreaming is the dreamer is aware that they are dreaming. They may have some control over their dream. This measure of control can vary between lucid dreams.
They often occur in the middle of a regular dream when the sleeping person realizes suddenly that they are dreaming. Some people experience lucid dreaming at random, while others have reported being able to increase their capacity to control their dreams.
For example, during exam time, students may dream about course content. People in a relationship may dream of their partner. Web developers may see programming code. These circumstantial observations suggest that elements from the everyday re-emerge in dream-like imagery during the transition from wakefulness to sleep.
A study of adult dream reports found:. Another study investigated the relationship between dream emotion and dream character identification. Affection and joy were commonly associated with known characters and were used to identify them even when these emotional attributes were inconsistent with those of the waking state.
The findings suggest that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, associated with short-term memory, is less active in the dreaming brain than during waking life, while the paleocortical and subcortical limbic areas are more active.
Freud maintained that undesirable memories could become suppressed in the mind. Dreams ease repression by allowing these memories to be reinstated. A study showed that sleep does not help people forget unwanted memories. Instead, REM sleep might even counteract the voluntary suppression of memories, making them more accessible for retrieval.
The findings of one study suggest that:. Dream-lag is when the images, experiences, or people that emerge in dreams are images, experiences, or people you have seen recently, perhaps the previous day or a week before.
The idea is that certain types of experiences take a week to become encoded into long-term memory, and some of the images from the consolidation process will appear in a dream. Events experienced while awake are said to feature in 1 to 2 percent of dream reports, although 65 percent of dream reports reflect aspects of recent waking life experiences.
The dream-lag effect has been reported in dreams that occur at the REM stage but not those that occur at stage 2. A study exploring different types of memory within dream content among 32 participants found the following:. Researchers suggest that memories of personal experiences are experienced fragmentarily and selectively during dreaming.
The purpose may be to integrate these memories into the long-lasting autobiographical memory. A hypothesis stating that dreams reflect waking-life experiences is supported by studies investigating the dreams of psychiatric patients and patients with sleep disorders. In short, their daytime symptoms and problems are reflected in their dreams. Many authors agree that some traumatic dreams perform a function of recovery.
One paper hypothesizes that the main aspect of traumatic dreams is to communicate an experience that the dreamer has in the dream but does not understand. This can help an individual reconstruct and come to terms with past trauma. The themes of dreams can be linked to the suppression of unwanted thoughts and, as a result, an increased occurrence of that suppressed thought in dreams.
The results demonstrate that there were increased dreams about the unwanted thought and a tendency to have more distressing dreams. They also imply that thought suppression may lead to significantly increased mental disorder symptoms. Research has indicated that external stimuli presented during sleep can affect the emotional content of dreams.
For example, the positively-toned stimulus of roses in one study yielded more positively themed dreams, whereas the negative stimulus of rotten eggs was followed by more negatively themed dreams. Up to now, the frequencies of typical dream themes have been studied with questionnaires. These have indicated that a rank order of 55 typical dream themes has been stable over different sample populations. Some themes are familiar to many people, such as flying, falling, and arriving late. For example, from to , there was an increase in the percentage of people who reported flying in dreams.
This could reflect the increase in air travel. Relationships : Some have hypothesized that one cluster of typical dreams, including being an object in danger, falling, or being chased, is related to interpersonal conflicts.
Sexual concepts : Another cluster that includes flying, sexual experiences, finding money, and eating delicious food is associated with libidinal and sexual motivations. Fear of embarrassment : A third group, containing dreams that involve being nude, failing an examination, arriving too late, losing teeth, and being inappropriately dressed, is associated with social concerns and a fear of embarrassment. In neuroimaging studies of brain activity during REM sleep, scientists found that the distribution of brain activity might also be linked to specific dream features.
Several bizarre features of normal dreams have similarities with well-known neuropsychological syndromes that occur after brain damage, such as delusional misidentifications for faces and places. Dreams were evaluated in people experiencing different types of headache.
Results showed people with migraine had increased frequency of dreams involving taste and smell. This may suggest that the role of some cerebral structures, such as amygdala and hypothalamus, are involved in migraine mechanisms as well as in the biology of sleep and dreaming.
Music in dreams is rarely studied in scientific literature. However, in a study of 35 professional musicians and 30 non-musicians, the musicians experienced twice as many dreams featuring music, when compared with non-musicians.
Musical dream frequency was related to the age of commencement of musical instruction but not to the daily load of musical activity. Nearly half of the recalled music was non-standard, suggesting that original music can be created in dreams. It has been shown that realistic, localized painful sensations can be experienced in dreams, either through direct incorporation or from memories of pain. However, the frequency of pain dreams in healthy subjects is low. In one study, 28 non-ventilated burn victims were interviewed for 5 consecutive mornings during their first week of hospitalization.
The question is why? Although our senses are dampened during sleep with vision being completely absent , strong sensory information, such as an alarm, will be registered and in some cases incorporated into the dream itself.
We also know that during times of stress we are more vigilant to threat on cognitive, emotional and behavioural levels , so it stands to reason that we are more likely to incorporate internal and external signals into our dreams, as a way to manage them. And this may account for these changes in our dreams, when we are anxious, depressed or sleeping badly.
The current thinking is stress reduction before bed and good sleep management — such as keeping a consistent sleep routine, using the bedroom only for sleep, making sure the bedroom is cool, dark, quiet and free from anything arousing — will reduce awakenings at night and so the frequency of stress-related negative dreams.
That said, using a technique called Imagery Rehearsal Therapy IRT , mainly used for treating nightmares in people with post-traumatic stress disorder, it appears stress and anxiety associated with nightmares and bad dreams as well as the frequency of bad dreams can be reduced.
This is achieved by re-imagining the ending of the dream or the context of the dream, making it less threatening. There is also evidence that IRT is effective for reducing nightmares in children. That said, a recent study showed that teaching people with insomnia to be aware while they were dreaming and to control the dream , as it occurs — known as lucid dreaming training — not only reduced their insomnia symptoms but also reduced their symptoms of anxiety and depression.
Perhaps then the key is to manage the dreams as opposed to trying to manage the stress — especially in uncertain times.
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