Info about Dreams
The need for sleep and dreams
Some People experience various changes when they are deprived of sleep. For example, a person may lose the ability to do even simple tasks. Senses, such as hearing and eyesight, can become distorted. After only a few days without sleep, a person may become irritable and even violent.
Everyone needs sleep. The human body needs time every day to rest. It appears that people also need to dream. During tests in sleep laboratories, subjects were awakened during their REM sleep periods. They were allowed to sleep through the other stages of sleep. In the morning, the subjects awoke tired. When these people were deprived of dream time for several nights, they began to experience symptoms of people deprived of sleep. This occurred even though they were allowed to have six or seven hours of sleep each night.
The amount of sleep needed changes as people age. Infants may sleep twenty hours a day. At your age, you may feel rested after nine or ten. Very few adults can sleep less than five hours every day and function normally.
The average person sleeps deeply only two to four hours a night. The rest of the time is spent sleeping lightly. Many people say they lie awake at night, not sleeping. In reality, such a person may be aware only of the periods of wakefulness, not those of deep sleep.
Do you know people who say they never dream? What they really mean is that they do not remember their dreams. Why are other people able to remember their dreams in great detail? The answer lies in timing. Most people dream about one hundred minutes for every seven hours of sleep. If you were awakened during or shortly after a dream period, you would probably remember your current dream. However, if you were awakened some time alter your dream period, you would remember very little, if any, of your last dream. You would be even less likely to recall dreams from earlier dream periods.
Some people have sleep patterns in which they awaken shortly after or during an HEM period every morning. These people tend to remember their dreams. Other people sleep halfway through the next cycle before they awaken. They often do not remember their dreams.
Furthermore, dreams differ throughout the night. Your first dream, which occurs about ninety minutes after you fall asleep, is usually a vague, thought like incident. Toward morning, your dreams grow longer, more complex, and sometimes bizarre. You are more likely to remember these dreams than earlier ones.
There are many theories that suggest why people dream. One theory is that people dream in order to satisfy drives they are not allowed to satisfy during the day. For example, in a dream you might strike out at someone who angered you during the day. It may be that people dream in order to categorize the day’s events. Still another theory is that dreams are a way for our unconscious mind to tell us things we should do.
Whatever the reasons for dreaming sleep researchers know it is important to dream. Only people who are seriously ill or who are using heavy doses of depressant drugs do not dream. When a person is deprived of dream time, he or she spends unusually long periods of time dreaming the next few nights.