Dreaming and REM Sleep

Dreams are not real. I heard this phrase many times from my mom while I was growing up. My anxious personality coupled with a lot of medical problems brought on regular nightmares. It was not uncommon for me to awaken in the middle of the night in tears from vivid dreams of losing loved ones or my own death. I continue to have these dreams on occasion. This is one reason why I woke up at 3:30 am this morning and cannot return to sleep. Understanding dreams is a fascinating if complicated subject. My purpose is not to define what every archaic symbol in a dream represents. My purpose is to explain the process of dreaming, how to tell if it is what is termed an information-processing dream, and why you may have dreams that contain a certain theme at junctures in your life.

With sleep, there are five stages. The final stage is called rapid eye movement sleep, or REM. REM is labeled as such because as a person dreams his eye movements rapidly go back and forth. In sleep studies, REM sleep reveals a brain as active as one that is awake. Other stages of sleep show brain activity slowing down along with the rest of the body but REM sleep is different.

Unborn babies can dream so REM sleep develops early. One can only speculate as to what they dream of since the uterine environment is rather closed off from the rest of the world. Perhaps they dream based on sounds they hear outside of their mothers' wombs? It is interesting that dream sleep is known to begin in infants near the time they can detect sounds outside the womb. I am by no means an expert in dreaming but am drawing from the many studies I read in college while seeking my four year psychology degree.

REM sleep is when dreams occur so it is also the period of time when nightmares happen. REM sleep is critical to maintaining normal brain function. It is during this final period of sleep the brain achieves true rest. The brain processes day-to-day environmental cues during stage four and stage five sleep. An example of an information processing dream was one I had several days ago. My husband and I needed to wake up early to take our children to a geneticist appointment in Little Rock. My dream was of us being late for the appointment. The previous day I saw the movie This is It and the dream continued to bring my parents and I to discuss whether we would stop by the theater and watch it. This is It has been out of the theater for a while but that part of the dream is irrelevant since it was obviously information from the day before. I am unsure why my parents were in the dream more than my husband. Since my father has to drive me to my Little Rock appointments, it may have been in regard to it usually being him rather than my husband.

The dream that woke me this morning was one I consider a nightmare. My husband was married briefly to a woman before me. He is fiercely loyal and a wonderful person. My dream showed him as something entirely different. He left our children and me to be with his former wife. There has always been a degree of jealousy involving his being married before but the main reason for the dream was due to a recent reliance upon him that is stronger than ever. Other issues have arisen in my family so my dependence on my husband is greater. My dream represented the fear he would leave me with nothing.

Sometimes the human mind tells you about things while you are dreaming. Did you ever fall asleep, dream of needing to get to the restroom, and wake up with that same incredible need? A dream I had that would fall into this category was one that occurred when I was between the ages of 14-15 years old. The memory of this dream is very strong because when translated, it is easy to see what my brain was trying to tell me. I was transitioning between schools at this time. The dream was bizarre with all colors in pastel. The location was at my former school but I hadn't attended the new school yet. Looking back, this dream may have symbolized the new school but I did not realize this at the time. There was urgency to this dream like no other I have experienced. My dad often scared me about the New Madrid earthquake fault line since we live on it. This dream's urgency was to get to the hospital before it occurred, the hospital being St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. It is easy for me to now see the urgency was not about an earthquake but about a health problem. Within two months of being at the new school, an unlikely cancer relapse was uncovered after six years of remission. This dream carried me through the new diagnosis because in the dream we arrived at the hospital in time, I hid under the chairs that were located in the Danny Thomas Research tower, and I survived though battered and bruised. It was a case of knowing if we had waited any longer to go to the hospital, I would not have survived. The cancer affected my kidney and because it was a recurrence it was labeled stage IV. There is no stage five in cancer.

I like to believe some dreams have meanings because it is God's way of helping us through our lives. I do not know how to believe in regard to psychic phenomenon through dreams. With the conception of both of my children, I knew their names and who they would be before they were born. One dream of Hannah was before my husband and I became engaged. The dream was so strong along with a later one of Owen that I could tell my husband we would have a little boy who looked like me and a little girl who looked like him. I was the only person not surprised when our son had blonde hair and blue eyes. My husband believed our daughter would also have blonde hair and blue eyes but I knew what she looked like. The dream I had so many years ago showed me a little girl in pony tails who resembled her father completely. The little girl in that dream is now 4 ½ years old and looks nothing like her mother.

Because I often wake up after dreaming, I remember much of what I dream about. REM sleep occurs on average 3-5 times a night providing much opportunity to dream. If you are interested in interpretation, first take note of what you dream immediately upon waking up. Examine the dream carefully to see if it falls under information processing from the previous day. Look at the dream also in the manner of your own anxieties and wishes. If you cannot find any explanation for dreams of these types, yours may be a candidate for interpretation. I know very little about the archaic symbols in dreams but have included this site to help if you are interested in exploring the subject matter further http://www.sleeps.com/