Less Sleep Means More Dreams

http://scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa029&articleID=239C577A-E7F2-99DF-38DA961471472CDD








According to neurologist Mark Mahowald of the University of Minnesota and director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center, "When people are sleep deprived we see greater sleep intensity, meaning greater brain activity during sleep." An example of this suggestion came from a woman named Eva Salem. As a new mother Eva became sleep deprived, getting only four hours a night. She had very vivid, and active dreams, but when she did get a full night of sleep her dreams became so vivid that she felt as if she wasn't sleeping at all.


REM, rapid eye movement, is the state in which we dream the most. Sleep is divided into REM and four stages of non-REM. We experience our first period of REM, lasting only five minutes, after approximately seventy minutes of non-REM sleep, and as the night progresses, non-REM stages shorten and the REM periods grow. Scientists' only way of studying sleep deprivation is by torturous sleep deprivation. Tore Nielsen, psychologist, and director of the Dream and Nightmare Lab at the Sacré-Coeur Hospital in Montreal, says, "We follow the electroencephalogram tracing and then when we see subjects moving into REM, we wake them up, as soon as you start to rob them of REM, the pressure for them to go back into REM starts to build." Sometimes the patient will have to be woken forty times in one night, because they go straight into REM as soon as they are asleep.



In a 2005 study, Nielsen showed that losing thirty minutes of REM one night can lead to a thirty-five percent REM increase the next night. Another thing Nielsen found, from subjects only getting about twenty-five minutes of REM sleep, is that dream intensity increased with REM deprivation; these subjects rated the quality of their dreams between eight and nine (one being dull, nine being dynamite).



Although REM is so persistent, and we spend about twenty-seven years dreaming, scientists still can't agree on why it's important. However, there are theories that suggest that REM helps regulate body temperature and neurotransmitter levels. There also is evidence that dreaming helps us assimilate memories. John Antrobus, a retired professor of psychology and sleep research at the City College of New York, says our dreams are tied with our anxieties. He also believes, " The brain is an interpretive organ, and when regions are less connected as they are in sleep, we get bizarre narratives." Antrobus is assured that we cannot answer the question of "What is the purpose of dreaming?", without answering the question "What is the purpose of thought?"







RESPONSE: It's interesting to see how being sleep deprived can really mess up your nightly routine. I thought the comment at the beginning of the article was intersting saying that if you miss a few dreams from lack of sleep, your brain keeps score, forcing payback soon after your eyelids close. Although, we may not remember dreaming, when we wake up in the morning, we most likely did and just cant recall them. Even if we only had a few that night, we'll be all caught up the next night! Not only the fact that missing dreams, and making up for it the next night, but also the fact that they get more active and intense.