Flaming June, painted in 1895 by Sir Frederic Leighton.PUBLIC DOMAIN/Museo de Arte de Ponce
Karen van Kampen is the author of The Brain Never Sleeps: Why We Dream and What It Means for Our Health.
I grew up in a house that was wired for sleep. My dad is a sleep doctor, and when he was setting up his first lab, I’d often find him fixing electrodes and testing a modified EEG machine in our kitchen. As a kid, I imagined our home as its own kind of sleep lab. At night, I’d sink into a mattress with just the right firmness and drift off to the constant hum of sleep-inducing cool air. In the morning, not even a sliver of light could get past the heavy blackout blinds, and my parents would tip-toe past my bedroom, letting me doze. When friends were dragged out of bed to do household jobs, I was working hard at sleep and unknowingly boosting my brain power and mental health.
In recent years, I’ve had my share of sleepless nights because of a sick child, scared puppy or puzzling bout of insomnia. Today, sleep is its own industry that’s built on the desperate search for shut eye and the importance of sleep for our health and well-being.
Go ahead, dream – it’s good for you
But what about our dreams? Why does it matter that many of us are dream deprived? In this accelerated world where busyness is currency, we don’t stop and think about our dreams, and we’re robbing ourselves of their many benefits. Dreams fuel the body and the mind while we sleep and also into the next day. Instead of dismissing these nightly stories as nonsense, we should prioritize our dream sleep and value our dreams to improve our waking lives.
The dreaming brain is busy at work while we sleep, helping to consolidate memories and strengthen learning. In dreams, we practise new skills and have our own study sessions as we review new information to make memories stick. One idea is that dreams help us remember by connecting recent events with our current catalogue of memories, which gives this new information deeper meaning. “It’s the equivalent to our brain opening all these drawers in our semantic knowledge and our autobiographical memories and going, does it fit in here and here and here?” says Montreal dream researcher Antonio Zadra. “That’s how we build our knowledge of the world. And it does it in a way that we can’t do in wakefulness because we don’t have that neurochemistry when we are awake.”
Karen van Kampen’s new book The Brain Never Sleeps explores the role dreams play in wellbeing.Supplied
In dreams, we often create a frightening virtual reality to prepare for life’s dangers. We dream up all kinds of doom-and-gloom scenarios. We might search frantically for our lost phone, protect ourselves from a virus or rehearse a difficult conversation with our boss. One study found that students with upsetting exam dreams had better test results while another study found first-time mothers with distressing dreams were more likely to have shorter labours. Like flight simulators used to train pilots, dreams test out everyday and even rare or exaggerated threats so we can learn from their variability, explains Finnish cognitive neuroscientist Antti Revonsuo. “If you go through exactly the same experience over and over again, your learning would be limited,” says Dr. Revonsuo. “So that’s why you are presented with lots of variations.”
Negative dreams are common, and often we ruminate over unresolved emotions, especially during times of crisis and change. Dreams help us heal, offering a unique therapy session that’s accessible and free to each of us. Sleep researcher Rosalind Cartwright studied people’s dreams during divorce. Those who were struggling with depression and had more emotional dreams about their exes were significantly less depressed a year later. Dr. Cartwright found they’d “worked through” their depression and adapted to their new life much better than those without such emotionally turbulent dreams.
Sleep’s silent work: How a good night’s rest helps restore your body and mind
While dreams do a lot of their work while we sleep, there are ways to use our dreams to better ourselves. Like the simple and surprisingly insightful habit of keeping a dream diary. By recording dreams over time, we can identify preoccupations, concerns, even people who keep showing up, needing our attention. If we’re feeling unsettled and don’t know why, our dreams often tell the story. Dreams are part of our 24-hour continuum of thought and experience. Our joys and stresses shape our days as well as our nights. Dreams aren’t film clips replaying the day’s events. They’re more like highlight reels of what’s occupying our minds.
During the first few minutes of sleep, something magical happens on the border between our waking and dreaming worlds. As we drift off, we host our own dreamy brainstorming session that’s a unique mix of free thinking and enough awareness to follow our wandering thoughts. Our brains flag important thoughts to revisit later in the night. If we focus on an idea and even repeat a phrase as we fall asleep, there’s a good chance this will shape our dreams and spark creativity. A study led by dream researcher Adam Haar showed that we can use voice recordings at specific times in the sleep cycle to guide our dream thoughts and generate more creative ideas about a chosen topic when we wake up. “Dreams are a way to get in touch with our originality – with demonstrable, objective benefits,” says Dr. Haar. “By bridging the conscious and unconscious mind, we can make the world a more creative place.”
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We can extend our dream adventures to the exciting realm of lucid dreaming. It’s a rare and mind-bending phenomenon to realize that everything around you is a dream. It takes practice to achieve this mind shift. One trick is to do a reality check like counting our fingers in a dream. If we hold onto this awareness, we can work at controlling our dreams to practise a new skill, cultivate a calm mindset or just have fun. We become the architects of our dreamscapes. In this ever-changing elsewhere, we might paint a masterpiece, fly through the air or explore all the destinations of our imagination. No plane ticket or vacation time required.
Nightmares can seem out of our control and cause feelings of helplessness. Often, we cope by waking ourselves up, which in the world of dreams, is the ultimate avoidance strategy. We aren’t given any resolution to the dream. It lives on in the mind. If we change our dream story, we experience a sense of control, which can be transformative when we discover this is possible. During the day, we can rewrite a nightmare’s frightening details to imagine another way out. Since I was a kid, I’ve had this terrifying falling dream. I practised rescripting the ending, and the next time I had the dream, I imagined landing safely on a soft, plush mattress. It actually worked!
Talking about our dreams creates a sense of connection. It’s an intimate experience to share the hopes and fears that play out in our private realm of dreams. British dream researcher Mark Blagrove and artist Julia Lockheart found that dream sharing boosts empathy toward a dreamer as people listen and connect through the person’s dream stories. Dreamers discover new ways of seeing their dreams through other people’s perspectives. “Those perspectives can help because sometimes what has caused the dream might not be immediately apparent,” says Dr. Blagrove, “and the discussion can lead to unexpected and enlightening disclosures by the dreamer.”
How can dreams have such a profound influence? With our dreaming brain operating in a different mode, our dreams are as real to us as waking experiences. During the day, we reflect on thoughts and events to learn, create and heal. We can do the same with our dreams. This immersive and believable virtual reality creates a mind shift as we rethink what is possible and in the process, how we see ourselves. In mindfulness and meditation, we focus inward to gain self-awareness and resilience and cultivate a growth mindset. This is what dreams are designed to do.
We spend a third of our lives asleep and a large amount of that time dreaming. We should prioritize our dream sleep and work with our dreams to make the most of this alternate realm of thought and experience. Dreams are like our very own late night radio show. If we tune in and listen closely, they can be our midnight meditation, our personal problem solver, even our creative muse. So let’s get busy dreaming.