True or False?
- Screens Prevent Your Body from Falling Asleep
- Most People Need 7 to 8 Hours of Sleep to Feel Fully Rested
- Dreamless Sleep Is the Best Quality Sleep
You’re not quite sure about that last one. You’re scratching your head, we know.
There’s a plethora of science-backed sleep tips, as well as tech solutions to track and optimize your sleep, but what do your dreams tell us? Are good dreams, or the lack of them, an indicator of good sleep?
Like everything else, we don’t have a definitive answer, but we do have a wealth of interesting information. Here it is.
What do dreams mean?
According to Dr. Rubin Nieman, a dream expert and professor of medicine at the University of Arizona, “really good sleep is made up of non-REM and REM sleep.”
Sleep tracking technology doesn’t accurately capture REM sleep, the stage most commonly associated with dreaming. So if you’re relying solely on your device’s data, you’re likely getting an incomplete and inaccurate picture of your sleep.
Years of research have shown that we’re “as much dreamless as we are dreamy,” says Nieman. It turns out that’s a problem. In a comprehensive review of the data published by the New York Academy of Sciences, Nieman concludes that dream deprivation is at the root of a host of health problems, contributing to a range of conditions including insomnia, poor memory, anxiety, and even depression.
In short, we need to sleep, but we also need to dream.
What does a “normal” night of good sleep and good dreams look like?
Most people need about 8 hours of sleep, during which they cycle through the different sleep stages (NREM and REM sleep). We enter the REM phase (more or less) every 90 minutes, after having gone through light and deep sleep. Each subsequent REM phase is longer than the previous one. At the beginning of the night, dreams are few. We dream mostly during the REM phase, which is longer with each turn of the sleep cycle, respectively - we dream the most at the end of our sleep cycles (or just before we wake up). You understand that if you sleep 4 hours, you probably dream significantly less than a person who sleeps 8 hours.
What do dreams say about the quality of our sleep?
The best sign of good and restorative sleep is the feeling of rest and “charged battery” in the morning (before coffee or other external stimulation).
But some people have a subjective association with dreaming. People who love to talk about their dreams, love to interpret them, and are generally interested in them tend to equate “good sleep” with “good dreams”—the more interesting, happy, vivid, and rich their dreams are, the better they feel they slept.
Other people, on the other hand, are more negative about dreaming and see dreams as a bad thing—as if they’re preventing them from sleeping well.
Ultimately, whether a dream is good is a subjective assessment. But here are some interesting interpretations of dreams and their occurrence:
If you’re having vivid, rich dreams
You might be waking up.
“We usually experience a dream as more vivid when our brains are activated and approaching the waking state,” says Dr. Nieman. Sometimes the richness of a dream is due to waking up. The same goes for those dreams that wake you up – no, it's not because of a terrible nightmare in which you are being chased, it's not because you are on the verge of being caught, it's not fear, it's not worry, it's just your brain waking up, completely naturally and normally.
2.
If you remember your dreams
You probably woke up during your sleep.
“To remember your dream, you have to wake up,” says Dr. Nieman. Whether something disturbed your sleep or you woke up naturally, you woke up. According to studies, people who sleep in noisy places are more likely to remember their dreams, but their sleep is of poorer quality because it is often interrupted.
Even if you think your sleep is undisturbed, you might be surprised. According to scientists, even people who sleep in sleep labs (you know, the ideal environment for sleep) experience so-called “micro-awakenings,” which help them remember their dreams. Although their bodies appear asleep—with their eyes closed and motionless—the brain waves indicate awakening right after the REM phase.
If you start dreaming as soon as you fall asleep
There are a few options here.
People with narcolepsy often enter REM sleep within the first 15 minutes of falling asleep. Keep in mind that this is a fairly rare condition.
You are more likely to experience so-called “hypnagogic hallucinations” (sounds scary, but it is not) – visual images that we see immediately after falling asleep. These images, which can be static or dynamic, do not have the developed plot of dreams characteristic of the REM phase and last only a minute or two.
Another possibility for early dreaming is waking up just before entering REM sleep. This usually happens in the morning. For example, when your alarm goes off, but you snooze it and fall asleep immediately, your body is almost guaranteed to pick up where you left off – namely REM sleep.
If you never dream
You may be chronically sleep deprived.
As a rule, the brain prioritizes non-REM sleep, specifically deep sleep, as it is the most restorative. That is, if you sleep little (3-4-5 hours), your brain prefers deep sleep over dreaming.
If you have nightmares
You may be under stress.
Technically, dreams provoked by trauma are a completely separate category and can occur at any time of the sleep cycle, not just during the REM phase.
Recurrent traumatic dreams are usually a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder. It has been proven that sleep attempts to heal, process and digest the traumatic experience.
How to dream better?
To dream well, you need to sleep well.
Give yourself enough time – between 7 and 8 hours a night, every night and make sure your sleep hygiene is up to par – turn off the lights, isolate yourself from noise and stay away from screens.
If you want to remember your dreams, wake up slowly, ideally without an alarm – immerse yourself in drowsiness with the idea of perceiving what your brain has fabricated.
Ultimately, it all comes down to how you, personally, interpret dreams – whether your attitude towards them is positive or not. According to scientists, a positive attitude towards dreams is directly related to a positive attitude and satisfaction with life. Dr. Nieman advises talking, writing, sharing your dreams and treating them as something important, because “dreams are the icing on the cake of a good night’s sleep”.
