Dream On, But Sleep Is Very Important, Too

Dream On, But Sleep Is Very Important, Too

Everybody dreams. Some remember their dreams; others don’t. The brain never sleeps; neural pathways are always active, whether mediated by ego during waking state or without it, as happens during sleep. Activation of neural pathways produces dreams.

During sleep, we go through four to five cycles of deep sleep and dreaming episodes, each of roughly 90 minutes duration. Electro-encephalography (EEG) studies done on the human brain during sleep, show that deep sleep is characterised by production of low frequency (1-4 Hz) Delta waves, known to help produce life and mood-enhancing chemicals. At this stage, we are totally unaware of our surroundings. But, dreaming episodes characterised by rapid eye movement (REM), are of light sleep kind, from which one can be woken up quite easily .

Dreams are both internal and external. Since ego, the director, is absent during sleep, neural pathways have free run. Thus, day-long experiences or existing memories are the driving force for internal dreams. When there is sanyam or tremendous thinking activity on a particular thought during waking time, it leads sometimes to solution-dreams.Several great inventions and discoveries have come through such dreaming process.

Externality of dreams comes because brain is both receiver and transmitter of human thought. Hence during sleep, memories or signals from knowledge-space impinge on the brain and may modify neural pathways. This can give rise to strange dreams of events and places never visited or interacted with. This is also the mechanism of getting prophetic dreams of which there are many instances. Why don’t we remember dreams? Brain scientists say part of it is to do with creating long-term memory . But it is dreams we remember that make life interesting. We still don’t know why we dream. A possible answer may lie in how synapses behave during sleep.

Synapses are connections between two neurons; they allow the transfer of information through passage of neuro-chemicals across the synaptic cleft, the distance (about 0.02 micron) between neuron and synapse that exchanges neurochemicals.

Scientists have found that during deep sleep, the synaptic cleft widens by about 20%. Perhaps it helps in allowing the cerebro spinal fluid to flow through it and to remove toxins from the brain.

The more we dream during the night, the less restful is the sleep. A really restful sleep is deep sleep without dreams. This helps in flushing out toxic material from major part of the brain. Besides this, the increase of synaptic cleft may also help in explaining the dreaming process.

During sleep, neural pathways are active without ego, so circuit production is quite random. But only those pathways produce circuits in which neural connections are still strong. Thus “loosened“ synapses or those with increased synaptic cleft might not take part in the information transfer and hence, in the dreaming process. So dreams could be random in nature. Besides, this loosening of neural pathways may also explain the removal of some memories of day-long experiences. Sleep is therefore necessary to remove clutter or irrelevant information from the brain.

Too often, we have dreams connected with our suppressed desires; most are based on unfulfilled emotional needs and psychological knots based on strong memories that do not get loosened during sleep and cause recurring dreams. Resolution of these knots through wisdom allows the loosening of strong memories and helps in brain detoxification, producing dreamless sleep.

Om Namah Shivay