"Executive function takes over before memorial processing can continue to occur," he adds. Unnatural wakeups like an alarm or hungry doggo can easily impede dream recall. "What happens to most people is that when they wake up, something causes an executive function to erase what's in their head," Breus says. Those of us who think we "don't dream" are actually experiencing deep forgetting. "Chances are that if you wake somebody up in REM, they're going to be in the middle of a dream," Ellis adds. According to Breus, about 80% of REM sleep is spent dreaming, although you can dream in the other stages of sleep. Most of our nightly dreaming happens during REM sleep, or the rapid eye movement sleep stage. And you still have the ability to remember your dreams. Your dream life may not rival the plot of Inception, but you're still dreaming. The fact of the matter: Everybody dreams. But what if we don't dream or haven't had a dream in years? Do we miss out on these benefits? "That movement of data, we think, is represented in your brain as this kind of fantastical imagery we call dreams." We all experience emotional events on the reg, and according to Breus, dreams are a reflection of processing, understanding, and storing these events.Īnd dream expert Leslie Ellis, Ph.D., agrees: "In dreaming, we appear to pull out those emotionally charged elements from the previous day or so and weave them onto our existing memories but also into a new kind of image or story," she previously explained to mindbodygreen.īeyond emotional processing and memory consolidation, dreams have been a source of creativity and inspiration throughout the ages. "One of the functional purposes of dreaming is moving information from your short-term to your long-term memory," he explains. Breus, Ph.D., board-certified sleep specialist, dreaming is all about data processing and data storage (and in that order). We haven't yet pinned down why we dream or what our dreams mean-but we do have promising theories.Īccording to Michael J. But what we do know is that dreams are a neurobiological process, just like thinking.ĭreams are the result of heightened activity in our neocortex 1, the outermost layer of our brain, although researchers are still understanding how different types of dreams (like lucid dreaming) activate different regions. Dreams are as mysterious to the dreamer as they are to the experts.
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