Many experts say dreams exist to: Help solve problems in our lives. Incorporate memories. Process emotions.
We all dream each night, whether the dreams are remembered or not. Many Americans are chronically sleep-deprived. It's important to have an understanding of ideal sleep and how our sleeping patterns may impact overall health and wellness. Everyone dreams anywhere from 3 to 6 times each night.
Excessive dreaming is usually attributed to sleep fragmentation and the consequent ability to remember dreams due to the successive awakenings. The dreams usually have no particular character, but sometimes they might include situations associated with drowning or suffocation.
Sleeping issues that cause a lack of sleep, such as insomnia and narcolepsy, can increase one's risk of experiencing vivid dreams. Changes to your sleep schedule, such as flying overseas (and going to sleep at a different time) or getting less sleep than usual, can also increase this risk.
Recurring Dreams and Mental Health Disorders
Although most people experience recurring dreams from time to time, they can also be symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). People who experience these disorders have other significant symptoms as well.
Healthy dreaming may be indicative of quality sleep that facilitates sharper thinking, better mood, and overall health.
So basically, it is possible to dream without getting a good quantity of quality sleep. But, if you're having those vivid REM dreams, then that's usually a sign you're getting good sleep, according to Dr. Dasgupta.
Sleep without dreams is the most restful sleep. Scratching your head at the last one? No one would blame you. There's no shortage of science-backed tips for better sleep, and about one in five people now use an app or wearable to track and improve their zzz's.
Remembering your dreams doesn't necessarily have anything to do with how restful your sleep is, Dr. Harris says. Instead, recalling those dreams is a lot more likely to depend on a number of factors, from your current level of stress to the medication you're taking.
Do you dream a lot at night? If you spend a lot of hours dreaming, your sleep quality may be affected, and you're more likely to wake up feeling tired and stressed.
"Dreams are often about identity, because we're figuring out who we are and what we need, and the beliefs and perspectives we hold," says Wallace. "If you feel unfulfilled, undervalued or not the person you want to be in waking life, your dreams will often reflect that.
We can't know for certain if a person never dreams. We do know that some people rarely, if ever, recall their dreams. If you have trouble remembering dreams, you're in good company. Most of us have 4 to 6 dreams a night, but we forget the vast majority of them.
Demonstrating that dreaming of a recent learning experience is associated with enhanced memory, these studies suggest that dream content does reflect the consolidation process.
Dreaming enhances creativity and problem-solving. It's been shown that deep non-REM sleep strengthens individual memories. But REM sleep is when those memories can be fused and blended together in abstract and highly novel ways.
There is no clear reason for what people call "excessive dreaming," but it's known that some people suffer from dreams that seem to last long periods of the night and are "vivid." This means that there is an abundance of details that carry high emotional burden to the point of becoming nightmares (such as in your case) ...
“Since dreams are thought to primarily occur during REM sleep, the sleep stage when the MCH cells turn on, activation of these cells may prevent the content of a dream from being stored in the hippocampus – consequently, the dream is quickly forgotten.”
Dreaming sleep is a deep stage of sleep with intense brain activity in the forebrain and midbrain.
"A range of sleep disorders is associated with dementia, especially Lewy body dementia," he said. "These sleep disorders include restless legs syndrome and visual hallucinations, as well as vivid dreaming and nightmares."
There are a variety of ways that dementia symptoms present themselves during the sleep cycle. Nightmares or bad dreams are more often associated with dementia, specifically Lewy body dementia that will be discussed more later.
Depressed people may dream more than the average person, but they are also less likely to remember those dreams.
Although their visual dream content is reduced, other senses are enhanced in dreams of the blind. A dreaming blind person experiences more sensations of sound, touch, taste, and smell than sighted people do. Blind people are also more likely to have certain types of dreams than sighted people.
Domhoff also emphasized that while dreams can have meaning, his research suggests they aren't symbolic. During sleep, people don't appear to be able to access the parts of the brain involved with understanding or generating metaphors, he said.