Dreams are pure emotional and cognitive gold. Those often surreal, fragmented images and plot lines that can instantly evaporate when we open our eyes, allow us not only to explore the themes and challenges of our day, but to step into the what-ifs of tomorrow.
Whether we remember our dreams or not, our brain and dreams are multi-tasking to the nth degree while we sleep. Together, they are shunting keeper memories into our memory bank, ditching others that don’t make the grade and strengthening positive emotions. They are weakening negative or traumatic ones, bolstering our stress resilience, cognitive function, problem-solving capabilities and our mental health. All of which explains the emotional rollercoaster that can come with sleep deprivation and insomnia (I’ve been there). Because when we’re sleep-deprived, we’re dream-deprived, robbed of those invaluable sleep-dependent perks that give us a depth of insight and emotional processing that’s out of reach to our waking selves.
Not all dreams are made equal. It’s the vivid dreams that take place during our rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, in the second half of the night, that really deliver when it comes to building our emotional resilience. The less vivid, non-rapid eye movement (NREM) dreams that occur when we first go to sleep have their own vital learning and memory-consolidating role to play, too. But if we haven’t had enough sleep, or our sleep has been disrupted in the night, or by early morning summer light, then we’re likely to be short of REM, with consequences that can spill over into our day.
“REM is really important for processing emotions and helping to make upsetting things less upsetting, decoupling that arousal from the memories,” says sleep engineer Professor Penelope Lewis, from the neuroscience and psychology of sleep lab (NaPS) at Cardiff University.
If we wake up sleep-deprived, we start our day with a breakdown in communication between the brain’s rational, cognitive power house that is the pre-frontal cortex, and the emotionally reactive amygdala; this can leave our emotions running the show with, unhelpfully, a negative lean. (After one night of sleep deprivation, the amygdala is 60% more reactive to negative images, compared to a decent night’s sleep.) But rather than focusing on the negatives of too little sleep, we’re better off focusing on the positives of getting the sleep and dreams we need and how we can optimise – and even engineer – this.
According to dream theorists Robert Stickgold and Antonio Zadra, co-authors of When Brains Dream, there are two standout benefits we get from our dream life. First, the narratives we create that allow us to travel in time – “to experience the thoughts, sensations and emotions engendered by those narratives” – effectively rehearsing and actually experiencing the what-ifs of our life. And second, the space that dreams create where we can not only imagine possible events, but where we’re free “to plan, to plot, to explore”.
In our virtual REM world, our brain scans every crevice of our memory bank, on the lookout for tentative associations or metaphorical connections that can help us make sense of our worries and the day’s challenges, searching for possible solutions, alternative outcomes and answers, so that once we’ve “slept on it”, we can have a much deeper and greater perspective. This is not a resource our conscious selves can call on.
Crucially, our REM dreams also allow us to revisit difficulties from our day when we’re in a non-emotional state – key to our emotional memory processing and regulation. In our dreams there are no heart palpitations, knots in the stomach, or tightening throat… Our fight-or-flight hormonal and physiological response is conveniently disconnected from the reactive amygdala during REM sleep. This allows the hippocampus, the brain’s memory centre, to get together with the emotional amygdala to contemplate those tricky, emotionally salient memories from the day, with no danger of releasing a load of stress hormones when we’re in this ‘playback’ mode. Instead, we can remain calm, while mulling our options, in situations that might trigger a meltdown in our everyday life. (But nightmares do, of course, sometimes break through.
Apart from giving ourselves enough quality sleep to harness all that nocturnal brain activity, the question is, how can we go further to actually direct and engineer our sleep and dreams for the better? Sleep and dream engineering is gathering pace, not only with dream theorists, psychologists and neuroscientists, but also with those creating sleep-engineering wearables and, controversially, advertisers looking to sell to our sleeping selves. Engineers use sensory stimulation to augment sleep and dreams, for example by using sounds and scents to boost learning, memory, brainwaves, creativity and to create happier dreams. With targeted memory reactivation (TMR), engineers might link sounds to studying a particular topic, or an improved ending to a nightmare, during the day and then reactivate these at night, when memories are being sorted, prioritised and stored. Relatively hi-tech and lab-centred, the medical focus is also on improving mental health and reducing cognitive decline.
“We can trigger reactivation of memories with sounds or smells and we know that can strengthen memories,” says Lewis. “Sleep engineering can help memories to integrate together. It can help with the processing of emotion, and upsetting memories. It can change the trajectory of the memories and consolidation.”
Away from sleep labs and prototype wearables, DIY sleep engineering is something we can all do. For starters, the neuroscience of scent – with its olfactory hotline to the brain, faster than the other senses – could be an easy win. You could try sniffing a scent when you’re learning something or feel in a good mood during the day, and then have a timed diffuser in your bedroom to release that scent every now and then, so that those associations waft their way into shaping your dreams.
We can also try directing the content of our dreams by thinking about something we want to learn, or a particular problem, for a short while before sleep (nothing stressful that might disrupt it) for our dreams to reflect on. Studying a maths problem or maze layout before sleep and then dreaming about it has been shown to make finding a maths solution easier and an exit to the maze that much quickerpost-sleep. We can’t expect a lightbulb moment(although I had this once, after giving my dreams a job to do – and the Periodic Table is one of many inventions said to have surfaced in a dream), but this prompt will probably give us more perspective.
Meanwhile, dream theorists suggest keeping a journal or voice recorder by your bed, to note themes and topics that pop up and maximise any personal insights that can come from the REM stage. The idea is that you tell yourself the night before that you will remember your dreams. In the morning, close your eyes after waking and try to recall as much detail from them as possible… The thoughts you had and emotions you felt.
Ultimately, the most important thing, sleep scientists agree, is to make sure that you get good sleep. We need both the complementary NREM and REM stages. The engineering side of things is just a bonus.
What to do, then, if you’re having trouble getting the quality of sleep you need? Since everything about our day affects it, we need to look at what is causing sleep to be elusive, then remove obstacles to strengthen the natural sleep-wake cycle. For this you could consider my three “sleep shapers” of biology, habits and suggestion.
To boost sleep quality and help your REM sleep become less disrupted, it pays to gen up on the basic biology of it. We sleep in roughly 90-minute cycles, so if you can time your alarm for the end of a sleep cycle, or allow yourself to wake up naturally, your REM dreams will not be interrupted or rudely cut short.
As for habits, we can get stuck in habitual sleep-wake patterns, but by intercepting this – perhaps by giving yourself a little longer to sleep at night – you can overlay that habitual pattern with a new one, boost your REM sleep and, with it, your emotional and cognitive health (sleep-supporting audios are also powerful sleep habit cues).
Finally, you can tap into the power of suggestion which alters our physiology, perception, expectations and behaviour, by shifting your mindset around sleep (eg, “Quality sleep is natural, achievable and not a waste of time!”).
Our slightly sci-fi future looks set to be packed with bespoke wearables that can emit beeps, words, scents and electrical pulses, creating an integrated circuitry between our sleeping body and our virtual dream life; to optimise our learning, creativity, memory, moods, insight and emotional processing. In the meantime, on the DIY front, just appreciating the immense value of our dreams and doing our best to nurture and nudge them in the right direction can bring huge rewards each morning, when we open our eyes to start the day.
Kate Mikhail is a sleep specialist and author of Teach Yourself to Sleep: an Ex-insomniac’s Guide published by Little, Brown. Buy it from guardianbookshop for £14.99
