Some time ago, I sent a circle of friends about dreams, and then many people are asking, and the questions can be roughly summarized as follows:
Why do we dream?
What is the phenomenon of dreams?
And what role does it play?
Next, let's go to the incredible "world of dreams" to see.
Maybe everyone knows that people dream during the REM sleep phase.
It is true that we dream when we are in the REM sleep state, but there are also experimental studies that confirm that non-REM sleep states actually dream.
So all night long, we were in the "world of dreams."
In the 1950s, shortly after REM sleep was discovered, it was learned that dreams were dreamed during the REM sleep phase.
But in 1957, Professor Dementer pointed out that people in non-REM sleep states also dream, and several researchers have further confirmed this.
Dreams that are remembered when you wake up are usually dreams that you made shortly before you woke up.
Because people generally wake up slowly in the process of shallow REM sleep repetition, there is such a cognition as "REM sleep = dreaming".
However, if you try to wake up the other person during deep non-REM sleep, you will find that you are actually dreaming at that time.
Through the description of dreams, it can be found that the dreams made by REM during sleep are mostly dreams that have a story and are close to the real experience of the individual; the dreams made during non-REM sleep are mostly abstract and illogical.
In the rem sleep state where the body is asleep but the brain is still functioning, the cerebral cortex is very active, just like when it is awake.
Nerve cells in the brain that are associated with "dreaming" and responsible for managing motor areas also become active.
In other words, because it is as if you have personally experienced a dream like reality, such a dream is concrete and reasonable.
People who own dogs and cats know that animals also dream.
Researchers have spent dozens of days monitoring brain waves while dogs are asleep.
When the dog sleeps, it seems to be happy to often wag its tail, because it is in a REM sleep state.
In the non-REM sleep state, the brain is in a dormant state, so even if you dream, the motor area in the brain is inactive.
For example, when suddenly woken up in a deep sleep state, people will feel confused, and their thinking will also appear short-term "short-circuited", completely unaware of when and where they are, and the dreams they make during non-REM sleep are very close to such a state.
It can be seen that if you wake up and remember an abstract and incomprehensible dream, you must have woken up in a non-REM sleep state.
This is very different from the state in which people wake up naturally from REM sleep, so the possibility of confusion in the sleep state is not ruled out.
In addition, when REM sleep alternates with non-REM sleep, the dreams we make also change.
This means that the more you dream, the more cycles you have to alternate between REM sleep and non-REM sleep.
In short, under the normal rhythm of sleep, ordinary people will have seven or eight different dreams.
Unfortunately, the more sleep time we have, the more we remember only the last dream...
Explore the meaning of sleep for life
Next issue of exploration: Can you just dream what you like?