Learning From Your Dreams

The average person will spend one third of their entire life time sleeping, which is obviously important in the sense that it will rejuvenate the body and prepare you for the day. However, there is something that happens deep at a neurological level when you sleep; dreaming has been shown to be vitally important for mental health.

People who do not dream have been shown to develop personality disorders and different forms of psychosis. So, how do you develop good dreaming skills?

It is simple create a dream journal, doing this is going to make your dreams more memorable. When you get in the habit of writing your dreams down first thing in the morning you start to remember them easier, and soon you will be recording three or four dreams daily.

There are a few different types of dreams, and the most significant are the REM dreams. These dreams are spurred from the amygdala but actuate every portion of the brain.

The brain actually creates a paralyzing hormone during REM sleep that keeps you from acting out your dream, so if you have woken up to find yourself incapable of moving it is only because the hormone is still in effect. This is nothing to be concerned about because it just means your brain is working properly when sleeping.

Usually these situations are accompanied by bad dreams, which are usually the cause for waking in the first place. The mind is so stressed by the dream that it resorts to the only defense it can think of: escaping unconsciousness.

REM dreams, like mentioned before, are housed in the amygdala which is the fight or flight, instinctive response area of the brain. Scientists theorize that these dreams are actually the subconscious mind preparing the conscious mind for hypothetical situations.

When you are young, generally you will dream about monsters and fantastical things that are unearthly and impossible, but as you age your dreams become more realistic and are more interpretable. Children are still working at a very naive and instinctive level, so to speak, and so their minds prepare them for situations where they may need to escape fantastical danger.

Adults who have developed a sense of reality usually have dreams about losing their car keys, or misplacing their wallet, or work related problems. It is not that people are negative it is that the amygdala is stressed based and trying to prepare you for problems, and that is why people have "bad" dreams.

So if you suffer from repetitive nightmares then you should try to realize what dream is trying to prepare you against. If you can consciously understand why you dreamed what you did, then you can work to change that specific distress in your life.

Destry Masterson is a health and fitness nut. She writes articles about exercise, sleeping and recommends the IntelliBED mattress from http://www.intellibed.com.

Contact Info:
Destry Masterson - MyOnlineArticleWriting@gmail.com - Twitter: @DestryMasterson


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