> dreams are primarily visual precisely because ...
This is a central claim in the article that's just stated and taken for granted.
In my experience, at least, dreams are not primarily visual. They have a visual component, but also a vague auditory component, a motor-experience (feeling of movement) component, etc., and all of those feel equally important. And most of all, there is a "felt experience" component that actually feels like the primary element of it; emotion is the core element of that, but a better description is "the lizard brain's interpretation" of what's happening in the dream, that feels like the central element of the dream.
The visual part is also not in full colour generally, in my case, it's like early movies during the transition from black-and-white, with slight colour tints generally towards the bluish colour regions.
I'm curious what others' dream experiences are like, and in particular whether it's the case that most people do experience them as primarily visual.
For me, the dreams I remember seem indeed more like experiences. I'm often aware that I dream, and can sometimes steer it. While it feels like a movie most of the time, it's not really visual in the same sense.
Like just yesterday I became aware that I was dreaming. In the dream I had somehow ended up in jail. The majority of the dream was me trying to escape in various ways, a bit like a reverse Ocean 11 thing.
As I was dreaming I could picture the places around me, I particularly recall the gate in the main corridor.
However even though my dreams are usually very visual in some sense, it's much closer to how I picture things in my mind when reading novels, rather than explicit images like when watching a movie.
I've always had a hard time with visualizations when reading novels. Like I'll read the page or two the author uses to describe some location, but most of the time the details don't really "sink in". Instead my mind seems to quickly grab hold of the high-level things, like it's an old apartment building, and the details are just generated based on that. Whatever detailed description the author makes usually doesn't affect the mental image I've already built.
I guess it's not that weird that the dream visuals feels more like that out of a book, both cases being generated by the imagination.
I’m able to consciously enter dreams from waking state. Basically, lucid dreaming on hard mode. Like going through sleep paralysis on purpose.
Dreams are so close to waking state, I’m always in awe when I successfully transition. Touch, taste, smell, every sense. It’s like waking reality, but with god mode.
That said, vision is really really weird. If you pull your sight into your dream body (hard to explain), then it’s just like you’d expect. It’s like it’s possible to see multiple perspectives at once, and it’s visual, but it’s all like one continuous field of view. Sometimes I don’t even really notice that I’m looking forward, backward, and from above all at once.
When I’m just playing around, I like to smash things and jump so high that I fly above the clouds, feeling the cold air above and the weightlessness at the apex. It’s no more visual primary than waking, IMHO.
I use my own secular simplified technique inspired by Tibetan dream yoga and wake induced lucid dreaming (WILD).
It’s as “simple” as learning to remain aware and observant when falling asleep, without rousing oneself. No deity worship or chakra alignments necessary.
Meditation practice helps tremendously, but my first success, I accomplished by trial and error.
A lot of instruction on the Internet suggests focusing on something, visualizing something, counting, eating supplements, etc. I have found all of that unnecessary.
I experience the same color dullness, although warm colors like red are more vivid for me.
Something I've noticed that I've never heard anyone else talk about is text-based dreams. That is, the dream primarily happens in a text interaction where the visual space is completely engulfed by a chatroom-like interface. The visual element is not the primary aspect of the dream, instead the text in the dream is projected into the visual space. Obviously this is because I spend a lot of time in chatrooms.
To me the most peculiar aspect of dreams is how vivid the universe you're in is. It feels as emotionally impactful as the best moments of your life. Super weird
The same brain that simulates your entire perception of reality from external inputs is using all of its resources to simulate its own, with itself as an input.
What's really weird is how dream-reality always makes sense to you in context, regardless of how absurd or random it is, because your self awareness and identity are being simulated the same way, both in dreams and in reality. It's like a virtual machine inside a virtual machine.
I occasionally have lucid dreams, where I realize I'm dreaming. When that happens, I can take control of the dream and do cool things like fly. Usually this only lasts a minute or two and then I wake up. But on a handful of occasions I've reverted to a non-lucid state, where I forget that I just figured out that I'm in a dream, and I lose control again. It's super freaky, and raises some pretty deep existential questions: who/what exactly am I when I'm in that state? How can I ever really be sure that I'm not dreaming?
> I occasionally have lucid dreams, where I realize I'm dreaming. When that happens, I can take control of the dream and do cool things
I experience lucid dreams I can control quite frequently. The thing I do most often is let the dream play out, but go back in (dream) time to replay certain scenes differently if I'm not happy with the outcome.
It's really pretty cool - like being in some kind of super-advanced VR simulation, or under the influence of some impossible drug. If anyone ever figures out tech to make this just happen (kind of like simulation VR goggles in scifi films), they are going to be very, very rich.
In another kind of "weakly lucid" dream type I know I'm dreaming but I don't have (full) control. So I can't make people answer what I want, but it feels like I can "mentally manipulate" them and push their answer to a certain direction, like make an attacker friendlier or so.
I've thought of dreams as unique in suspending self-doubt. For some reason, while in a dream, we are incapable of doubting what is going on. Everything feels incredibly vivid and real. Then we wake up, and we go back to doubting: "Ah, must've been a dream!"
Edit: Perhaps immersive psychedelics (LSD, ketamine) are similar actually. Speculatively, one could define "real" as our ability to doubt, "fantasy" as the suspension of doubt.
Dreams made a whole lot more sense to me when I learnt about idea of the brain as a predictive processing machine. It asserts that the brain works as a sort of recursive two-sided process, with theory creation on one side and evidence collecting on the other. Recursive in that the visual processing system might get a "is that a door?" theory from a higher level system, which it'll then answer by collecting and trying to match evidence from multiple lower level systems ("is that an edge?" "is that a shadow?" etc.) until it eventually reaches the level of processing stimuli directly, with each system on the way acting as both questioner and answerer.
In this framework dreaming is when the evidence collecting side becomes a lot less rigorous than it usually is, so it says "sure, why not" without reference to a stimulus (i.e. a way to be falsified). In other words it's the brain's predictions continuously coming true.
> brain as a predictive processing machine. It asserts that the brain works as a sort of recursive two-sided process, with theory creation on one side and evidence collecting on the other.
SlateStarCodex has a nice article[1] about this.
> The key insight: the brain is a multi-layer prediction machine. All neural processing consists of two streams: a bottom-up stream of sense data, and a top-down stream of predictions. These streams interface at each level of processing, comparing themselves to each other and adjusting themselves as necessary.
> ...
> You’re not seeing the world as it is, exactly. You’re seeing your predictions about the world, cashed out as expected sensations, then shaped/constrained by the actual sense data.
I've had recurring dreams that were entirely in math. And by that I don't mean a dream where I was sitting in math class or something. I mean the actual substance of the dreams were equations that I was trying to make sense of.
In my awake life I like math a lot and am comfortable solving equations. The dreams themselves, though, were terrifying in ways no other dream has ever matched.
This idea ignores a fascinating aspect of REM sleep. During REM, the brain shuts down the executive functions, while the brain goes into extreme 'story generation mode'. A story in which you are a character. I think this is one of the most overlooked and interesting parts of dreaming. We are able to observe ourselves in our dreams acting without the constraints of our 'executive functioning' brain. This means we get to learn about our purely emotional behaviour, and perhaps spot where it is maladaptive. (I am very bias on this subject, as I have written a paper on this topic - https://psyarxiv.com/k6trz, which was discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590)
I think the article describes one good reason for why we dream, one of the benefits of dreaming, but it doesn't have to be the only or even main reason. I think it's most likely that dreaming provides multiple benefits, and what the article claims is one of the minor ones.
I definitely feel like I have "executive function" even in many non-lucid dreams. It's just that I assume it's reality but I'm still solving problems, fighting, running away, talking to people to achieve things. Yes the world changes in weird ways and the distinctive thing about dreams is not noticing that this level of weirdness is implausible.
But I'm distinctly not "purely emotional" or animalistic in my dreams.
Link to original paper which is still a non-peer reviewed biorxiv article [0]. The crux of the paper is based on expressions of plasticity correlating with the percentage of sleep time spent in REM (fig.2). Apart from the high-level questions raised already in the comments there are several caveats in the data:
Data points are sparse i.e. the number of samples included are too few to strongly believe in correlations. Taking out extreme data points would make the correlations look independent.
The data values across 25 primate species are based on averages across previous studies and using proxies where some data was not available. I do not know how justifiable such approaches are but I am skeptical about them.
This doesn't explain why consistently interrupting REM sleep will lead to death.
Also, the exposition suggests that this is somehow particularly necessary for visual information because we can't see while sleeping. They originally suggest that this is because it's dark at night, but later modify it to be because one's eyes are closed while sleeping. However, to my knowledge, very little hearing is done while one is sleeping, certainly not enough to protect the auditory portions of the brain from being taken over. Furthermore, if other senses like hearing or smelling are in fact unused while sleeping, it seems like there wouldn't be much need to protect certain regions of the brain from takeover, since there would be no other sense to take them over. Finally, it seems like there are multiple situations where senses are required in a periodic way, such as an animal active during dusk, where its senses transition from being more to less sight focused. Being able to cycle the role of brain regions in response to these changes would be widely beneficial, and we would expect the capacity for this to be deeply ingrained. Insofar as we need non-sight senses while we are sleeping, it seems like the circuitry to deal with cyclic use of senses would be able to protect the visual cortex from total reuse.
Stronger than all this, it seems like REM is fairly fundamental to sleep, in that understanding it ought to offer deep insight into why we sleep in the first place. The proposed explanation offers no such insight, and generally answers no other questions besides the one regarding dreams. It seems like answers to deep questions usually provide insight into questions we didn't even know we had, whereas this answer provides no such insight.
I saw an answer to the dreams question to the effect that the brain cools down while we are sleeping, and REM sleep heats up the brain to prevent it from becoming too cold. This answer potentially provides insight into why we sleep, in that it proposes the cooling of the brain to be important to sleep, rather than incidental. It also explains why interrupting REM would kill a person. It doesn't obviously preference visual portions of the brain, suggesting that visual information is the focus of the brain simply because it is what the brain focuses on while awake. It potentially explains the data of these researchers, if the brain cools down more during sleep whenever the brain is more flexible.
I am not suggesting that I think this answer is definitely true, but merely trying to demonstrate that the standard I am measuring this new theory against is not impossible to reach. I think the explanation of why we dream will look more like the brain cooling answer, rather than the brain reuse answer.
Hmmmm...there's a whole article on that blog about 'why you should have a blog' which to me reminds me of 'flatting the curve' medium post which was written by a 'marketing manager'....
Are you implying that the author of the post I linked to is untrustworthy, because their site also has a post about why it’s good to have a blog? And then something about Covid which has nothing at all to do with this?
Sorry, but this is just unfair insinuation, based on nothing.
> consistently interrupting REM sleep will lead to death.
I’ve seen this claim many times, but I’ve not seen any studies that say “no [REM] sleep causes you to die”. The closest I can find are studies in the form “less [REM] sleep correlates with all causes of death to go up” - it’s not like you can literally kill someone just by keeping them awake for a month.
Without a good reference its just a repeated nonsense.
Even if this is true, there must be limits on it. What qualifies as 'interruption' ? Does REM taking 10ms counts as interrupted ? 100ms ? 1s ? 0ms (hard to believe this is actually possible). Its also known that some people require less sleep then others due to genetic factors. Perhaps 1m REM is enough for some...
I don't have a link handy, but I recall watching a documentary where a bunch of college students participated in a study that involved waking them every time they reached REM state. After 6 days they started becoming psychotic. After 7 days someone stepped in and aborted the project as the students were going fully psychotic. I don't recall who intervened. They may not have died but if I recall correctly, they would have killed each other.
In this article, there is a mention of "constant battle going on inside our brains between different sets of neurons, fighting over who gets control of certain parts of the brain." Because of which visual cortex always gets activated (even in sleep)so that it's neurons are not repurposed for other activities. Hence we dream.
http://m.nautil.us/issue/91/the-amazing-brain/your-brain-mak...
Another prediction of this theory would be that naturally blind animals such as some moles would not need REM sleep or would have substantially less REM sleep.
I couldn't find any research in completely blind mammals, but in a mammal that has very poor eyesight "Cape mole rats sleep substantially less than other similarly sized terrestrial rodents but have a similar percentage of total sleep time occupied by REM sleep." https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301482322_Sleep_in_...
Seems like there is still a lot of scope for research on REM sleep in non-human species.
I think that this part of the article answers that
> those who are born blind (or who become blind early in life) don’t experience visual imagery in their dreams; instead, they have other sensory experiences, such as feeling their way around a rearranged living room or hearing strange dogs barking. This is because other senses have taken over their visual cortex.
The prediction would be that moles experience sounds in sleep, or smell, or touch, whatever their primary sense is.
I don’t buy the theory. If you lose your vision, like the boy in the story then I’d expect that you’d eventually stop dreaming. It doesn’t make sense that other senses would start then fighting for protection of their neural circuitry. Why didn’t they earlier then?
What feels more likely to me is that your brain is trying to optimize something in it, which is why it is correlated with plasticity. The brain has evolved to turn off most of the body (since there’s probably strong selection against moving limbs while sleeping), but little selection against moving eyes while closed. REM is just what is left of our bodies movements.
My pet theory is that brain uses its power at night to process data from different organs and to fine-tune their settings (especially guts which is extremely complex organ with millions of sensors). That’s why sleep deprived creature dies from misbehaving organs. Some neurons are not required for this task, because they are too specialized. Namely neurons responsible for vision, conscience, movement. They receive random signals which don’t really mean anything and more like white noise. But brain is brain, so those neurons are trying to make sense from that noise and that’s how dreams are created.
Hmmm somehow I’m a bit skeptical. The article itself includes an example that is not easily reconcilable with their theory: What about the people like the boy who became blind they mention in the beginning? Shouldn’t they have extreme visual dreams even at day to protect their visual area, at least if this theory was true? But instead the brain area was rewired.
It explained this with the example of the blindfolded braille readers. Over 5 days their sense of touch was enhanced, presumably at the expense of their visual senses. Over time, the visual cortex would be completely taken over if the brain was not receiving signal from the eyes.
And that's exactly what's described at the end of the article:
> If dreams are visual hallucinations triggered by a lack of visual input, we might expect to find similar visual hallucinations in people who are slowly deprived of visual input while awake. In fact, this is precisely what happens in people with eye degeneration, patients confined to a tank-respirator, and prisoners in solitary confinement. In all of these cases, people see things that are not there.
Hmmm this is interesting. I wonder if people that cannot sleep more than 4-5 hours per night also have very vivid dreams? And therefore the brain cleaning REM cycle is just more intense and prolonged so the mind-body decides it does not need to sleep any longer?
Data point, unsure if helpful. I sleep plenty but wake up at least once per night. My most vivid dreams always occur in my last sleep, usually after 6am. I can literally live a lifetime in my dreams between 6 and 9am. I haven't quite figured it out yet, but because my dreams are less than stellar, I usually dread going back to bed.
I often feel these waves of ... something ... flush and course through my head when I drift off and am still semi-conscious. I know it happens when I begin to nap, I think too it may happen early in the morning, just before waking. It feels almost chemical.
I have had the same feeling too during a power nap. It feels like a reboot to me. Perceptually when I wake up I panic thinking it must have been hours then I look at the watch and only 10 minutes have passed.
Yes, that. I can wake up at 8, accidentally fall asleep, and feel like hours or days have passed and panic, but it's just 8:15. Dreams are so mysterious it's weird, in our age of science.
As another anecdote, on mornings when I can sleep in, I wake up momentarily before my final doze (another 30m-1hr). That wake always interrupts my most vivid dreams of the night (whose events feel like several hours of real life, but unsure about its real length).
Then, as I fall back asleep, I'm either wishing for/against that dream topic to continue. Most of the time not getting what I want.
I used to dream a lot and then it all stopped, especially when the pandemic started and I became less physically active. Long story short, It turns out I have a severe sleep apnea and it became more pronounced when my physical activity went down significantly (aka I was less tired). Few days later after i started using my CPAP machine my dreams came back. Make sure you don't have sleep apnea, about 7-8% of people have it.
Out of curiosity, are you a frequent cannabis user? I found I didn't remember my dreams when I smoked cannabis, however after a long break I started to remember dreams vividly.
The only time I seem to remember dreams is when my sleep is disturbed. Most nights I go to sleep and wake up in the morning, no (remembered)dream. If something wakes me up like indigestion or needing to pee I’ll often remember a dream.
Yup. I smoked pretty heavily for two years and didnt really dream at all during that time. Outside of those two years I've always had pretty vivid dreams.
A dream journal really does help though. The last thing most people want to do when sleepy is write though.
I personally hardly ever use cannabis, and often oscillate between periods of distinctly remembering all my dreams to having weeks of seemingly dreamless sleep. The oscillations have gotten especially wild in post-lockdown pandemic life.
Interesting - I pretty much never remember my dreams. I only started smoking/edibles fairly recently in life and one side effect was if I take an edible in the evening I almost always remember them.
But if you want to remember your dreams again, this is something you can work/train with. Basically, every morning before getting up, not jump up with the alarm out of bed, but rather ly still, in the same position as before and try to remember. If you want to, have a dream diary. Doing so a few days, should bring your memory of your dreams back.
I used to do so to train my ability for active/lucid dreaming. Can be fun ...
(but now with a toddler and a baby I lack the time and focus)
I often remember the dream right when I wake up, but if I don't immediately focus on remembering it (e.g. while writing it down), later in the day I almost magically won't remember even what the general topic was.
You can also write down your dreams if you wake after a dream in the middle of the night. The downside is you might start waking up frequently to write down your dreams.
Anecdotally some b6/b12 supplements have given both me and my partner very intense dreams and vivid recall. No idea what the mechanism might be (Or if it's a preservative/etc) but potentially an interesting data point?
IIRC the cheese thing is basically a myth, any heavy food in your stomach when you sleep will cause you to sleep less deeply, wake more often, and consequently, remember more of your dreams.
Funny that some medications have these dream effects. An uncommon side effect of Montelukast is vivid nightmares and sleep paralysis. It’s a relativity common asthma control medication, but was recently moved to a not-recommended status for younger people because of this side effect. My personal experience was pretty intense nightmares 1-2 times a week if I took it before bed. Taking early in the day stopped this side effect.
Of course. Articles such as the "OP" are simplistic bollocks. For starters, you'd be completely blind by now if the article had any merit. And deaf. And lost all memory.
Oh no, wait: we open our eyes every morning, so even if there was any effect, it would be the opposite: visual taking over everything else. Which also doesn't happen.
So take it with a grain of salt: yet another unprovable "theory" about the brain.
Have you stopped to think for a second where science would be if every possible hypothesis was thrown out as soon as its inventor realized he couldn't conclusively prove it in a day?
Also exactly the fact that it hasn't been fully proved out yet is why the nuance is missing. But now all the sudden you want them to be able to give you an explanation of the nuanced mechanism that prevents visual from taking over everything else? (Plus why on earth would it? What are you even talking about? I'm seeing all day long, but I'm also smelling hearing touching and tasting) Make up your mind!
1. If it's just a hypothesis, write it up in a journal, don't put it in Time magazine.
2. The hypothesis is as unprovable as they come: not only do we not have any idea on how this process of taking over other brain areas would work, if you knew how it worked, you couldn't build brains that lack this mechanism but are identical for the rest, and set up an experiment in which half of the brains (modified and original) would dream and the rest wouldn't. Because that seems to be about the only experiment that could truly falsify this idea.
3. It doesn't explain why only the visual cortex is susceptible to this, when we know that other brain areas also can adapt. The argument "it's dark" doesn't cut the mustard, because the effect should go away as soon as we open our eyes, which is around 2/3rds of the day. BTW, babies can't see, so it's odd that so many of them manage to develop a normally functioning visual cortex.
4. Sleep inhibits the senses, so how can the areas they input to take over, and why don't their areas get taken over?
5. They don't even attempt to prove that REM sleep and REM sleep alone activates the visual cortex and only that.
> Make up your mind!
That was under the assumption that the hypothesis was true. It seems to lead to rather unintuitive predictions. And I do like a theory to not be in apparent contradiction with simple observations.
So no, I have no reason to take it seriously, and people that (think they) don't dream shouldn't worry.
I hear a lot about people struggling with sleep and so I recognize that it is probably a widespread problem, but I sleep like a rock most nights and have little to no stress about it.
My personal experience has been that dreams seem to play a critical role in learning. Often when learning something new, the new experience will manifest in my dreams. The more immersive the new experience, the more rapidly the dreams come and the more vivid they are. Most dreams that I remember are almost like mashups of previous experiences. Very often, my dreams have elements of places and experiences from my childhood. I could see this being a manifestation of the brain managing placticity. Perhaps the brain grounds itself in old experiences and mixes in new ones so that things are not forgotten.
Is the suggestion meant to be that this only applies in certain kinds of brain function areas (eg for continuous senses, ie sight, sounds, etc)
The reason I ask is that I don't need to repeatedly dream of bicycling actions to be able to keep bicycling - I might not use that skill for a long period and yet I can still do it with accomplished ease when I resume it after a gap. This suggests that the bicycling neural area (and likely those for other similar skills, assuming there is indeed an "area") does not suffer the kind of neural take over they hypothesise.
I have always woken up feeling rejuvenated if I could remember what I had dreamt vividly. I asked some of my friends if it's the same with them also, but they said it's the opposite.
The article says that "dreams are primarily visual". That might be true for most people (and for the researchers), but I'm aphantasic and I don't think I've ever had a visual dream. My visual cortex seems to work perfectly fine on waking (though I do find a sunrise alarm clock useful in winter). If this is typical among aphantasics then I don't see how the theory can possibly be correct.
The theory could be correct in general (dreams are a result of a evolutionary trait that keeps visual circuits active at night) while not apply to you specifically, especially if you are different than most people when it comes to vision/visualizing.
I understand that current theories link dreaming to REM phase of the sleep. That is when we are in REM phase, we dream. Yet, remembering of the dreaming is not always guaranteed. So it's very much possible to have the REM phase, but no recollection of having dreamt at all. The data on dreams is likely based on self-reports, unlike the REM data which can be measured. So there's a lot of room for speculation on any possible connection and purpose of the dreaming.
On thing is for sure, if we can say to remember of the dreaming, we indeed did wake up.
In personal experience, I noticed a direct connection between physiological discomfort while sleeping and the related dreaming. That is a discomfort, say in my body positioning would generate dreams around the effect of it, not always literal but often it would either trigger a brief awakening or a change of the positioning.
One very stark experience was related to a case when previously frozen (and likely swollen at night) toes were constantly triggering a dream of sleeping next to a campfire and leading invariably to waking up with my knees bent and feet tucked underneath me. Toes healed, the dream was gone.
Another very much reliable trigger is airsupply. Say, by odd positioning the breathing is affected, sometimes an external factor can affect the air quality. Sure enough, there will be some dream leading to waking up just to be annoyed at dry/stuffy nose or some random smoke from an open window finding its way in. That I should feel probably grateful about, as it's like an internal smoke alarm... (though no substitute for proper detectors!!)
The point is, the dreaming might still be an extension of our survival mechanism. Kind of internal dashboard to check while asleep, no matter how oddly scripted.
One of the few serious books about dream meaning is from Freud https://g.co/kgs/LdLZs8 this field is seen as pseudo-science but I believe we still have a lot to discover
I really love when I have strange dreams, especially when you go back into the same dream if you wafe briefly, giving you a moment to consider before it continues. I imagine it's unlikely there is any real meaning behind dreams, but I can't help but feel there must be sometimes, especially with some of the odder dreams.
The most disappointing thing about a good dream though, is how quickly memories of it fade away upon wakening - it's like trying to grab tendrils of smoke rising away.
Usually at best I manage to recall one or two small snippets, or something about the general theme, but every now and then - very rarely - more vivid details stick with me for a little longer.
»It is generally accepted that NREM mentation that is indistiguishable from REM dreaming does indeed occur. Monroe et al.’s (1965) widely cited study suggests that approximately 10–30% of NREM dreams are indistinguishable from REM dreams (Recht-schaffen 1973). Even Hobson accepts that 5–10% of
NREM dream reports are “indistinguishable by any criterion from those obtained from post-REM awakenings”
(Hobson 1988b, p. 143). If we adjust this conservative fig-
ure to account for the fact that NREM sleep occupies ap-
proximately 75% of total sleep time, this implies that
roughly one quarter of all REM-like dreams occur outside
of REM sleep.«
A recent reference that discusses this is:
Nicholas and Ruby. 2020. Dreams, Sleep, and Psychotropic Drugs. Front Neurol. 2020; 11: 507495.
»Regarding the link between dreaming and neurophysiology, 60 years of debates has been necessary to get rid of the rapid eye movement (REM) sleep hypothesis of dreaming, and it is now acknowledged by a majority of dream researchers, be they neuroscientist or not, that REM sleep is neither necessary nor sufficient to get a dream report and that dream reports can be obtained at the awakening of any sleep stage (2, 7, 9–12). It is also now clear that the complexity and story-like characteristics of dream reports are related to sleep stages but also, and even more so, to circadian rhythms leading to more vivid and complex dreams in the morning than in the early night [e.g., (13–15)].«
She's probably putting the cart before the horse... light or troubled sleep leads to more dreaming because REM sleep phase comes just before a waking or almost waking phase. Also, you most vividly remember those dreams that happen just as you are waking up, so the more often you wake the more intense your dreaming seems.
She says she feels tired because she feels she lives paralel lifes in her sleep.
But objectively she has NONE of the symptoms of bad sleep I get when I can't actually sleep.
So she maybe just feels emotionally tired for the first 5 minutes after she wakes up.
I once gave her my fitbit and checked her sleep -- she had almost no restless sleep like I do, she had a lot of REM and a lot of deep sleep, I'd love to have her sleep pattern.
Consider that maybe the intense dreams are a reflection of physical processes in the body that cause sleep to not be restful. That is, both intense dreams and not feeling rested are maybe caused by the same underlying thing.
To the best of my knowledge, I’ve never dreamed (I’m almost 50 years old). I’ve always wondered what that means about my brain. Is there a medical or psychological label for people who don’t dream?
Healthy people dream several times a night and don't remember most of their dreams upon waking.
Have someone monitor your sleep and wake you up when observing REM. There's a good chance you'll remember the dream you're currently in, and feel the disappointment of not knowing how it ends...
I’m pretty sure I haven’t been on medication (other than the occasional aspirin) or weed for the past 50 years. Something natural has prevented dream recall my entire life.
I dream fairly frequently but I'm very rarely myself or in a place I've been before or with people I know. Dreams are weird and I wouldn't worry about it too much.
I don’t buy it. Dreaming is computationally/metabolically expensive. If the sole purpose was to prevent plasticity then there would be far cheaper ways to accomplish the same result.
Interesting. Recently my cat's vet (who's also a researcher) told me that the best guess they have is that animals dream about the things they did in the day so they can create long term memories. Wonder if it's the same for humans.
Well, why are you implicitly insisting on the unproven theory that "sleep serves just one single purpose" - one that no one else has proposed? What if sleep is needed for more than one reason? Is the complexity of the world so hard to fathom that you throw up your hands and yell 'bullshit' on the first hint of challenge!
Lol. Please quote where I’m saying this. I never wrote that phrase you quoted in your comment. Are you trying to lie? :)
Better read my words one more time:
“People see dreams not every time they sleep, not every night, sometimes we can have multiple nights without dreams. By this moronic theory our “visual cortex” should be modified to “blind mode” just in the first night of sleep without dreams.”
Clearly “your reading comprehension wasn't up to par to tackle it in one pass” ;)
No, whatever their visual cortexed had been repurposed to do would be preserved. They might dream in "clicks". But I'm inclined to disregard this theory, it's overly simplistic, and doesn't explain vast reaches of sleep phenomena.
You and they making a mistake saying that blind people should not see dreams. I wonder how such an idiotic idea reached the HN at all. It's Daily Mail level.
People see dreams not every time they sleep, not every night, sometimes we can have multiple nights without dreams. By this moronic theory our “visual cortex” should be modified to “blind mode” just in the first night of sleep without dreams.
Articles containing words “Mother Nature” are only good for religious organizations, homeopathy lovers and other imbeciles.
I would recommend rereading the article, your reading comprehension wasn't up to par to tackle it in one pass. Also you're assuming a TON of things that were never suggested. Jumping to conclusions won't help you read what was written I'd say
This is a central claim in the article that's just stated and taken for granted.
In my experience, at least, dreams are not primarily visual. They have a visual component, but also a vague auditory component, a motor-experience (feeling of movement) component, etc., and all of those feel equally important. And most of all, there is a "felt experience" component that actually feels like the primary element of it; emotion is the core element of that, but a better description is "the lizard brain's interpretation" of what's happening in the dream, that feels like the central element of the dream.
The visual part is also not in full colour generally, in my case, it's like early movies during the transition from black-and-white, with slight colour tints generally towards the bluish colour regions.
I'm curious what others' dream experiences are like, and in particular whether it's the case that most people do experience them as primarily visual.