I can tell you, as a person who suffered (and I mean Suffered) insomnia for 8 years, and saw countless docs.. (the cause was stress, and docs don't treat that) .. the role for me is that it makes it work like I am a teen again. I can memorize youtube urls now, with some practiced chunking.
I had a similar discovery with sleep myself like that. I had been suffering from un-diagnosed severe complex sleep apnea for as best as we can figure 5-10 years. once starting sleep with a BiPAP machine to help with the breathing I went from having no REM sleep and no dreams to having them all the time. After about the first month I could finally remember what happened the day before clearly and without issue. The dramatic change did actually swing me a little more towards depression for a while simply because I could finally understand what I had been missing for so long and that there was nothing I could do to get it back. It was definitely an interesting experience.
