Remembering your dreams can help you sleep better

By Isobel Williams via SWNS

Creating dreams could help people with sleep disorders achieve deeper slumber, new research has suggested.

A unique study has discovered that the more you remember your dreams, the deeper you slept.

The University of Montréal researchers took 20 “good sleepers” and woke them up 12 times in the night to ask whether they had been awake or asleep, how deeply they were sleeping, what was last in their minds, and how immersed they felt in their dreams.

The team found that when the participants were able to recall their dreams, they perceived their sleep as deeper.

They also saw a shocking amount of sleep misperception — feeling awake even when electrodes measured they were asleep — especially in the early, dreamless stages of sleep.

As someone who has experienced insomnia her whole life, lead author Dr. Claudia Picard-Deland thinks it is crucial for people to realize that they may be sleeping more than they think.

She said: “It helped me to see it with my own eyes, happening in front of me, that participants were sleeping yet still felt awake.

“Dreams are not studied a lot in the context of sleep quality. The focus is more often on objective measures like brain activity or sleep stage, but I think we need to look closer at dream activity and its impact on how we perceive sleep.”

In the future the team hope to explore whether dream training-- teaching people how to experience more immersive lucid dreams-- could lead to better perceived sleep quality.

Dr. Picard-Deland’s research will be presented at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) in Toronto.

Dr. Remington Mallett, who is chairing a session at the meeting, said: “Understanding how dreams are generated and what their function might be — if any — is one of science's biggest open questions right now.

“Because we don't know much about dreams, it is hard to estimate their full impact on our waking lives. But current results suggest that indeed dreams influence our waking experiences.

“I think most scientists are skeptical that dreams can be studied, so before I tell them about what we found, I need to convince them that we can find something. That we have the methods and tools to make discoveries about dreams.”

He added: “You need to manipulate dreams for good experimentation, and you need to manipulate dreams to reduce nightmares.

“Nightmares are incredibly frustrating for a variety of clinical populations, and there is great need for approaches to reducing them.

“Understanding how dreams are formed, and how to change them, is already laying paths forward for efficient nightmare reduction protocols.”

Together a collection of sleep studies highlights the many different ways in which dreams can affect our waking lives and provide hope that new methods of dream manipulation could help insomnia sufferers.