The meanings of sleep and its benefits

Do you remember what you dreamed last night? Think about it: For something almost all of us do every night, remembering your dreams is a tall order. Studies show that we forget about 95% of a dream and almost immediately.

And this not only stops there, since making sense of your dreams can be even more difficult. That is why sleep therapy has become increasingly popular. Although we spend about two hours a night dreaming, we know very little about what dreams are and why we experience them.

We know that dreams are a type of hallucination and that we have them most often during stage five of REM sleep, the deepest stage of sleep. We also know that dreams play an important role in regulating our metabolism, blood pressure, and brain function. However, one critical question for which we still don't have a good answer is…

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Why do we dream?

The logic we use to navigate waking life doesn't stand a chance against dreams. Dreams seem to be based on recent experiences and problems we are facing, but

no consensus yet among mental health professionals about what is the purpose of dreams. Below I will tell you the most accepted answers.

1. Your dreams can be ways of coping with the emotional pain in your life.

While you sleep, your brain functions on a much more emotional level than when you are awake. This can allow your brain to make connections about your feelings that your conscious self doesn't. would, in the same way that psychedelics work, meditative trances or hypnosis.

2. Helps practice for future challenges

Your amygdala is one of the most active areas of your brain when you are dreaming. This part of your brain is responsible for the fight or flight response. This activity suggests that dreams could be the way that your brain simulates future threats to prepare for them; an instinctive biological survival mechanism that allows him to "learn how to avoid being eaten by a tiger without having to physically engage the actual threat." A fascinating conceptualization of the purpose of our dreams.

3. Helps classify and store memories

Dreams can be a way of rank which of your memories are important enough how to store them so that you can remember them efficiently later and which ones should be delegated to the subconscious or unconscious memory system.

• You may be interested in: "Types of memory: how does the human brain store memories?"

What is Sleep Therapy?

sleep therapy is the process of unraveling what dreams mean in relation to our waking lives. The dream interpretation process is symbolic and uniquely tailored to the dreamer. It is a collaborative process that draws on Freudian interpretation, Jungian symbols, transpersonal theory, and relational object introjections.

The goal of dream therapy is not necessarily to arrive at an unequivocal interpretation of a given dream, but to find meaning, usability, and emotional substance for the client through their dreams. For this reason, you may not be able to do substantive dream analysis simply by looking for symbols in your dream in a "dream dictionary".

It may be important to interpret your dreams under the guidance of an experienced psychotherapist or dream therapist. Psychotherapists, in general, are already trained to detect subconscious indicators of problems. Because dreams are often so abstract, detecting these indicators is more complex, but still similar to the process of individual therapy.

Dream therapy is rich in material and in many cases can be an empowering journey. The subject of dream interpretation has inspired the writing of hundreds of books and doctoral theses. Dreams are powerful. They make us feel strong emotions and remember seemingly forgotten experiences.

While dreams alone can seem completely abstract, dream analysis helps you understand them within the context of your life. This process of interpreting dreams is used by both psychotherapists and therapists of dreams, as it can be instrumental in helping patients understand themselves and their deepest desires deep.

• Related article: "Personal Development: 5 reasons for self-reflection"

What is useful for me to learn to interpret dreams?

These are the main benefits of this process.

1. Learn to interpret dreams

It is of great helps to know ourselves more, helps us decipher our fears and then understand and overcome them.

2. It can help us find the answers to our ills

It is a source of knowledge not exploited by the person who dreams, and allows to improve the quality of life.

3. You can help our loved ones!

In the case of children, some often suffer from nightmares that torment them and does not let them rest! The interpretation and dialogue with children is of great help to calm the degree of anxiety and reduce the number of nightmares.

Without going too far, understanding our children's dreams can be of great help to understand what they are going through and that they do not tell us out of fear or shame. It is known that children often dream of their aggressors in the case of violence, so knowing how to interpret dreams gives us an advantage to prevent.

4. It can promote a better family and couple relationship

Create a deeper bond by talking about your dreams. In this case, the Senoi tribe, described by its discoverer in 1930 as a peaceful and very happy society. This tribe has the peculiarity of analyzing dreams many centuries ago thanks to the work of the psychoanalysts Freud and Jung. In this tribe, all the members usually meet to comment on their dreams, to later be discussed in order to help the person overcome their fears.

5. We learn to remember more about our dreams

This entails a greater development of creativity and consolidation of learningAccording to Dr. Sara Mednick, taking a REM nap promotes productivity and creativity! As if that were not enough, dreams prepare us for future events, so remembering and understanding them will make us more successful in choosing a life project.

Examples of great dream recorders are: Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison induces lucid dreams!, Authors of great works such as: Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde, Frankenstein, Paul McCartney and the song Yesterday!

There are potentially infinite benefits in life to better understand our dreams, our unconscious mind, as Freud would say: The Royal Path to the Unconscious. In other words, the perfect way to enter a person's unconscious.