How Bad Dreams Can Be Good for Us

Dreams are experiences we have while we sleep. They can make us feel happy or scared but what are they and how do they happen? Studies show that people usually dream for two hours each night, which means that by the time we reach 80, we spend nearly seven years dreaming. This must mean that there's a benefit to dreaming, right? Otherwise, why would we spend so much time doing it?

There are different phases our brain goes through while we sleep, which repeat in cycles throughout the night. First, we experience a transition to sleep. This is when we stop checking our phones and fall into a light sleep. Then, we enter the Deep Sleep phase, characterized by a pattern in our brain called delta waves. This phase means our brain is resting, and we're getting good quality sleep. Finally, we get to the R State, also known as the rapid eye movement state. This is when we dream. At this point, our brain is working almost as much as it does when we're awake, our breathing speeds up, and our body might even twitch a bit.

Almost half of us remember at least one dream a week, even though we have an average of four to six dreams every night. Women are more likely to remember their dreams than men, and this is because of their perception of detail. Dreaming helps regenerate our brains. Here's how it works: There are about 10 trillion neuroconnections within the architecture of the brain. These connections are created by everything we think and do daily. If we didn't have any mechanism to delete some of these connections, we'd be fried, literally.

A 1983 neurobiological theory of dreaming called reverse learning says that it's during our REM sleep cycles that our neocortex reviews these connections and decides what to do with them. That's when our brain cleans up, dumps the unnecessary connections, and keeps the important ones. In this theory, our dreams are the result of this unlearning process.

Say you've been dealing with some anxiety caused by your job. You don't know if you're going to get promoted, and all you can do is think about that all day long. Your brain will make up all of these different scenarios and play out a bunch of different interactions that end up never happening in real life. Some of these neural connections will be deleted from the database of your brain while you sleep. In this case, dreams would be our brains trying to let go of all of these not-so-important memories. That's also where the expression "sleep on it" comes from. After a hard day of work and stress, the best thing you can do is to get some sleep.

The famous scientist Aus Kay altered the path of organic chemistry after receiving some advice. One winter day, Kay was exhausted from trying to figure out the structure of benzene. He took a nap in front of his fireplace and saw floating molecules of hydrogen and carbon that makeup benzene while he was sleeping. These molecules turned into a series of snakes, and suddenly one of them coils and bites its tail, creating a circular figure. This moment gave Kay an idea, and he woke up instantly to draw the chemical structure of benzene. The problem was solved.

Does this also remind you a little bit of Inception? If it does, that's because Christopher Nolan took inspiration from his experience with lucid dreaming to write and direct this movie. Lucid dreaming is another mysterious type of dream state that scientists are still trying to understand. It happens when a person is aware that they are dreaming and starts to consciously narrate the course of their dreams. This is where you get to be the scriptwriter and director of your own life. Scientists speculate that lucid dreaming is not a state of sleep but rather a state of wakefulness where a person can establish the so-called two-way communication between dreaming and real life. Cool, huh?

Dreams can help us forget, and they can also help us make new and innovative neural connections, like what happened with this guy, Kay, in his snake dream. But this doesn't explain why some dreams have an uncanny quality to them. I'm talking about certain dreams that can feel like warnings or mysterious messages from some other plane of existence.

The superstitious approach to dreaming is something mankind has been cultivating since the beginning of time. Our ancestors have long questioned if our dreams hide deeper meanings in them and if we should interpret them as messages from the universe.