Dreams may help your brain sort information

“What is the scientific probability of your dream coming true?” asked a young patron at the Arlington Heights Memorial Library.

Dreams from sleep are often analyzed as a means to better understand emotional states. Everyone must sleep, and everyone dreams, though dreams are not often remembered. Dreaming most often occurs during the final sleep stage before waking, accounting for about 25 percent of sleep time. This is called the REM stage: rapid eye movement. Sleeping dogs and cats experience REM, and, just like people, their eyes dart back and forth underneath closed lids. During REM, signals race to the brain's center for learning, thinking and organizing and at the same time the brain dispatches signals to the spinal cord to stop muscle movement. It may seem that the rapid eye movements are an attempt to watch action during a dream, but Dr. Thomas Andrillon of the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique in Paris and Dr. Yuval Nir of Tel Aviv University identify REM as a way the brain changes visual imagery, like moving from one scene to another. Dreams show incredible creativity and imagination, illustrating improbable actions and outcomes. Sometimes dreams are frightening. Experts believe dreams help organize and process learning. Without sleep, people are less capable. When there's sleep with dreams, people tend to feel more refreshed. The National Sleep Foundation recognizes National Sleep Awareness Week, March 10-16 in 2019, as a way to promote good sleep practices. This year's theme “Begin with Sleep” highlights the personal, family and professional gains possible with optimal sleep. Sleep and dreams are a relatively new area of research, and there's still more to learn. While data has revealed increased brain stimulation during the fifth sleep stage, there's been little formal documentation to connect dreams to outcomes. A “Neurology Times” article from this year asserts that dreams are realities, that dreams are “ ... essentially putting concrete signs that are collected during waking hours together to form a reasonable deduction about their implications.” The age-old advice “sleep on it” makes sense if you're trying to increase the probability that dreams will come true.