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Getting Rid of Stress
About Those Crazy DreamsThe visions you have while sleeping can help you sort through problems in waking lifeYou’re falling down a bottomless tunnel…having a conversation with a polar bear… walking into a party stark naked. Are you the only person with dreams this weird?
“Everyone’s dreams are freaky,” says psychologist Mary Kaland, Ph.D., of Lehigh Valley Hospital and Health Network. “Dream images come straight from the unconscious, without the ‘filter’ we apply to our waking thoughts.” Chatting with an animal makes perfect sense in this realm, more akin to Alice in Wonderland than waking life. And we all go there—regularly. “Dreaming is a natural part of healthy sleep,” says Jay Kaufman, M.D., sleep specialist at Lehigh Valley Hospital and Health Network. In other words, people who insist they don’t have dreams probably just don’t remember them. For the most part, Kaufman says, dreams occur during the stage called REM (rapid eye movement), when the brain is most active. “You go through several gradually longer REM episodes a night, the longest just before you wake up,” he says. “That’s why you often remember a dream then.” Of course, a dream can wake you anytime, especially if it’s highly emotional. But even “nightmares” are a normal part of dreaming, Kaufman says—and no cause for alarm unless they’re frequent enough to interfere with sleep or daytime functioning. Dreams and sleep disordersSome sleep disorders are dream-related. One example is young children’s night terrors, which occur not in REM but in deeper delta sleep. The child may scream and sit up sweating, but doesn’t actually awaken and remembers nothing in the morning. The condition almost always is outgrown.Then there’s REM behavior disorder. “During normal REM sleep, your body is paralyzed except for a few muscles including the diaphragm,” Kaufman says. “It prevents you from acting out your dreams.” People with REM behavior disorder don’t have this protective paralysis and can damage themselves or their partner. The problem can be treated with medication. The meaning of dreamsIs there any point to dreaming? Or is it just “day residue”— leftover images that linger in your brain like the trash icon on your computer? While dream interpretation isn’t a part of mainstream counseling these days, Kaland says, you can gain much from paying attention to your dreams. “They are the way your unconscious speaks to you about feelings and issues you repress in waking life. Dreaming is one of the few ways to access that material,” she says.Anything that pushes you beyond the comfort zone can show up in your dreams. Take the case of a woman deciding on a divorce, who dreams her husband is on a boat sinking into a lake as she watches, distraught. There are several possible meanings here, Kaland says. The woman may be telling herself she’s still tied to him emotionally. She may be overestimating her importance to him (“he’ll drown without me”) or simply wishing he’d disappear. Or, the person on the boat may be herself, drowning within the marriage. “To get at the meaning of a dream—and often, there are multiple meanings—you have to think about it in the context of what’s going on in your life,” Kaland says. “Ask yourself, what do the symbols and people in this dream mean to me? How old was I in the dream? How did I feel when I woke up?” In Kaland’s experience, you typically don’t become aware of something through a dream until you’re psychologically prepared to deal with it. And if you’re open-minded enough to question what your dream means to you, it can clarify your thinking and lead you to a deeper understanding of yourself. “It’s been said that we can never fully understand what’s going on in our unconscious,” she says, “but we spend our whole life trying because that’s what makes life so interesting!”
Want to Know More about interpreting dreams on your own or with a group, or about the services of the Sleep Disorders Center at Lehigh Valley Hospital? Call 610-402-CARE or click here to download. This page last updated 2/12/08 04:08 PM
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