Hi everyone, I am Hang. I love food, and my flat mate mentionedthat she might have someone over and bake an angel food’s cake real soon, and strangely that same night, I dreamt about being handed a thick slice of light, fluffy cake! This has inspired me to write about dreams, which I find to be such a peculiar phenomenon.
There are two types of sleep throughout the night, rapid-eye movement (REM) and non-REM. Like the name suggests, the REM phase of sleep involves the rapid, random movements of your eyes. It is also when the strangest of dreams happen. One of the weirdest ones I could recall was when a friend and I (after escaping from a broken-down rollercoaster ride at a night-time amusement park) discovered an underground farm that rear chickens with human faces and consciousness!
Nevertheless, I woke up with many ethical questions. This was an example of dream recollection; however, it is thought that you are less likely to remember what you’ve dreamt if you’ve woken up naturally rather than by an alarm (because you don’t want to be late for school) or your mum (because you are late for school). This is due to the particular stage of sleep cycle you find yourself in at the point of waking; sudden waking in the middle of REM results in worse dream memory (Izawa et al 2019).
Is non-REM sleep involved in dreaming too I hear you ask? Well actually, yes, it is. Non-REM sleep is a phase that your brain actively replays memories and events you’ve made when awake, which reinforces your memory. As REM and non-REM sleep constantly transitions through the night, it is very likely that some of the memories being replayed during non-REM sleep are incorporated into your odd dream during REM sleep, which could explain why you could sometimes experience recent real-life events in your dream, just as I have with the angel food cake.
Do you find that, sometimes, you have very strong emotions after a dream? This has personally happened to me before, where I had a gory nightmare of being kidnapped by Jeffree Star (a Youtuber for those who are unfamiliar). The stress I experienced in that dream was similar to the pressure I felt during exam season at that time! Aside from coming up with bizarre storylines, dreams can also help process emotions that you had throughout the day. They do this by stripping off the emotions you had with a real-life experience, and then merge them into the fantasies that your brain comes up with. Creating a new memory of your emotions helps us process it better. This is especially important as negative emotions that are not processed properly leads to more anxiety. Interestingly, disruptions in REM sleep also have shown to contribute to some mental disorders (Anderson, K. N., & Bradley, A. J., 2013).
And that’s it on my segment on dreams today! What’s your oddest dream? Hopefully next time you dream, try to recall as much as possible in a dream journal. That way you’ll have bizarre stories to share with your friends, and even better, write a novel about it if you can (I had a dream with a plot like The Walking Dead even though I have never watched it before until I told a friend about it)!
Here are some of the weirdest dreams of the members of the DNA team.
Laia: My weirdest dream... Well, the only one I can think of is not necessarily the weirdest, but the most vivid and worth remembering for me is one where I dreamed that we were in a pool with people from my school from different grades and all of a sudden out of the depths of the pool a crocodile just appeared so everyone started running and my sister got left behind and she was going to be eaten so I immediately stood in front of her for the crocodile to get me instead and then I woke up sweating and yelling. Not a fun one for sure and definitely very weird, like crocodile in a pool? How?
Stella: One of the few ‘weird’ dreams I can remember was when I was in high school. I wasn’t the most oganised person, but I was also deadly scared of getting into trouble for forgetting things. It must’ve been a particularly stressful time in Year 11 because I dreamt that I forgot to do a piece of my homework. I remember the teacher being particularly upset with me so gave me a detention (something that I hadn’t got yet- in the whole of high school). I was so scared it meant I would get my house captain badge taken off me so I woke up really stressed out, thinking it was real. Looking back it was actually really sad, but I used to take these things seriously!
Next Lily will entertain you with a blog about what scientific discovery looks like!
Check out these links if you want to learn more about the science of dreams:
Anderson, K. N., & Bradley, A. J. (2013). Sleep disturbance in mental health problems and neurodegenerative disease. Nature and science of sleep, 5, 61–75. https://doi.org/10.2147/NSS.S34842
Izawa S, Chowdhury S, Miyazaki T, Mukai Y, Ono D, Inoue R, Ohmura Y, Mizoguchi H, Kimura K, Yoshioka M, Terao A, Kilduff TS, Yamanaka A. (2019) REM sleep-active MCH neurons are involved in forgetting hippocampus-dependent memories. Science. ;365(6459):1308-1313. doi: 10.1126/science.aax9238. PMID: 31604241; PMCID: PMC7378274.
Spencer R (2019) The Science of Dreams. Front. Young Minds. 7:140. doi: 10.3389/frym.2019.00140
Sander L (2011) The Science Behind Dreaming. Scientific American. \
https://www.abc.net.au/science/sleep/facts.htm
A Ted-ED talk on why we dream: Why do we dream? - Amy Adkins
By: Hang Nguyen