Sleep is a part of our lives that remains most mysterious and is very difficult to figure out. We dream a lot when we sleep. Why do we dream and where do they come from is a question that remains unanswered fully.
Long ago we thought that our brains rest during sleep and that sleep, is a dormant part of our lives. But it is not, our brain is fully active when we are asleep. Sleep is an essential part of our lives and without it, we won’t be able to survive.
Stages of Sleep:
To understand why do we dream we need to know about sleep in the first place. What we know about sleep is that we won’t be able to recognize that we are sleeping when we are asleep and even if we watch someone else sleeping we won’t be able to figure out what experience or changes they are going through inside.
But we know about the stages of sleep that might help out in the process of figuring out our dreams. We pass through five stages when we are asleep in a cycle that continues until we are awake.
1.Stage 1
When you are able to wake up easily and are often startled awake, it means that you are going through the first stage. This stage is also called light sleep. When awakened from this first stage people might encounter muscle contractions like hypnic myoclonia or hypnic jerks.
2.Stage 2 and 3
In stage 2, our eye movements stop and the brain wave fluctuations become slower but our brain produces occasional bursts of waves called “sleep spindles” to make the sleeping process faster. In stage 3, delta waves are produced, and the waves become much slower.
3.Stage 4
Stage 3 and 4 together called deep sleep and waking people up from this stage is extremely difficult and who wakes up from this stage is temporarily unconscious and groggy. The delta waves produced in stage 3 becomes faster in this stage.
4.REM sleep
In this stage, people experience many symptoms like shallow breathing, high blood pressure, and many others even sleep paralysis occurs in this stage of sleep. When awakened from this stage people might tell bizarre tales also known as dreams.
In the early night, REM sleep lasts around ten minutes and as the night goes on the REM sleep duration lasts longer. In the early morning, we almost spend the whole sleep in stages 1,2, and REM.
Dreams:
As mentioned above dreams originate in the REM stage. It is still not clear why and how people dream. The layer that is responsible for thinking and organizing is also responsible for the birth of the dreams.
REM sleep involves the part of the brain that is responsible for learning and scientists believe that dreams are an attempt by the cortex to make sense of the signals that received in consciousness by making it a story that we think of as dreams.
Many experts say we dream for no reason at all and many say that it is for our mental and physical health. Or it might be something that our subconscious is trying to tell something that we should know.
Edited By - Nidhi Verma
Written By - Jaime A.
0 Comments