Researchers are beginning to conclude that dreams are a form of therapy that occurs while we sleep. An experiment was done in which 34 people were shown 150 pictures that were quite emotion-involved right before being sent to sleep, doing brain activity scans throughout the process. For all who saw the pictures, they had a high involvement of REM causing several dreams to occur. The next morning the same people were shown the pictures but were less affected emotionally by the same pictures that they had been shown the previous day. This made researchers believe that dreams are possibly used in the sense of therapy and are to help people deal with emotional defaults in our lives. Although this is an exciting find to all those involved in the researchers, it brings upon the thought that the reason for sleeping is still a mystery. It has been found that different disorders may cause different sleep patterns and known that sleep can sometimes allow one to feel better, but the question is whether or not sleep is related to a person’s emotional lives as dreams were found to be. There are still concerns as to whether the “dreams related to emotional therapy” can be set in stone yet. Expert David Kuhlmann argues that dreams may help with bad emotions towards something, but it can not necessarily cause them to totally go away.
I have personally always wondered the reason for dreaming. I thought this article was good because it not only related to the scientific part of the topic, but was also relatable to all humans since we have all dreamed at least at some point. The fact that they are considering dreams as a type of sleep therapy is interesting to me. I can recall several times in which something bad had happened recently or I had something/someone on my mind as I was falling asleep and having dreams about it for a night or two afterwards. It is very often heard of people going through traumatic events and waking up several times due to a “nightmare” dealing with the same situation. In this sense, I can see how it could possibly be considered sleep therapy. It is almost as if the brain keeps processing it during the night, making the recovery time of the thoughts of the situation seeming slightly shorter. I think overall the person is still forced to deal with the subject in some way, rather in this situation they would be dealing with it partly at night as well. One question I have with this though is how it will necessarily help with the scientific aspects of it. It could possibly help with people having sleep abnormalities allowing the scientists to unveil something that are causing the person stress or heartache. Maybe it could lead to somehow figuring out how to help the person sleep while touching on the dreaming aspect as well. I really don’t know if I would rather not sleep because of dreams related to something or not. Sometimes the dream of it is even worse than the reality. Either way, I think this could be a large step for researchers to discover and could possibly lead to an even larger outcome for later diagnostics and cures.
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