How meaningful are dreams?

Dreaming occurs during a state of unconsciousness and is a widely researched area of psychology. Most of the research focuses on dream content, what does it mean? Is it important?

Sleep is split into 5 broad stages which make up one cycle. It usually takes about 90minutes to complete a sleep cycle- so depending on how many hours sleep a night you get the amount of sleep cycles completed will vary. The first 2 stages of sleep are called "light sleep", stages 3 and 4 are "deep sleep" and the 5th stage is called REM sleep ( Rapid Eye Movement sleep). If you actually watch people sleep (very weird) you are able to see when they are in the REM stage of sleep as you can see the eye balls moving under the eyelids. During REM sleep your muscles are also paralysed. A theory as to why, centres on the fact that if people acted out their dreams it could cause them or others physical damage.

It is believed that dreaming occurs during the REM stage of sleep, so once every sleep cycle. The amount of time a person spends in REM sleep is thought to increase throughout the night. So it could start as 5 minutes in the REM stage and end with 40 minutes. This implies that we have maybe 5/6 or 7 dreams a night depending on the amount of sleep you get. Many people don't recall dreams the next morning and find it difficult to believe they have had 4/5 dreams overnight. It is much more likely that you will remember a dream if you wake during the REM stage of sleep or are acutely aware during the lighter stages of sleep.

Clearly dreams are incredibly important as people who are sleep deprived enter REM sleep much quicker than people who have adequate sleep, demonstrating the importance of REM sleep on cognitive functioning. So are dreams just meaningless babble or is their content important? One theory is that dreaming provides an opportunity for connections to be made across memories which haven't been connected throughout the day. Another theory is that dreaming provides an outlet for the days/weeks/months sometimes years worth of irrelevant information that needs to be cleared from the brain. Our brain is bombarded with input regrading people, environments, events and dreaming can provide a way of sifting the unnecessary bits out. Freud was a big believer in examining dream content as he posed it provides an insight into our unconscious as our conscious is unable to inhibit or censor the content of dreams.

An interesting fact is that the most common emotion felt in dreams is Joy, followed by anger, followed by fear.

Information obtained from The Psychologist magazine, volume 22