Dreams And Sleep | Gentle Bedtime Reading

Drift off with this calm bedtime reading on dreams, designed to soothe your mind and ease insomnia. Sleep peacefully as you explore the fascinating world of dreams, their meanings, and the science behind them. Learn about how and why we dream, the stages of sleep linked to dreaming, and the many theories that try to explain our nighttime visions. Benjamin’s soothing voice guides you through each fact with gentle clarity—no whispering, no hypnosis, just calm, educational reading to ease stress, anxiety, and sleepless nights. Press play, relax, and let your thoughts wander as you drift into restful sleep. Happy sleeping!

Transcript

Welcome to the I Can't Sleep podcast,

Where I help you drift off one fact at a time.

I'm your host,

Benjamin Boster,

And today's episode is about dreams.

A dream is a succession of images,

Dynamic scenes and situations,

Ideas,

Emotions,

And sensations that usually occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep.

Humans spend about two hours dreaming per night,

And each dream lasts about 5 to 20 minutes,

Although the dreamer may perceive the dream as being much longer.

The content and function of dreams have been topics of scientific,

Philosophical,

And religious interest throughout recorded history.

Dream interpretation,

Practiced by the Babylonians in the 3rd millennium BCE,

And even earlier by the ancient Sumerians,

Figures prominently in religious texts in several traditions,

And has played a lead role in psychotherapy.

Dream work is similar,

But does not seek to conclude with definite meaning.

The scientific study of dreams is called oneirology.

Most modern dream study focuses on the neurophysiology of dreams and on proposing and testing hypotheses regarding dream function.

It is not known where in the brain dreams originate,

If there is a single origin for dreams,

Or if multiple regions of the brain are involved,

Or what the purpose of dreaming is for the body or brain or mind.

The human dream experience,

And what to make of it,

Has undergone sizable shifts over the course of history.

Long ago,

According to writings from Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt,

Dreams dictated post-dream behaviors to an extent that was sharply reduced in later millennia.

These ancient writings about dreams highlight visitation dreams,

Where a dream figure,

Usually a deity or a prominent forebearer,

Commands the dreamer to take specific actions,

And which may predict future events.

Framing the dream experience varies across cultures,

As well as through time.

Dreaming and sleep are intertwined.

Dreams occur mainly in the rapid eye movement,

REM stage of sleep,

When brain activity is high and resembles that of being awake.

Because REM sleep is detectable in many species,

And because research suggests that all mammals experience REM,

Linking dreams to REM sleep has led to conjecture that animals have REM sleep.

However,

Humans dream during non-REM sleep also,

And not all REM awakenings elicit dream reports.

To be studied,

A dream must first be reduced to a verbal report,

Which is an account of the subject's memory of the dream,

Not the subject's dream experience itself.

So,

Dreaming by non-humans is currently unprovable,

As is dreaming by human fetuses and pre-verbal infants.

In Old English,

The word dream was used to describe noise,

Joy,

Or music,

But not related to the sleep-induced brain activity.

It was only in the 13th century that the word dream was used to describe a series of thoughts,

Images,

Or emotions occurring during sleep.

Etymologists believe that this change was influenced due to the Old Norse draumr,

Which had the same meaning as the word dream nowadays.

Preserved writings from early Mediterranean civilizations indicate a relatively abrupt change in subjective dream experience between Bronze Age antiquity and the beginnings of the Classical era.

In visitation dreams reported in ancient writings,

Dreamers were largely passive in their dreams,

And visual content served primarily to frame authoritative auditory messaging.

Gurdia,

The king of the Sumerian city-state of Lagash,

Reigned circa 2144-2121 BCE,

Rebuilt the temple of Nyungirsu as a result of a dream in which he was told to do so.

After antiquity,

The passive hearing of visitation dreams essentially gave way to visualized narratives,

In which the dreamer becomes a character who actively participates.

From the 1940s to 1985,

Calvin S.

Hall collected more than 50,

000 dream reports at Western Reserve University.

In 1966,

Hall and Robert Vandecassel published the Content Analysis of Dreams,

Outlining a coding system to study 1,

000 dream reports from college students.

Results indicated that participants from varying parts of the world demonstrated similarity in their dream content.

The only residue of antiquity's authoritative dream figure in the Hall and Vandecassel listing of dream characters is the inclusion of God in the category of prominent persons.

Hall's complete dream reports were made publicly available in the mid-1990s by his protégé,

William Domoff.

More recent studies of dream reports,

While providing more detail,

Continue to cite the Hall study favorably.

In the Hall study,

The most common emotion experienced in dreams was anxiety.

Other emotions included abandonment,

Anger,

Fear,

Joy,

And happiness.

Negative emotions were much more common than positive ones.

The visual nature of dreams is generally highly phantasmagoric.

That is,

Different locations and objects continuously blend into each other.

The visuals,

Including locations,

People,

And objects,

Are generally reflective of a person's memories and experiences.

But conversations can take on highly exaggerated and bizarre forms.

Some dreams may even tell elaborate stories,

Wherein the dreamer enters entirely new,

Complex worlds and awakes with ideas,

Thoughts,

And feelings never experienced before the dream.

People who are blind from birth do not have visual dreams.

Their dream contents are related to other senses,

Such as hearing,

Touch,

Smell,

And taste,

Whichever are present since birth.

The COVID-19 pandemic also influenced the content of people's dreams,

According to a scientific study of over 15,

000 dream reports by Deirdre Barrett.

This analysis revealed that themes involving fear,

Illness,

And death were two to four times more prevalent in dreams following the onset of the pandemic than they were before.

Dream study is popular with scientists exploring the mind-brain problem.

Some propose to reduce aspects of dream phenomenology to neurobiology,

But current science cannot specify dream physiology in detail.

Protocols in most nations restrict human brain research to non-invasive procedures.

In the United States,

Invasive brain procedures with a human subject are allowed only when these are deemed necessary in surgical treatment to address medical needs of the same human subject.

Non-invasive measures of brain activity,

Like electroencephalogram EEG voltage averaging,

Or cerebral blood flow,

Cannot identify small but influential neuronal populations.

Also,

FMRI signals are too slow to explain how brains compute in real time.

Scientists researching some brain functions can work around current restrictions by examining animal subjects.

As stated by the Society for Neuroscience,

Because no adequate alternatives exist,

Much of this research must be done on animal subjects.

However,

Since animal dreaming can be only inferred,

Not confirmed,

Animal studies yield no hard facts to illuminate the neurophysiology of dreams.

Examining human subjects with brain lesions can provide clues,

But the lesion method cannot discriminate between the effects of destruction and disconnection,

And cannot target specific neuronal groups in heterogeneous regions like the brainstem.

Denied precision tools and obliged to depend on imaging,

Much dream research has succumbed to the law of the instrument.

Studies detect an increase of blood flow in a specific brain region,

And then credit that region with a role in generating dreams.

But pooling study results has led to the newer conclusion that dreaming involves large numbers of regions and pathways,

Which likely are different for different dream events.

Image creation in the brain involves significant neural activity downstream from eye intake,

And it is theorized that the visual imagery of dreams is produced by activation during sleep of the same structures that generate complex visual imagery in waking perception.

Dreams present a running narrative rather than exclusively visual imagery.

Following their work with split-brain subjects,

Gazzaniga and Ledoux postulated,

Without attempting to specify the neural mechanisms,

A left brain interpreter that seeks to create a plausible narrative from whatever electrochemical signals reach the brain's left hemisphere.

Sleep research has determined that some brain regions fully active during waking are,

During REM sleep,

Activated only in a partial or fragmentary way.

Drawing on this knowledge,

Textbook author James W.

Collard explains,

A dream represents the brain's effort to make sense of sparse and distorted information.

The cortex combines this haphazard input with whatever other activity was already occurring,

And does its best to synthesize a story that makes sense of the information.

Neuroscientist Indre Viscontis is even more blunt,

Calling often bizarre dream content just the result of your interpreter trying to create a story out of random neural signaling.

For many humans across multiple eras and cultures,

Dreams are believed to have functioned as revealers of truth,

Sourced during sleep from gods or other beings.

Ancient Egyptians believed that dreams were the best way to receive divine revelation,

And thus they would induce or incubate dreams.

They went to sanctuaries and slept on special dream beds in hope of receiving advice,

Comfort,

Or healing from the gods.

From a Darwinian perspective,

Dreams would have to fulfill some kind of biological requirement,

Provide some benefit for natural selection to take place,

Or at least have no negative impact on fitness.

Robert,

1886,

A physician from Hamburg,

Was the first who suggested that dreams are a need,

And that they have the function to erase a.

Sensory impressions that were not fully worked up,

And b.

Ideas that were not fully developed during the day.

In dreams,

Incomplete material is either removed,

Suppressed,

Or deepened and included into memory.

Freud,

Whose dream studies focused on interpreting dreams,

Not explaining how or why humans dream,

Disputed Robert's hypothesis and proposed that dreams preserve sleep by representing as fulfilled those wishes that otherwise would awaken the dreamer.

Freud wrote that dreams serve the purpose of prolonging sleep instead of waking up.

Dreams are the guardians of sleep and not its disturbers.

A turning point in theorizing about dream function came in 1953,

When science published the Ozerinsky and Kleitman paper,

Establishing REM sleep as a distinct phase of sleep and linking dreams to REM sleep.

Until and even after publications of the Psalms 2000 paper that certified the separability of REM sleep and dream phenomena,

Many studies purporting to uncover the function of dreams have,

In fact,

Been studying not dreams but measurable REM sleep.

Theories of dream function since the identification of REM sleep include Hobson's and McCarley's 1977 activation synthesis hypothesis,

Which proposed a functional role for dreaming sleep in promoting some aspect of the learning process.

In 2010,

A Harvard study was published showing experimental evidence that dreams were correlated with improved learning.

Crick's and Mitchison's 1983 reverse learning theory,

Which states that dreams are like the cleaning up operations of computers when they are offline,

Removing or suppressing parasitic nodes and other junk from the mind during sleep.

Hartman's 1995 proposal that dreams serve a quasi-therapeutic function,

Enabling the dreamer to process trauma in a safe place.

Rivensoe's 2000 threat simulation hypothesis,

Whose premise is that during much of human evolution,

Physical and interpersonal threats were serious,

Giving reproductive advantage to those who survived them.

Dreaming aided survival by replicating these threats and providing the dreamer with practice in dealing with them.

In 2015,

Rivensoe proposed social simulation theory,

Which describes dreams as a simulation for training social skills and bonds.

Eagleman's and Vaughn's 2021 defensive activation theory,

Which says that given the brain's neuroplasticity,

Dreams evolved as a visual hallucinatory activity during sleep's extended periods of darkness,

Busying the occipital lobe and thereby protecting it from possible appropriation by other non-vision sense operations.

Eric Hole proposes,

Based on artificial neural networks,

That dreams prevent overfitting to past experiences,

That is,

They enable the dreamer to learn from novel situations.

Dreams figure prominently in major world religions.

The dream experience for early humans,

According to one interpretation,

Gave rise to the notion of a human soul,

A central element in much religious thought.

J.

W.

Dunn wrote,

But there can be no reasonable doubt that the idea of a soul must have first arisen in the mind of primitive man as a result of observations of his dreams.

Ignorant as he was,

He could have come to no other conclusion but that in dreams he left his sleeping body in one universe and went wandering off into another.

It is considered that,

But for that savage,

The idea of such a thing as a soul would never have even occurred to mankind.

In the Mandukya Upanishad,

Part of the Veda scriptures of Indian Hinduism,

A dream is one of the three states that a soul experiences during its lifetime,

The other two states being the waking state and the sleep state.

The earliest Upanishads,

Written before 300 BCE,

Emphasize two meanings of dreams.

The first says that dreams are merely expressions of inner desires.

The second is the belief of the soul leaving the body and being guided until awakened.

In Judaism,

Dreams are considered part of the experience of the world that can be interpreted and from which lessons can be garnered.

It is discussed in the Talmud Takhtet Berachot 55-60.

The ancient Hebrews connected their dreams heavily with their religion,

Though the Hebrews were monotheistic and believed that dreams were the voice of one God alone.

Hebrews also differentiated between good dreams from God and bad dreams from evil spirits.

The Hebrews,

Like many other ancient cultures,

Incubated dreams in order to receive a divine revelation.

For example,

The Hebrew prophet Samuel would lie down and sleep in the temple at Shiloh before the ark and receive the word of the Lord.

And Joseph interpreted a pharaoh's dream of seven lean cows swallowing seven fat cows as meaning the subsequent seven years would be a famine.

Most of the dreams in the Bible are in the book of Genesis.

Christians mostly shared the beliefs of the Hebrews and thought that dreams were of a supernatural character because the Old Testament includes frequent stories of dreams with divine inspiration.

The most famous of these dream stories was Jacob's dream of a ladder that stretches from earth to heaven.

Many Christians preach that God can speak to people through their dreams.

The famous glossary the Somniale Danielis,

Written in the name of Daniel,

Attempted to teach Christian populations to interpret their dreams.

Ian R.

Edgar has researched the role of dreams in Islam.

He has argued that dreams play an important role in the history of Islam and the lives of Muslims,

Since dream interpretation is the only way that Muslims can receive revelations from God since the death of the last prophet Muhammad.

According to Edgar,

Islam classifies three types of dreams.

Firstly,

There is the true dream,

Al-rutya,

Then the false dream,

Which may come from the devil,

Shaitan,

And finally the meaningless everyday dream,

Khulm.

The last dream could be brought forth by the dreamer's ego or base appetite based on what they experienced in the real world.

The true dream is often indicated by Islam's hadith tradition.

In one narration by Aisha,

The wife of the prophet,

It is said that the prophet's dreams would come true like the ocean's waves.

Just as in its predecessors,

The Quran also recounts the story of Joseph and his unique ability to interpret dreams.

In both Christianity and Islam,

Dreams feature in conversion stories.

According to ancient authors,

Constantine the Great started his conversion to Christianity because he had a dream which prophesied that he would win the battle of the Milvian Bridge if he adopted the Cairo as his battle standard.

In Buddhism,

Ideas about dreams are similar to the classical and folk traditions in South Asia.

The same dream is sometimes experienced by multiple people,

As in the case of the Buddha-to-be before he is leaving his home.

It is described in the Mahavastu that several of the Buddha's relatives had premonitory dreams preceding this.

Some dreams are also seen to transcend time.

The Buddha-to-be has certain dreams that are the same as those of previous Buddhas.

The Lalita Vistara states,

In Buddhist literature,

Dreams often function as a signpost motif to mark certain stages in the life of the main character.

Buddhist views about dreams are expressed in the Pali commentaries in the Milinda Panha.

In Chinese history,

People wrote of two vital aspects of the soul,

Of which one is freed from the body during slumber to journey in a dream realm,

While the other remained in the body.

This belief and dream interpretation had been questioned since early times,

Such as by the philosopher Wing Chung,

27-97 CE.

The Babylonians and Assyrians divided dreams into good,

Which were sent by the gods,

And bad,

Sent by demons.

A surviving collection of dream omens entitled Ishkar-Zakiku records various dream scenarios,

As well as prognostications of what will happen to the person who experiences each dream,

Apparently based on previous cases.

Some list different possible outcomes based on occasions in which people experienced similar dreams with different results.

The Greeks shared their beliefs with the Egyptians on how to interpret good and bad dreams,

And the idea of incubating dreams.

Morpheus,

The Greek god of dreams,

Also sent warnings and prophecies to those who slept at shrines and temples.

The earliest Greek beliefs about dreams were that their gods physically visited the dreamers,

Or they entered through a keyhole,

Exiting the same way after the divine message was given.

Antiphon wrote the first known Greek book on dreams in the 5th century BCE.

In that century,

Other cultures influenced Greeks to develop the belief that souls left the sleeping body.

The father of modern medicine,

Hippocrates,

460-375 BCE,

Thought dreams could analyze illness and predict diseases.

For instance,

A dream of a dim star high in the night sky indicated problems in the head region,

While low in the night sky indicated bowel issues.

Galen,

129-216 AD,

Believed the same thing.

Plato's student Aristotle,

384-322 BCE,

Believed dreams were caused by processing incomplete physiological activity during sleep,

Such as eyes trying to see while the sleeper's eyelids were closed.

Marcus Tullius Cicero,

For his part,

Believed that all dreams are produced by thoughts and conversations a dreamer had during the preceding days.

Cicero's Somnium Scipionis described a lengthy dream vision,

Which in turn was commented on by Macrobius in his Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis.

Herodotus,

In his The Histories,

Writes,

The visions that occur to us in dreams are,

More often than not,

The things we have been concerned about during the day.

The dreaming is a common term within the animist creation narrative of Indigenous Australians for personal or group creation and for what may be understood as the timeless time of formative creation and perpetual creating.

Some Indigenous American tribes and Mexican populations believe that dreams are a way of visiting and having contact with their ancestors.

Some Native American tribes have used vision quests as a rite of passage,

Fasting and praying until an anticipated guiding dream was received,

To be shared with the rest of the tribe upon their return.

Beginning in the 19th century,

Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud,

Founder of psychoanalysis,

Theorized that dreams reflect the dreamer's unconscious mind,

And specifically that dream content is shaped by unconscious wish fulfillment.

He argued that important unconscious desires often relate to early childhood memories and experiences.

Carl Jung and others expanded on Freud's idea that dream content reflects the dreamer's unconscious desires.

Dream interpretation can be a result of subjective ideas and experiences.

One study found that most people believe that their dreams reveal meaningful hidden truths.

The researchers surveyed students in the United States,

South Korea and India,

And found that 74% of Indians,

65% of South Koreans and 56% of Americans believed their dream content provided them with meaningful insight into their unconscious beliefs and desires.

The Freudian view of dreaming was believed significantly more than theories of dreaming that attribute dream content to memory consolidation,

Problem solving,

More as a by-product of unrelated brain activity.

The same study found that people attribute more importance to dream content than to similar thought content that occurs while they are awake.

Americans were more likely to believe to report that they would intentionally miss their flight if they dreamt of their plane crashing than if they thought of their plane crashing the night before flying while awake,

And that they would be as likely to miss their flight if they dreamt of their plane crashing the night before their flight as if there was an actual plane crash on the route they intended to take.

Participants in the study were more likely to perceive dreams to be meaningful when the content of dreams was in accordance with their beliefs and desires while awake.

They were more likely to view a positive dream about a friend to be meaningful than a positive dream about someone they disliked,

For example,

And were more likely to view a negative dream about a person they disliked as meaningful than a negative dream about a person they liked.

According to surveys,

It is common for people to feel their dreams are predicting subsequent life events.

Psychologists have explained these experiences in terms of memory biases,

Namely,

A selective memory for accurate predictions and distorted memory so that dreams are retrospectively fitted into life experiences.

The multifaceted nature of dreams makes it easy to find connections between dream content and real events.

The term veridical dream has been used to indicate dreams that reveal or contain truths not yet known to the dreamer,

Whether future events or secrets.

In one experiment,

Subjects were asked to write down their dreams in a diary.

This prevented the selective memory effect,

And the dreams no longer seemed accurate about the future.

Another experiment gave subjects a fake diary of a student with apparently precognitive dreams.

This diary described events from the person's life,

As well as some predictive dreams and some non-predictive dreams.

When subjects were asked to recall the dreams they had read,

They remembered more of the successful predictions than unsuccessful ones.

Graphic artists,

Writers,

And filmmakers all have found dreams to offer a rich vein for creative expression.

In the West,

Artists' depictions of dreams in Renaissance and Baroque art often were related to biblical narrative.

Especially preferred by visual artists were the Jacob's Ladder dream in Genesis and Saint Joseph's dreams in the Gospel according to Matthew.

Many later graphic artists have depicted dreams,

Including Japanese woodblock artist Okusai and Western European painters Rousseau,

Picasso,

And Dali.

In literature,

Dream frames were frequently used in medieval allegory to justify the narrative.

The Book of the Duchess and the vision concerning Piers Plowman are two such dream visions.

Even before them,

In antiquity,

The same device had been used by Cicero and Lucian of Samosa.

Dreams have also featured in fantasy and speculative fiction since the 19th century.

One of the best-known dream worlds is Wonderland from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,

As well as Looking-Glassland from its sequel,

Through the Looking-Glass.

Unlike many dream worlds,

Carroll's logic is like that of actual dreams,

With transitions and flexible causality.

Other fictional dream worlds include the dreamlands of H.

P.

Lovecraft's Dream Cycle and the never-ending stories world of Fantastica,

Which includes places like the Desert of Lost Dreams,

The Sea of Possibilities,

And the Swamps of Sadness.

Modern popular culture often conceives of dreams,

As did Freud,

As expressions of the dreamer's deepest fears and desires.

In speculative fiction,

The line between dreams and reality may be blurred even more in service to the story.

Lucid dreaming is the conscious perception of one's state while dreaming.

In this state,

The dreamer may often have some degree of control over their own actions within the dream,

Or even the characters in the environment of the dream.

Dream control has been reported to improve with practiced deliberate lucid dreaming,

But the ability to control aspects of the dream is not necessary for a dream to qualify as lucid.

A lucid dream is any dream during which the dreamer knows they are dreaming.

The occurrence of lucid dreaming has been scientifically verified.

O'Nyrenod is a term sometimes used for those who lucidly dream.

In 1975,

Psychologist Keith Hearn successfully recorded a communication from a dreamer experiencing a lucid dream.

On April 12,

1975,

After agreeing to move his eyes left and right upon becoming lucid,

The subject and Hearn's co-author on the resulting article,

Alan Worsley,

Successfully carried out this task.

Years later,

Psychophysiologist Stephen LaBerge conducted similar work,

Including using eye signals to map the subjective sense of time and dreams,

Comparing the electrical activity of the brain while singing awake and while dreaming.

Communication between two dreamers has also been documented.

The processes involved included EEG monitoring,

Ocular signaling,

Incorporation of reality in the form of red light stimuli,

And a coordinating website.

The website tracked when both dreamers were dreaming,

And sent the stimulus to one of the dreamers where it was incorporated into the dream.

This dreamer,

Upon becoming lucid,

Signaled with eye movements.

This was detected by the website whereupon the stimulus was sent to the second dreamer,

Invoking incorporation into the dreamer's dream.

The recollection of dreams is extremely unreliable,

Though it is a skill that can be trained.

Dreams can usually be recalled if a person is awakened while dreaming.

Women tend to have more frequent dream recall than men.

Dreams that are difficult to recall may be characterized by relatively little effect,

And factors such as salience and interference play a role in dream recall.

Often,

A dream may be recalled upon viewing or hearing a random trigger or stimulus.

The salience hypothesis proposes that dream content that is salient,

That is,

Novel,

Intense,

Or unusual,

Is more easily remembered.

There is considerable evidence that vivid,

Intense,

Or unusual dream content is more frequently recalled.

A dream journal can be used to assist dream recall for personal interest or psychotherapy purposes.

Adults report remembering around two dreams per week on average.

Unless a dream is particularly vivid,

And if one wakes during or immediately after it,

The content of the dream is typically not remembered.

In line with the salience hypothesis,

There is considerable evidence that people who have more vivid,

Intense,

Or unusual dreams show better recall.

There is evidence that continuity of consciousness is related to recall.

Specifically,

People who have vivid and unusual experiences during the day tend to have more memorable dream content and hence better dream recall.

People who score high on measures of personality traits associated with creativity,

Imagination,

And fantasy,

Such as openness to experience,

Daydreaming,

Fantasy-proneness,

Absorption,

And hypnotic susceptibility,

Tend to show more frequent dream recall.

There is also evidence for continuity between the bizarre aspects of dreaming and waking experience.

That is,

People who report more bizarre experiences during the day,

Such as people high in psychosis-proneness,

Have more frequent dream recall,

And also report more frequent nightmares.

Recording or reconstructing dreams may one day assist with dream recall.

Using the permitted non-invasive technologies,

Functional magnetic resonance imaging,

And electromyography,

Researchers have been able to identify basic dream imagery,

Dream speech activity,

And dream motor behavior,

Such as walking and hand movements.

Reviews

Interesting! Fortunately I only heard a few minutes of it. 😜
Thank you, Benjamin! 😻

Good one, Ben! It has put me to sleep twice already!! 🥱😴💤💤💤

Always the best educational random information to fall asleep to. I feel like I’m getting smarter as I dream.