Perchance to Dream

This morning I was awakened by the phone ringing at 7:47. I was in the middle of a dream and it took me a minute to shift gears and attend to my caller. I expected the call to be from my husband, who will be winging his way home from California today. However, it was the nice man from the lumberyard, calling to say our order had arrived. He had lots of questions and I found it difficult to coordinate my brain with my mouth, which was dry and not ready to work. Two hours later my brain still felt foggy. I think it was because I was in the middle of a dream that got cut off before its time. I am a vivid, lucid dreamer. Several times each week I report, in detail, the previous night's dream to my husband. He thinks this habit of mine is rather bizarre, because he rarely remembers his dreams. Humans spend about 6 years of their lives or 2 hours each night dreaming, so I think not remembering is a shame. When I gave up smoking in 1996 and wore a nicotine patch to help me break the habit, one of the side effects I experienced was an increase in vivid dreaming and the dreams seemed extremely odd, but life like. What I know about dreams from reading about memory is our dreams appear to be part of the process we use to consolidate information in our long term memory. Sleep and dreaming are really important. Non-REM sleep, the sleep we get when we don't have Rapid Eye Movements, helps us consolidate declarative memory. That is our memory of facts, personal events, stuff we learn in school, the "what" of memory. REM sleep helps us consolidate procedural memory, the "how" of memory, such as how to ride a bike, drive a car, swim, etc. Studies show that if one crams for an exam and does not get at least 7 1/2 hours of sleep afterwards, the ability to recall the information that was studied is significantly impaired. Dreaming also replays informations to consolidate it or "re-file" the information in a new way and also delete information that is no longer necessary or useful. That may explain the crazy connections that appears in dreams.

At times the solution to problems that I have had difficulty figuring out and solving in my waking hours have been presented in my dreams. Also, a few times I have dreamt about something happening and then woke to find it happening. Spooky. These non-linear events are the kind that make dreams seem magical. For centuries people have reported visitors appearing to them in dreams, to tell them to do or not to do something. From my old Chemistry Club days in high school I remember how August Kekule sought to discover the structure of benzene, and in 1886 as legend has it, discovered the answer in a dream. So cool. There has been much speculation about the function of dreams from psychiatrists and psychologists. Freud (wish-fullfillment), Jung (commumicating with your unconsciousness), Adler (tool to help problem-solve), Hall (visual representation of thoughts), Hartmann (expressions of emotional states), Griffin (lowers stress by completing patterns of emotional expectation) and others had their own understanding of the function of dreams. All I know is that sometimes, as I wait for sleep to slip over me, I think thoughts of what I hope to dream and that sometimes makes for a lovely night.