Sleep is essential for a person’s mental and physical well-being, yet a CDC report found that one in three adults in the U.S. doesn’t get enough sleep. Another report by the American Medical Association revealed that approximately 30 million Americans live with insomnia.
A recent study to be presented at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society in Toronto on April 14, sheds light on the connection between sleep quality and dreams.
To understand the link, researchers from the University of Montreal conducted a study on 20 “good sleepers”, by waking them 12 times during the night and asking them whether they had been awake or asleep, how deeply they had been sleeping, what was last on their minds and how immersed they had felt in their dreams.
Simultaneously, the researchers measured the participant’s brain activity to determine whether they were actually asleep and where they were in their sleep cycle.
“Dreams are not studied a lot in the context of sleep quality,” Claudia Picard-Deland, who led the study, said in a statement. “The focus is more often on objective measures like brain activity or sleep stage, but I think we need to look closer at dream activity and its impact on how we perceive sleep.”
Many participants reported that they were awake even when they were in fact sleeping, which is a common occurrence during the early dreamless phase of sleep.
Dr. Remington Mallett, who is chairing a session at the meeting, said, “Understanding how dreams are generated and what their function might be — if any — is one of science’s biggest open questions right now”.
He added, “Because we don’t know much about dreams, it is hard to estimate their full impact on our waking lives. But current results suggest that indeed dreams influence our waking experiences”.
Sleep deprivation for a short-period could seriously affect a person’s attention span, judgment, emotions and cognitive function. But over time, it might lead to heart disease, obesity, neurodegenerative disorders and depression.
The research team plans to work towards sleep rehabilitation and dream training to support better perceived sleep quality without nightmares.
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