You Need to Sleep, But Did You Know You Also Need to Dream?

When you don't get enough sleep, you may feel less alert, less energetic and maybe even more confused, irritable and fatigued. Lack of sleep affects not only your energy level but also your mental and social functioning. You may find it more difficult to concentrate; or find that you lose patience quickly, become less interactive in your relationships and that you are less productive at work and more prone to accidents. Each night that you do not get enough sleep makes the next day worse. All these effects on the body are not only from lack of sleep, but also from lack of dreaming.

Waking up during the night may not be the problem? You need sleep just as much as you need air, water and food. But your sleep/dream cycle also makes you wake up during the night.

As you go through the stages of sleep, it is normal to be awake for short periods during the night. In fact, you should expect to wake up at least four times during the night because the various stages of sleep occur in 90-minute cycles all through the night (you can test this by checking the clock before you go to sleep at night, and again when you wake up during the middle of the night.)

This means that if you sleep for six hours a night, you will have four "dream cycles," which you should be using to access information (most people dream an average of 100 minutes a night).

When you dream your subconscious takes over and works to sort out the challenges of the day. It attempts to answer your questions and give you helpful advice through the images in your dreams. For this reason, you should give you subconscious something specific to work on, so it doesn't just go off and randomly try to find information on whatever it thinks is the most important thing to you. When you direct your subconscious by asking the right questions before you go to sleep, it takes those questions and goes to work, using any input that it has been fed, and anything it can gather from the outside. Your subconscious believes everything is real, true and possible, which is why it will come up with things you may not have thought of before.

The reason you may not remember your dreams is that in REM sleep (where dreaming occurs) the brain cells that secrete the chemicals needed for memory are shut off. This lack of memory capability causes a loss of self-reflective awareness, loss of critical judgment, and the loss of linear logic.

It is very important for you to try to remember what you dream in order to resolve any issues you may have. Do not immediately dismiss any information you receive in your dreams as impossibility. If you are going to dream for 100 minutes a night, it is worth taking a moment to remember those dreams when you wake up throughout the night.

That million-dollar idea may be presenting itself to you tonight, so sleep well, and remember!