The Brain Never Sleeps: Why We Dream and What It Means for Our Health

Next, I examine how dreams are made. I look at the mental mechanics of the dreaming brain to understand why our thoughts and experiences are so different in dreams. As we travel through a night of sleep, parts of the brain quiet down while other areas hum with activity. At certain points, different parts of our brain are as active as when we are awake. I learn how the dreaming brain works in a different mode, which changes how we think, behave, and imagine what is possible. We might fly through the air and convince ourselves it's really happening. Our dreams are as real to us as our waking experiences. For some of us, the nightly journey doesn't go so smoothly. REM behaviour disorder is a rare kind of sleep disorder that has people act out their dreams, sometimes with devastating and even fatal consequences.

While dreams aren't replays of waking life, they illuminate our preoccupations and worries that we are so skilled at avoiding during the day, from difficult conversations to facing our darkest fears or coping with many kinds of loss. Dreams offer new perspectives on ourselves and others. As I learned about the intrinsic connection between dreams and our mental health, I kept coming back to Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score. The book had opened up a new way of thinking for me on how we carry and process trauma. It made me think about how dreams know the score, revealing our true state of mind.

Dreams indicate how we are feeling and coping at the moment. They are a kind of natural warning system, signaling when to attend to our mental health. We can learn a lot from our dreams simply by paying attention to recurrent themes and unresolved issues. This highlights what is emotionally important to us and needs our attention. In speaking with scientists, I discover that we can be a poor judge of our level of stress and how it's affecting us biologically. Sometimes dreams tell a different story than the one we are telling ourselves. If we are struggling during the day, there is a good chance this will play out in our dreams.

Our everyday worries and preoccupations along with mental health struggles often become the focus of our dreams. About 50 percent to 70 percent of people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) suffer from recurrent nightmares, which can cause severe distress at night and during the day and sometimes continue for decades. Negative recurrent dreams can be distressing, although on a much milder scale, as we ruminate over unresolved thoughts, feelings, and situations. Upsetting dreams can follow us into the next day, creating a continuum of negative waking and dreaming thoughts.

I discover there is a positive side to this difficult dream work. Researchers have found that positive well-being, specifically peace of mind, can lead to positive dreams. So if we are able to create a calm mindset during the day, this might also improve our dream life. During the night, dreams offer a safe space to process difficult emotions. I find there are effective techniques to rescript nightmares and change our reactions to them. In this way, it makes each of us an empowered dreamer.

This brings me to the fundamental question that researchers have been exploring for more than a century: Why do we dream? I speak with many scientists to gain their different perspectives, which leads me to in-sleep as well as post-sleep effects of dreams. Does the work happen when we are asleep, and we benefit even if we don't remember our dreams? One idea is that we dream to strengthen and integrate memories into our existing catalogue of experience and knowledge. Another theory suggests that a dream is a nightly therapy session that helps us process emotional memories. Or could the value of dreams be found when we reflect on them in the morning?

In speaking with scientists, physicians, and psychologists, I've found that beyond their possible functions are the many ways we can use dreams in our everyday life. I try some of my own dream experiments, testing different tools and techniques to make the most out of my dreams. I use an AI dream analysis tool to interpret one of my dreams using Freudian and Jungian modes and then sit down with a psychologist to understand the results. I participate in my first

"dream salon" where some friends, avid dreamers, and researchers help me figure out a particularly strange dream while an artist brings my dream to life. I talk to people who have experienced a certain kind of "big dream," as Carl Jung called it, that transformed their lives. I discover the subtle revelations of little dreams from everyday life that can inspire big change.

I travel to the next frontier in dreaming where I meet dream engineers who are using technology to guide our dreams. I speak with a graduate student and her undergraduate subject who one January morning in Evanston, Illinois, opened the lines of communication between the waking and dreaming worlds. She asked the sleeping undergrad a math problem, and he answered with staccato left-right, left-right eye movements behind closed lids. Along the way, I gather tips and techniques on how to make the most of our dreams. I have shared some of these in the Dreamer's Toolkit at the back of the book.

Finally, I try an at-home dream experiment to guide my dreams during sleep onset, those first few minutes of sleep where Dalí found inspiration. The surrealist artist was in his late twenties when he painted The Persistence of Memory, a tiny canvas just over nine by thirteen inches that is like a portal into his vast dreamscape. It sold for $250. A few years later, it was donated to the Museum of Modern Art, where it is still on display.

I explore the physiology of the universal dream phenomenon and the psychology of this personal experience. On my tour of the dream world, I discover why dreams matter, how they are connected to our mental health, and ways we can use them to improve our waking and dreaming lives. Let's dream big.