Sleep If You Can And Dream If You Can't

When it comes to high order thinking skills and labyrinthine questions, we trust the experts the most. we know they won’t let us down as their domain expertise keeps them in good stead. At times, however, this perception goes for a toss and all myths regarding experts stand punctured. Sleeping and dreaming are one of them.

A few days ago one of my bosom friends asked me a question: can I not sleep and put myself into more productive hours? Another friend of mine having troublesome time sleeping, hardly he can sleep for more hours than advised elsewhere and a different boon companion catechized about horrible dreams that she used to have every time to which I generally ask myself am I normal enough to not have frequent dreams.

Famous Comedian Mike Birbiglia was having trouble with sleep, one night while staying in the hotel room he dreamt that one missile guided him to his bed and for these ramifications, he jumped out of the window to escape it. Unfortunately, he didn’t do this in his dreams and it was from the 2nd floor, this whole thing cost him thirty-three stitches and a trip to sleep specialists. Thus sleep is not some break time where our brain and body go dormant.

why we sleep in the first place, what goes on in the brain when we do sleep, what happens when we can’t sleep, and a lot about dreams. Though it might seem that, we are dead when we sleep, our perceptual windows remain slightly open. Technically sleep is a periodic, natural, reversible, and near-total loss of consciousness, meaning it’s not hibernation and being in a coma or anesthetic oblivion. we spend one-third of hour lives sleeping and we know that it’s essential to our health and survival but there’s still not any scientific consensus why do we do it?

Researcher in a sleep experiment, Eugene Aserinsky discovered REM sleep; Rapid eye movement he went on to demonstrate that this “rapid-eye-movement” was correlated with dreaming and a general increase in the brain activity which goes bonkers with brain waves when we actually sleep. In between all these, what we may feel called hypnagogic sensations; those brief moments when we feel like we’re falling and our body jerks and we startled. More so, while we actually start to dream there’s a lot going on with eyes rather than the main conscious mind which grants vivid visual dreams and provides for the namesake, certain mythological achievements.

Obviously sleep is super important and lack of sleep is terrible for health, mental ability, and mood. In fact, it’s predictive for depression and linked to weight gain and immune system suppression which you can ask an insomniac person who is having recurring problems in staying and falling asleep. Then we got Night terrors which are terrible as creepy sounds, increased heart rates and screaming unlike the nightmare, which occurs like most dreaming but Ohh… nightmares, what dreams may come, there you go- snakes all around you, clowns chasing you, falling from a colossal building, seeing the dead and after which you wake up thinking WHAT WHAAT WHAAAT WHAAAAAAAT.

Yes for sometimes we have really crazy dreams but mostly our dreams unpack and reshuffle what we did for that day or our daily routines. But what’s the real purpose of dreaming? Am I right!!. why do we do this? to answer this read- “The interpretation of dreams “ by Sigmund Freud in which he told it offers what’s called Wish fulfillment, in other words, it manifest content the pieces of stuff you remember in the morning was just sort of symbolic version of inner conflicts that were going on — latent content. Dreams draw on our knowledge and understanding of the world, mimicking reality. Another theory told us that dreams are nothing but accidental side effects of thinking, imagination, and brain neural rewiring- brain attempts to weave a story out of a bunch of random sights and emotions.

For now, if you are awake while reading it or just acting like a chicken, can you promise me one thing!!- that you will dream today, if not, then I am speechless for your cognitive imagination………..period!!!!! and thanks and have a nice day.