Does dreaming interfere with sleep

Dreaming is normal brain activity and is part of the sleep cycle, especially during rapid eye movement (REM sleep). Usually, dreaming does not have a negative impact on sleep quality, but rather it is a way for the brain to process daytime experiences, emotions and memories, which has its positive effects on mental health.

However, if dreams are too vivid, nightmares are frequent, or if you wake up feeling tired or anxious, it can affect the quality of your sleep. For example, frequent nightmares may interrupt sleep cycles and cause frequent awakenings, which can affect overall recovery from rest. In addition, if you are overly worried about the content of your dreams and cause psychological stress, it may also indirectly affect your relaxation and sleep at night.

Japanese scientists have isolated two sleep-related peptides in the human brain, one is dreamless sleep peptide and the other is dream-promoting sleep peptide, and they have studied this. Researchers used dream-promoting sleep peptides to prolong the dream-dreaming sleep time of animals, and found that most of these animals had a longer lifespan, which proved that dreaming is beneficial to health from a certain perspective, thus overturning the long-standing saying that dreaming during sleep will affect people’s health.

To be precise, in the process of dreaming, the dreamer will constantly adjust himself, turning various stimuli received during the day into perception and weaving them into the specific plot of the dream. Once this stimulus is responded, the dreamer can continue to sleep peacefully, which is also the basis for a healthy sleep. Freud revealed this peculiarity of dreams early on, and he explained that dreams not only help us release our spirits, but more importantly, they maintain our sleep. Freud made a very detailed analysis in “The Interpretation of Dreams”, saying that if you are thirsty and want to drink water, when you are cold, you want to dress, if you are hungry and look for food, and other stimuli cannot be realized in dreams, then it is easy to wake up. On the contrary, if you want to sleep soundly, you can only rely on the realization of dreams to alleviate it, but at the same time, you will also present anxiety. For this reason, Freud called dreams “guardians of sleep.”