Dreams, Sleep, and
the Nervous System

Your brain may not need to dream, but the act of dreaming itself may just be a happenstance that occurs while you sleep. Although, studies have proven that sleeping is important and is beneficial for all aspects of your life.

Sleeping helps improve focus, helps you learn skills at a heightened ability, develops our brain and allows us to hold onto memories better.

During NREM sleep individual memories can be enhanced and strengthened. On the contrary during REM sleep, you are dreaming the most, memories are able to be blended and connected through your brain.

Similarities are being extracted, as well as the differences and rules of all the information you learn are being understood and confirmed during REM sleep.

This process conducted by your brain can help put you into a more creative and heightened mindset.

These ideas are proven by a study that was conducted, where participants were tasked to solve anagram puzzles after being woken up while sleeping. People who were woken up in NREM sleep showed slower results and were only able to solve a few puzzles. While people who were woken up in REM sleep showed exponentially more promising results, being able to solve most of the puzzles with ease.

Further demonstrating that creativeness, brain activity and the movement of signals throughout the brain is tied to what sleep cycle you are in. Showing that your brain is the most active during REM sleep.

During waking hours, most of your brain and nervous system is actively helping us function in our day to day lives. As well as many other parts of the nervous systems, which are working together in order to help your body function throughout the day.

Your cerebellum, which controls your coordination and balance.

Your pons and medulla oblongata are regulating the autonomous systems of your body.

Your frontal lobe is processing and taking in information from your senses to store and place into memory.

As well as many other parts of the nervous systems, which are working together in order to help your body function throughout the day.

Though, during sleep other parts of your brain have been tested to show that a greater amount of neurons are firing and forming connections in regions of your brain that aren’t primary to when you’re awake.

These regions include your hippocampus, which is responsible for your emotions as well as forming your long term memory.

Your amygdala, that has functions that control many parts of your emotional learning and behaviour.

The thalamus, which assists in the regulation of your sensory nerves as well as your consciousness, and general alertness.

Greater amount of inner segments of your brain corresponding to memory also have heightened activity.

Melatonin is produced in the pineal gland, which sends signals to your muscles to immobilize them. Which allows for more vivid dreaming and the brain to be more active, without moving your body to remain asleep.

The parietal lobe has been shown to have less activity, as the lobe mostly controls recognition. The lobe also includes the functions of coordination of visual and auditory stimuli, as well as spatial and body awareness.

Your pons region of the brain stem is vital in order for your brain to shift into REM sleep. As the nucleus reticularis pontis oralis (RPO) is responsible for REM sleep to occur.

This can only happen after two nuclei in the pons, that function to keep your body awake, cease neurotransmitters from firing.

The frontal lobe of your brain, even during REM sleep, is sending motor signals to the rest of your body in order to react to the subject you are dreaming about, even though your body does not move.

Your body stays still during your REM sleep because of REM atonia, which is a function of the brain that cuts off motor signals at the brainstem in order for you to stay immobile.

Sleep atonia does allow for neuron motor signals to fire which is the cause for rapid eye movement during REM sleep. Sleep atonia also allows for respiratory functions; this is the reason you can breathe while you are asleep.

REM sleep is caused by the brain’s activity being heightened which in turn causes your blood pressure to rise, your heart rate, and your breathing to quicken.

Your muscles are also immobilized from the neck down during this stage of sleep, this allows your eyes to dart around rapidly.

As the functions of your parietal lobe’s activity is decreased, no visual information from your eyes is being received while you dream. This causes your brain to create virtual images for you to see while dreaming.

Dreams were first studied when the existence of REM (Rapid-eye-movement) sleep was discovered in 1953 by scientists, Aserinsky and Kleitman.

REM sleep is a phase during your sleep cycle that occurs before you transition back to the lightest phase of sleep.

It is at this stage that most dreams occur, as your brain is in its most active stage, creating dreams and nightmares for you to experience.

Some dated methods of studying dreams from 1978 include, Herman, a scientist in this field had all of his participants take a placebo pill.

The participants were then told that they would be unable to recall what they had dreamt about. But to his surprise a greater number of people gave insight to Herman about their dreams, compared to an experimental group.

Another study of dreams was conducted by Stickgold, he observed that the longer participants remained in REM sleep compared to NREM (Non-REM) sleep, the greater the participants ability was to recall dreams.

Parasomnias are unwanted or distressing, behaviours, movements, thoughts and dreams during sleep.

Nightmares are a sleeping distress also known as a parasomnia that occurs during REM sleep and they can be caused by a number of factors. Including experiencing a scary or terrifying event while you are awake.

Stress

Anxiety

Depression

Lack of Sleep

Thus your brain causes these memories to be recalled during REM sleep. These feelings and thoughts can then be transformed and shaped into nightmares which often lead to stress and anxiety.

Sleep terrors are a parasomnia that occurs during the deepest stage of your sleep, the phase before REM sleep.

This parasomnia happens mostly to children.

Trauma, stress or fevers can cause sleep terrors.

They can also occur if someone has underlying conditions. These being restless legs syndrome or sleep apnea.

When someone is being affected by a sleep terror they are still asleep, and are difficult to wake up.

Upon waking the person being affected usually does not remember anything about the terror, and sometimes does not recognize anyone around them, or the place they are in.

Sleepwalking can also coincide with sleep terrors.

Sleepwalking is a parasomnia where the person being affected moves around while sleeping.

This parasomnia can also have a greater intensity where someone can perform activities such as preparing food or using the restroom.

Sleepwalking is usually caused by stress or fatigue as well as having an inconsistent sleep schedule.

Though sleepwalking has no definite cause, it has also been hypothesized that it’s cause is the delay of maturity in the central nervous system.

Slowed brain development has been shown to increase the likelihood of sleepwalking which was studied on common fruit flies.

The population of fruit flies with lower brain development showed greater signs of sleepwalking.

Sleep walking and other parasomnias can be predicted through family history.