CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) -- Are your dreams are trying to tell you something? Maybe. But at the very least, sleep researchers said dreams may be trying to help you.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been creating some pretty strange dreams, sometimes even nightmares, for people, and a researcher said they're the result of the brain's effort to process and regulate emotional responses.
“Your brain is really actually trying to help you out. I think it is adaptive,” Dr. Jessica Payne, an associate professor of psychology at Notre Dame, told WSBT.
Payne, whose research includes how sleep and stress influence memory, said while not a lot is known about dreams and their function, it is known that stress and anxiety play a role - and that is what a lot of people are experiencing.
“We don’t have a full handle on dreaming as of yet. We don’t know exactly what they are, what causes them. We certainly don’t know much about their function,” Payne said. “Here is the thing about studying dreams. They are fundamentally subjective. You can’t objectively assess them. You have to rely on what people tell you they were thinking about while they were asleep. And it is retrospective. People have to wake up to tell you what they were just dreaming. So if it is subjective and retrospective as a scientist that is a really difficult think to study and you get into muddy waters very quickly.”
But Payne said there are things researchers do know.
“Your most characteristic dreams happen in Rapid Eye Movement sleep. The ones that are bizarre. They can be kind of creative. They often don’t make a lot of sense. They are highly emotional. Those tend to happen in Rapid Eye Movement sleep and especially Rapid Eye Movement sleep that is occurs later in the night closer to the time of awakening,” Payne said.
Payne theorizes that the chemicals and parts of our brains that are related to stress and arousal maybe what is generating the scary and strange dreams being reported around the world.
“It’s your brain's effort, I think, to process all of the emotion, all the uncertainty, all the stress. It is your brain's effort to regulate your emotional response to all of these events,” Payne said.
She told WSBT, she believes dreams are the brain's effort to regulate responses to what is happening.
“So when people ask me about their dreams I always say, pay less attention to the content and think about how the dream made you feel. Because I think what dreams are doing is they are really trying to process your emotions and your emotional experiences,” Payne said.
She said she is not surprised their is a massive uptick in dreams that are bizarre, negative, anxious, and scary.
“We are all globally being impacted by this. So I am not surprised there is a massive uptick in bizarre dreams, negative dreams, anxious and scary dreams because we are all under a lot of stress,” Payne said.
Payne said people are also reporting having trouble falling asleep at night and staying asleep. That is also impacting a person’s “sleep architecture” which in turn impacts dreams.
“So if you wake up in the middle of the night. Which is very common right now and you can’t get back to sleep. Your brain is selectively deprived of Rapid Eye Movement sleep so what that means is when you finally fall asleep an hour or two later you are going to have increased levels of Rapid Eye Movement sleep and because that is where those crazy, emotional, bizarre dreams occur you are more to wake up out of Rapid Eye Movement sleep and you are much more likely to remember those dreams,” Payne said.
She told WSBT the problem is we need our stress hormones to be low when we go to sleep at night and because of what is happening in the world, it has been hard for people to dial down at night.
She said, if your dreams are trying to tell you anything, it is that you should get those stress levels down during the evening and during the day.