Not dreaming
I’ve heard people mention a “deep and dreamless sleep”. In one book (I think it was Harry Potter), someone was given a potion to induce this for better healing. Also, some people say dreams disturb their sleep, might cause them to wake up, etc. My friend says, “I kept dreaming last night” like it is a reason for not sleeping well.
Dreaming
On the other hand, dreams only occur during deep sleep. If you can reach this stage, it means you’re sleeping well/long enough. If you can’t sleep / take sleeping pills, you’re unlikely to achieve deep sleep.
I’ve heard that you forget your dreams if you wake up after they’re over - maybe by “dreamless”, people really mean they can’t remember their dreams? Personally, I prefer to dream. Is there any consensus on this?
When I was younger I used to go to sleep and wake up in the morning. Once in while I would remember a dream. Now I wake up several times a night and often remember what I was just dreaming. I think it’s great.
No dreaming. I have nightmares and sometimes night terrors - it’s an awful way to live. If I can just go to sleep and then wake up in the morning, I feel 100% better the next day than if I spent the night “dreaming” (in quotes because dreaming implies something not really, really bad. With me, dreaming is really, really bad.)
REM sleep (associated with dreaming) is necessary – people who “sleep badly” are often REM sleep deprived, and suffer psychological problems. Look up the wikipedia article for REM Sleep.
I said No Dreaming, but what I think I meant was, I prefer the nights when I sleep and do not remember my dreams. I wake feeling most rested when I cannot remember dreaming. Any night that I remember my dreams, I am more tired that morning.
When my sleep patterns are disrupted (trouble fallling asleep, waking too early, being too tired, etc.), I have extremely vivid dreams that I remember in detail. I don’t consider that to be a good sleep. When my sleep patterns are good, I typically don’t remember my dreams.
If I can go to bed, go to sleep, sleep straight through and wake up feeling refreshed, that’s a good night sleep. Dreams tend to wake me in the middle of the night.
I’d fall under other for this, I think - I don’t have any nights where there isn’t at least an impression of dreaming, or some vague leftovers as I wake up.
A night without that impression would make me feel like I hadn’t slept at all.
You can’t sleep well without dreaming, so I’ll take the dreams. But I prefer not to remember them. It’s very rare that I have a good dream, mostly they’re on the spectrum from “ugh-what-the-hell-did-I-just-do” to “night-of-the-living-dead-horrible.”
Rarely do I remember dreams; I wish I could. But I figure I’m havin’ 'em. The literary [del]cliche[/del] convention no doubt arises from the fact that most folks remember dreams only if woken in the middle of them; if your night was dreamfilled, thus, you were woken up many times.
I usually feel less rested after a sleep with remembered dreams, even if the dreams are pleasant.
My guess is that in a “dreamless” sleep, you’re too deeply asleep to form lasting memories of any dreams you may have. Most of your brain systems, including the ones that record memories, are resting. If you remember your dreams, those systems are doing at least some work intermittently, and therefore don’t get as much rest.
Yes. Essentially, people only remember their dreams if they wake up (maybe only barely and very briefly) while the dream is in progress. Remembering lots of dreams is a sure sign of not having slept well (although remembering the dream you were having just before you finally awoke at the end of the night is not too much of a problem)… On the other hand, sleep without dreams, that is, without REM, is abnormal (it can really only be achieved by heavy drugging) and not restorative.
The poll is unanswerable as written. The best night’s sleep means lots of dreams, but not remembering any of them.
You are quite right. Most people forget their dreams upon waking up. Usually, the dreams most easily remembered are the ones when the REM mode was interrupted by waking up.
I don’t feel like I’ve slept if I haven’t dreamt. I’ve done that before, and everyone will tell me I fell asleep, but I’ll swear I was just thinking.
As for the idea that people usually don’t remember their dreams unless they get interrupted: I may not actually remember the dream itself, but I will remember dreaming if I’ve slept long enough. And most of the time, I do remember what I’ve dreamt for a few minutes, at least.
Plus, you don’t just dream in REM sleep. That’s just when you have the dreams are most vivid. Some think we dream all the time, but don’t notice when we are conscious.
No. Except perhaps for a very short nap, the first almost never occurs, and if it does occur, is a result either of some sort of neuropathology, or heavy drugging, so, not good at all.
So your sleep was interrupted by brief moments of wakefulness. That is common enough and not necessarily a problem.
This is true. The fact seems to e that people always report a dream if they are woken during REM sleep, but sometimes will report one if waken during non-REM sleep too. I think non-REM dreams tend to be more verbal than visual, though. As I understand it, it is more like rather incoherent and repetitive conscious thinking rather than the largely visual experience of REM dreams.
