Dreams could be as vital to life as breathing, scientists claim

We’ve all been there. Tossing and turning through a sleepless night, anxiety levels rising as the hours slide by. In fact, insomnia affects a third of UK adults on a regular basis. 

We spend millions on sleep aids and remedies, and yet the more obsessed we become, the more we worry. With good reason, too.

We know that a good night’s rest reduces anxiety, keeps us focused and even helps to prevent heart disease and certain cancers. And yet sleep scientists are only just beginning to appreciate that dreaming, too, plays a key role in providing those benefits.

From the ancient Greeks to Sigmund Freud, mankind has long pondered the significance of dreams. I first became fascinated by them as a student and have spent the past three years researching their power.

But only now are we, as a society, starting to recognise their vital importance to our health.

Some scientists believe that dreaming is as fundamental to human life as breathing.

Harnessing the power of dreams all starts with learning how to remember them. And the good news is, it’s a skill that anyone can acquire…

Why ‘sleeping on it’ really does work

Dreams are an essential part of our body’s in-built mechanism for maintenance and repair. But they are crucial, too, to our mental health, which is why dream deprivation can be associated with depression and anxiety. 

They help us learn new skills, find answers to complicated problems and process stressful situations so we can deal with them calmly. They are like subconscious homework, repeating and refining what we’ve learned during the day, so we get better at it, even in our sleep. 

The oft-repeated advice that we should ‘sleep on it’ when wrestling with a dilemma is rooted in hard science.

One dream researcher gave 500 students copies of brain-teasers and instructions not to look at them until before bed, when they were to spend 15 minutes trying to solve the problems. 

In the morning they wrote down whatever dreams they could remember and tried the riddles again.

The first puzzle was a sequence of letters: O, T, T, F, F with the students asked to predict how the series continued. 

One student dreamed about strolling through an art gallery counting the pictures on the wall: ‘One, two, three, four, five.’ When he came to the places where the sixth and seventh paintings should have been, he found only vacant frames. 

In the morning he realised that the letters represent the first letters used in spelling out the numerical sequence. S for six and S for seven was – of course – the continuation of the pattern. In all, the researcher found that of 1,148 dream reports, 87 referred to the problem and seven contained the answer.

Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett tried a more personal experiment. She asked students to choose a problem in their life and, every night for a week, to spend 15 minutes thinking about it before bed. 

They recorded their dreams in the morning. Over the course of the week, half dreamed about their problem and a quarter came up with a solution in their sleep.

When we dream we allow ourselves to consider ideas we might otherwise dismiss. When we’re conscious, we tend to be inhibited by society’s conventions. 

But in dreams, our brains are working in a wider network of associations, drawing on memories from the past as well as recent experiences, turning up long buried thoughts and truths that we might, while conscious, try to quash.

If we ignore our dreams, we waste a real opportunity.

On average, we spend a third of our lives asleep, and about 20 to 25 per cent of that time in REM (rapid eye movement sleep, which is one of the five distinct phases of sleep through which the brain cycles at night). 

And this is the phase of sleep where most dreaming takes place. So if you live until you’re 75, you’ll spend five years dreaming. And if we know how to remember and understand our dreams, that’s five years of solving problems, learning skills, and dealing with stresses.

In fact, many sleep experts now think improving your ability to recollect and interpret dreams is key to a happier, more tranquil existence.

Dreams can help us cope with universal struggles, such as coming to terms with death. Mourning is messy and individual, but for most people, the work of grieving continues in sleep. In vivid, unforgettable dreams, the dead come back to us.

In a 2014 study of nearly 300 mourners at a New York hospice, 58 per cent could recall at least one dream about the person who had died. Although they were not always pleasant, the dreams usually helped mourners accept their loss, led to heightened feeling of spirituality and an overall sense of well-being.

And dreaming is vital to our physical health, too. Animals deprived of REM sleep suffer many of the same symptoms as animals that aren’t allowed to sleep at all. Rats die after about four to six weeks with REM, but after only two to three if denied sleep altogether.

Tricks that can help you remember your dreams

For many, simply deciding you want to remember dreams is enough and reminding yourself of this intention as you fall asleep can yield a wealth of memories in the morning.

It helps not to drink too much before bed, since alcohol suppresses REM sleep.

The easiest, most effective way to boost dream recall is to keep a dream journal and write in it first thing in the morning.

Do it as soon as you become conscious. You can write your dreams down or record them into a voice recorder – before

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