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Weird dreams you've had

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Kenyahp:

--- Quote from: LTK on 29 Mar 2012, 10:48 ---
--- Quote from: Kenyahp on 29 Mar 2012, 09:47 ---Sleeps main goal is to replenish chemicals in the brain throughout the night and to let the body restore what we used up. Thats why it has to be dark in your room, because the chemicals replenish best in the dark. It doesn't do anything for the actual thoughts during the day, its main goal is purely biological.
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Chemical replenish best in the dark...? Honestly, I have no idea where you got that from. Maybe you're confusing animal metabolism with that of plants. Replenishing energy reserves is indeed one of the hypothesised functions of sleep, but it doesn't have to be dark for that. Nocturnal animals sleep during the day, and they get by just fine.


--- Quote ---Dreams, on the other hand, are what consolidate memory and thoughts, not actual sleep. They go hand-in-hand, though. I don't believe there is hidden insight in dreams. I do believe that they can make sense of things we couldn't during the day, however. But, the human psyche is so vast and mostly unknown, still, that how can someone say our dreams know something we don't at the forefront of our mind? For every study that says that dreams can't do that, there are a thousand saying they can. Its easier to prove something than disprove it.

The stage where you dream is REM sleep. Sleep is a cycle, starting at 1 and ending on the fourth part, called REM. The cycle takes about 40 minutes. Also, the idea that if you wake a sleepwalker they die is completely false. So totally not true at all. Every psych class I've ever taken has said this again and again.
I kinda wanna see the studies that went into this...

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You can't dream without sleep, and you can't sleep without dreams. We know that sleep consolidates memories from experiments, and we know that dreams happen in your sleep from personal experience, but the two are really hard to reconcile scientifically. It's intuitive to think that the two represent the same process, but proving this is another matter entirely.

It's been a long time since the human brain was universally considered a 'black box', and the functions that we consider 'vast and unknown' are becoming less and less numerous. Although I admit that sleep and dreams are still poorly understood, I still find it dubious that dreams themselves have some mysterious power that's unrelated to the memory processes that we see in other animals.

I think your information is a bit out of date. The common belief that REM sleep is the dream sleep stems from the fact that in a normal sleep cycle, you wake up from REM sleep, and thus the dreams you've had in that stage are the most vivid. But Idontunderstand is right; dreaming occurs in every stage of sleep. Wake someone up at any point during the night, and most of them will be able to tell you that they were dreaming.

No one said anything about sleepwalkers that die. But if you want to see studies I can look some up. You can also look at Wikipedia, Scholarpedia or search for articles in scholar.google.com. I bet there's a ton of sleep-related stuff out there that I don't know about either.

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http://www.wellnesstips.ca/dark.htm Thats the basics on how light effects our sleep. The idea is that the body uses very different chemicals during the day than during the night, so when there is light on our bodies, we absorb that light and release chemicals into our system that makes us think its morning. Nocturnal animals also don't sleep in the light, they sleep in places like dark caves or in trees where the light can't reach them.

No one said anything about dead sleepwalkers, no. That was just an added thought, in case anyone brought that myth to the table.

Technically we dream throughout sleep,yes. But (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_eye_movement_sleep) we remember our dreams that occur during REM. And, those are obviously the dreams we are talking about, yes? If you wake someone up in the middle of the night, they can't tell you what their dreams were during the rest of the cycle, its typically the REM cycle's dreams.

You can dream without sleep. Its called Lucid dreaming. You're in a kind of half sleep half wake situation, but it still exists. That way you can control your dreams because you are aware of them.

And, just because the two processes (sleep and dreaming) happens at the exact same time doesn't mean they cannot serve two different functions. And, we are more then able to monitor brain activities during sleep to pinpoint when the more active dreams are happening.

The brain may not be completely unavailable, but we still have plenty of theories that need proving. We still aren't 100% sure on quite a few things. Its a lot harder, psychologically, to get information because of human bias and the inability to see some of the things we are experimenting. We may know a lot, but there is still tons more to learn.

Carl-E:

--- Quote from: Kenyahp on 29 Mar 2012, 14:39 ---http://www.wellnesstips.ca/dark.htm Thats the basics on how light effects our sleep. The idea is that the body uses very different chemicals during the day than during the night, so when there is light on our bodies, we absorb that light and release chemicals into our system that makes us think its morning. Nocturnal animals also don't sleep in the light, they sleep in places like dark caves or in trees where the light can't reach them.
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Sorry, but some better references would be good.  That website has the work "QUACK" written all over it.  Especially the references to the CHEK institute, a glorified chiropractic school.  I have nothing against chiro, they are wonderful, and have helped me with a lot of physical issues over the years, but when they try to go and explain everything  in their own terms, without scientific backup, I have to stop listening...

LTK:

--- Quote from: Kenyahp on 29 Mar 2012, 14:39 ---http://www.wellnesstips.ca/dark.htm Thats the basics on how light effects our sleep. The idea is that the body uses very different chemicals during the day than during the night, so when there is light on our bodies, we absorb that light and release chemicals into our system that makes us think its morning. Nocturnal animals also don't sleep in the light, they sleep in places like dark caves or in trees where the light can't reach them.
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Ah, you mean the effect of light on the body! I agree with you there, but it's not really the same as 'replenishing chemicals'. I mean, I sometimes take a nap with the lights on, so the effect is not especially strict, but of course it's true that the light/dark cycle, whether natural or artifical, affects how you sleep.


--- Quote ---Technically we dream throughout sleep,yes. But (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_eye_movement_sleep) we remember our dreams that occur during REM. And, those are obviously the dreams we are talking about, yes? If you wake someone up in the middle of the night, they can't tell you what their dreams were during the rest of the cycle, its typically the REM cycle's dreams.
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Sure, but I don't believe REM-sleep dreams are more relevant or more important than deep-sleep dreams just because people remember them more often. Why should there be a difference between REM-sleep dreams and deep-sleep dreams?


--- Quote ---You can dream without sleep. Its called Lucid dreaming. You're in a kind of half sleep half wake situation, but it still exists. That way you can control your dreams because you are aware of them.
--- End quote ---
Haha, no, that doesn't count. When you find yourself having some degree of consciousness or agency while in a dream, it doesn't mean you're not still sleeping, aka lying limp on your bed with practically zero situational awareness.


--- Quote ---And, just because the two processes (sleep and dreaming) happens at the exact same time doesn't mean they cannot serve two different functions. And, we are more then able to monitor brain activities during sleep to pinpoint when the more active dreams are happening.
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Yeah, that's the thing. I think that sleeping and dreaming are just two sides of the same coin, and dreams are just reflective of the consolidation and recovery processes that are necessary for a good night's rest. And if I'm interpreting correctly, you think that dreaming is its own process that takes place on top of the aforementioned processes as a complementary function. Whether it's one or the other is pretty damn hard to find out. I'm having trouble thinking of an experiment that can tell. Maybe if I sleep on it I'll know. :lol:

Also, I'm not sure what you mean by 'more active dreams'; I assume those are the dreams in REM-sleep, but how can you tell if it's the dreams that are active, or just the brain itself that's in a more excited state in REM-sleep, compared to other cycles?

This might also be interesting: A researcher at my university specializes in the role of sleep in memory. She gave a couple of lectures in the Learning & Memory course I followed. Some of her publications could be relevant. Really nice lady, too; she was voted the faculty's best teacher two years ago.


--- Quote from: Carl-E on 29 Mar 2012, 15:11 ---Sorry, but some better references would be good.  That website has the work "QUACK" written all over it.  Especially the references to the CHEK institute, a glorified chiropractic school.  I have nothing against chiro, they are wonderful, and have helped me with a lot of physical issues over the years, but when they try to go and explain everything  in their own terms, without scientific backup, I have to stop listening...

--- End quote ---
The website may be dubious (COMIC SAAAAAANS) but you'd do better to check out the book they're referencing. According to the reviews on Amazon, the book really does have the right ideas about sleep, nutrition and health, but the author just doesn't know what she's talking about in other respects. So, good message, bad messenger. Still better than a bad message coming from a good messenger.

But this isn't DISCUSS, so feel free to talk about the time you were riding a giraffe through a field of daffodils. Or just split this bit off, I don't care.

Kenyahp:
Okay, okay, I'll concede to your argument simply because this is the wrong forum.

As for the reference, it was honestly just the shortest one I could find. Most of the other, more reputable sites, say the exact same thing, but I didn't want to have to put "well, its the 94th paragraph down under the third heading" because...well, I was strapped for time.

Next: Weird dream I had last night. It was just a dude looking at me in my sexual psych's classroom, for like an hour dreamtime. Like, literally just staring me down for a really long time. I kept asking him what he wanted, but he just kept looking at me. It made me uncomfortable, because I hate when people look at me. Then I woke up to my cat staring at me, also. Not a good night.

pwhodges:
(There's nothing wrong with a serious discussion of dreams here.  The underlying reason that most real discussion goes in its own area is that it is a place that certain subjects can be raised that are forbidden in the rest of the forum, such as politics, religion, or guns.  In return, behaviour in that section is more strictly moderated - though in recent months this has not been visibly necessary, as it happens.  And when I raised the possibility of doing away with the separate Discuss! area, people expressed a preference for keeping it this way.)

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