What are the negative effects of not dreaming less
There are some things that people don't feel valuable until they lose them. In the same way, dreams, while they exist, do not seem to us to have an effect on people. However, once the dream is deprived, people will appear a lot of uncomfortable feelings.
In studying the role and meaning of dreams, scientists have taken the experimental approach of dream deprivation. There are three forms of sleep deprivation: total sleep deprivation, partial sleep deprivation and selective sleep deprivation. Experiments have found that many total sleep deprivation can cause emotional behavior disorders. If it lasts more than 100 hours without sleep, then mental work can not be completed, the subject loses interest in the external environment, lethargy is extremely serious, and even causes schizophrenia.
The method of selective deprivation of dreaming REM sleep is to wake the subject immediately and keep him awake for three minutes when the electroencephalogram and polygraph indicate that the subject has just entered REM sleep. This period of REM sleep is disturbed, and when you fall back asleep, you enter non-REM sleep. Rem sleep has a 'rebound phenomenon', if deprived, there is a replacement. For example, one subject was awakened 7 times on the first night and 30 times on the fifth night. 16 consecutive nights of REM sleep deprivation followed by the first night of uninterrupted recovery sleep, almost all of which consisted of dreaming REM sleep. There is also a method of selective deprivation of REM sleep is 'drug deprivation method', that is, use a variety of hypnotic drugs and central stimulants to inhibit REM sleep, to achieve the purpose of reducing dreams, once the drug is stopped, there is a rebound phenomenon. Another method of selective REM sleep deprivation was to have subjects sleep only in the first half of the night on the sixth night, because dreaming REM sleep is concentrated in the second half of the night.
Selective deprivation of REM sleep can produce a variety of harmful psychophysiological effects, such as anxiety, excitement, anger or unfriendliness, inattention, etc. Direction disturbance, memory disturbance, paranoia, abnormal behavior may also occur; Some slow thinking, clumsy movements, fatigue or increased appetite, partial food and so on. In addition, the experiment also proved that the subjects of dream sleep deprivation were affected in the completion of homework and mood, such as prolonged reaction time, reduced visual alertness, and increased errors. In addition, the REM sleep deprived subjects showed a reduced ability to adjust interpersonal relationships, as well as anxiety, withdrawal, higher excitability and instability. After REM sleep deprivation, some subjects reported an increase in dreaming pressure; They often dream before they are awakened, and have long dreams for a short time; The content of dreams is generally unpleasant, often aggressive and want to eat content. Some researchers have experimented with selective REM sleep deprivation in animals, proving that deprivation has a strong physiological effect on animals. The experimental animals showed increased cortical excitability, restlessness, impulsivity, appetite and sexual desire, and sexual abnormality. Cats who have been deprived of sleep for 30 days in a row, as soon as they fall asleep, immediately show unusually strong REM sleep, eyeball tremors, and muscle twitching throughout the body, a bit like a muscle spasm.
The research on the biochemical effects of REM sleep deprivation is mainly focused on brain biochemistry. It is manifested in the following three points: First, when deprived of REM sleep, the glycolysis of the brain is enhanced, indicating that the brain nerve activity is enhanced at this time. Second, deprivation of REM sleep increases the content of amino acids in certain brain areas, such as reticular structure and optic colliculus; Sleep deprivation increases tricarboxylic acid circulation and aspartic acid increases in the brain, while protein synthesis decreases. Third, when deprived of REM sleep, protein synthesis in some parts of the brain is reduced, catabolism is strengthened, and protein and RNA content in neurons is reduced, but it has little effect on glial cells, which indicates that protein synthesis has an important physiological function in REM sleep.
So what does REM sleep really do to the body? There's no scientific answer yet, but there are three hypotheses that have a big impact. One hypothesis is that fast wave sleep is closely related to brain growth and development. Studies of the correlation between the degree of brain development in humans and various animals, and the amount of fast wave sleep they require, have shown that the brains of humans, pigs and rats are too immature at birth to protect themselves; The percentage of fast wave sleep relative to total sleep time is high, while sheep and guinea pigs, whose brain development is basically complete at birth, can walk soon after birth, and the sensory system can perform functions quickly, have a correspondingly low proportion of fast wave sleep. In addition, the proportion of fast wave sleep in these animals did not change significantly during development. At the same time, the individual developmental pattern of human sleep also suggests that fast wave sleep is related to brain growth and development. Another hypothesis is that fast-wave sleep plays a role in cognitive processes. Research suggests that fast wave sleep may be involved in the encoding of new information and the storage of short-term memory into long-term memory. Therefore, it is inferred that infants and children need more fast wave sleep because they need to learn a lot of things, and elderly people need to learn less things, and fast wave sleep is reduced. Animal experiments support this hypothesis: After domestic chickens are born, visual stimulation is given to mark the image of the hen, and 20 minutes of visual stimulation can significantly increase fast-wave sleep in the chickens for the following 45 minutes. The young rats raised in rich environment and poor monotonous environment showed significant differences in sleep. That is, the time and percentage of fast wave sleep in the former increased significantly compared to the latter. It is also hypothesized that fast wave sleep or REM sleep occurs periodically during long nights to give the body some activity to avoid excessive sleep and thus regulate the internal environment.
It should be emphasized that people dream when there is REM sleep, but this statement cannot be said in reverse, that is, it cannot be said that people must have REM sleep when they dream. Some researchers have found that when REM sleep is deprived, dreams move into the first to second light stages of non-REM sleep. At this time, the subject will wake up, and often dream experience. In addition, subjects deprived of REM sleep may experience changes in their daytime waking behaviors (such as hallucinations, suspicion, paranoia, depersonalization, etc.). In a dream, a man can act recklessly, and when he wakes up, he can restrain his behavior. Depriving REM sleep deprives you of the chance to dream, and there is no safety valve to allow instinctual impulses to leak out and behavior to be released when you wake up. The performance of many chronic alcoholism patients also proves this theory. Alcohol inhibits REM sleep, and chronic alcoholism is equivalent to chronic dream deprivation. The behavior of these patients is indulgent and lacking in self-control. Delirium induced by sudden withdrawal of alcohol can be seen as a rebound phenomenon of rapid eye movement sleep, at which time the EEG appears continuous low-amplitude asynchronous fast waves characteristic of rapid eye movement sleep, and a large number of scary hallucinations similar to dreams appear clinically.
As a subconscious mind, dream is an indispensable and irreplaceable stage, link or aspect of the human mental system. If there is no such stage, link or aspect, the human mental system cannot function normally at all. If people are artificially deprived of dream sleep, then people's mental activities can neither continue day and night, nor can they move day and night, and people's spiritual life will be difficult to maintain. Therefore, deprivation of REM sleep will lead to the collapse of the entire mental system due to the inability of the human mental system to function normally.
It can be seen that everyone dreams is certain, and do not dream, we are unable to control, because the physiological basis of the brain provides the basis for dreaming, do not dream or not, it will affect the recovery of human brain function, not conducive to the growth and development of the central nervous system, but also disrupt the role of people in the dream alert state, destroy the balance of human mental system adjustment process, It impairs human's developed brain function and creative potential. The influence of dreams on sleep is actually a kind of physiological confrontation between nature and the outside world; Only by controlling some physiological instinctive actions or reactions can dreams better act as guardians of dream sleep.
The reason why dreams are the guardians of sleep is that during sleep, people can continue to sleep in loud noises without being woken up. On this point, conventional wisdom contradicts this view. The traditional view is that people dream more during sleep, which will affect the rest of the brain and is not conducive to sleep. However, in recent years, some people have challenged this view, arguing that even more dreams will not affect sleep and health, and researchers at the University of Yamanashi in Japan, based on recent research results, also proposed that more dreams may be beneficial to prolong life. They found that there are two opposite classes of sleep-inducing peptides in the human brain, one that promotes dreamless sleep and the other that promotes dream-inducing sleep. When researchers successfully isolated the dream-promoting sleep peptide and applied it to animals to prolong the dream period of sleep, the results found that most of the tested animals lived longer, which indicates that dreams can protect sleep, and only if the quality of sleep is improved, can we ensure good health and longevity.
Regarding the very close relationship between sleep and dreams, such an experiment has been done in the sleep laboratory: when the test subjects can continue to sleep in the loud noise, they are almost all the content of the noise into their dream plot. The noise becomes a part of the dreamer's story so that the dreamer can sleep peacefully. One of the subjects was placed in a bed with 90 decibels of noise on. When she woke up, she told someone about this dream:
She dreamed that she was driving when suddenly the car horn jammed and blared. As the noise grew louder, she realized that she was driving a large truck, honking her horn while driving fast.
Another subject in the same situation dreamed that he was playing ball somewhere, and when he heard the noise, he found himself blowing an elk's antler for an instant; As the noise grew louder, he became surrounded by a whole herd of elk, all of them blowing their horns at him. No matter how the plot of the dream changes, our bodies are bound to incorporate the perception generated by the stimulus into our dreams.
The function of dreams, in addition to providing us with a mental release channel, is to maintain the continuity of sleep. Dreams incorporate external stimuli into the content of the dream in order to allow the dreamer to continue to sleep; In doing so, it provides a way to answer the various 'questions' brought to our mind by external stimuli, such as being too cold, too hot, hungry, thirsty, or noisy. If these questions cannot be answered by our dreams, we may well be forced to wake up to see where they came from; If we wake up too many times, we can seriously interfere with the continuity of our sleep. In this view, our dreams use dreams to interpret external stimuli in order to protect our sleep. So some people call dreams the 'guardians of sleep.'
This can be confirmed by the following dream: a man lived in a tall building facing the main road, and one night while he was sleeping, an ambulance sirens screamed past, and the man's dream changed direction at that moment to include the sirens he heard. He had a relative who was recently ill, and he dreamed that he was waiting for an ambulance to arrive in the emergency room of a hospital. Or maybe the person, before going to bed, watched a movie on TV called 'Cops Catch Thieves,' so he began to dream that he was a gangster in a gang and was fighting with the police. Similarly, many people may have dreamed that they desperately want to answer the phone or dream of the mobile phone clock, and when they wake up, they find that they are really listening to the phone or mobile phone clock.
In sleep experiments, various stimuli have been applied to subjects. The researchers woke the subjects up shortly after providing the external stimulus and asked them if they had dreamed. These people often report that these stimuli have been programmed into their dreams. The stimuli generated in our bodies also enter our dreams. For example, I dream that I am eating in a restaurant or waiting in line to buy lunch, and when I wake up, I find that I am hungry. If we drink alcohol before going to bed, we may be thirsty in the morning, and then the feeling of thirst in the mouth may enter our dreams. We dream that we are looking for water or soda to drink, or that we have drunk a lot of water but are still thirsty. If our blanket falls to the ground, we may dream that we are walking in the snow. If it is hot at night, we dream that we are sitting by a fire. Whatever the case, physical sensations usually enter into the content of our dreams.
It is precisely because sleep has dreams as its 'caretaker' and 'guardian' that external stimuli can be eliminated to ensure the continuation of sleep. In real life, such examples are also common. Dream, not only feel comfortable sleep, and wake up happy spirit, there are many examples of this.
The poet Goethe said, 'Human nature has the best ability to find support in times of disappointment.' There have been times in my life when I have gone to bed in tears of grief, and dreams have comforted me in various ways, and lifted me out of my grief, so that I may be happy the next morning.'
For example, 'Lizi · King Mu of Zhou' once recorded such a story: there is a rich man surnamed Yin, he has an old servant, hard all day, tired and exhausted. But as soon as he went to bed, he dreamed that he was a king, high up in the world, dealing with the affairs of state, going to and from rich feasting and magnificent palaces, doing whatever he wanted, and being very happy. When he woke up, feeling well and contented, he worked harder.