Giving Your Brain a Vacation
How to enhance your emotional well-being through sleep
Jean Edelman: Great to be with you this week.
This week, I want to talk about dreams. Do you dream? I love my dreams to the point where I started a dream journal. I do my best every morning to write down whatever I can remember when I get a very vivid dream on a specific person. To me, it’s usually a signal that I need to connect with them.
There’s so much research about dreams. The basics are that a dream is a succession of images, ideas and emotions and sensations that usually occur during our REM, our rapid eye movement cycle of sleep. Dreaming can be a continuation of our thoughts from the day. Our dreams can be symbols or metaphors. Sometimes we have color in our dreams. Sometimes they’re in black and white.
During our REM sleep, our brain is basically working from our prefrontal cortex. Our prefrontal cortex controls our rational thought. And during REM sleep, that becomes dormant. And our amygdala, that part of the brain that controls our emotions, becomes highly active.
Dreaming can be full of guidance, advice, warnings. It can be a very creative time to solve a problem, maybe gain a clearer perspective of something that we’re working on.
This can help us make some better decisions. There’s daydreaming, there’s reoccurring dreams. There can be common themes to our dreams that sometimes we’re falling or we’re flying. That’s my favorite. We’re being chased or there’s water. Sometimes we’re stuck in a house or we’re traveling.
Think of our dreams as our brain on vacation. So let’s see where it can take us. So my action item for the week is Let’s keep a dream journal. As soon as we wake up, take a few moments to write down what you remember. If you don’t remember, that’s okay. Just keep practicing. And eventually you’ll even remember the finer points of your dreams. It’s so much fun. And it can be very, very revealing, too. Maybe some things that we need to be doing.
So my word of the week is simple. It’s DREAM.
The D is to Dare. Dare to reach beyond our comfort zone.
The R is for Real and being authentic. There is no pretending in our dreams.
The E is for Ether, the space between the spaces. And that’s where our dreams lie.
The A is for Amazing that all things are possible.
The M is for Magic. Let’s believe we’re free in our dreams. Let’s find out where we can go. Have a wonderful week, everyone.