Dream production is among the benefits of good quality sleep, and mental health depends on the quality of dreams and the adjustments that are made to them. All the more reason to invest in healthy sleep, preventing or treating insomnia, thus managing to preserve or restore your mental health.
To understand the significance of good quality sleep, and therefore of dreams, for mental health, a quick analysis of sleep, and more specifically its forms, is necessary. Thus, while sleeping, the brain goes through two main stages, namely NREM sleep and REM sleep. The two names come from studies by Aserinsky and Kleitman, who monitored brain activity and eyeball movement and identified different periods of sleep, i.e. periods of sleep with no rapid eyeball movement (NREM) and periods of sleep with rapid eyeball movement (REM).
Sleep is made up of several cycles of about 90 minutes each. Each cycle has an NREM sleep part and a REM sleep part, then another 90-minute NREM-REM cycle, and so on until you wake up. In the first half of the night, within a 90-minute cycle, NREM sleep has the largest share, and in the second half of the night, REM sleep dominates in a cycle.
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In the waking state, when you are awake, the brain receives a multitude of information, states, and responds to many tasks. During NREM sleep, the mind reflects on all the accumulations made during the waking state. It is also the period when your memories are protected, transferred, and decanted. During REM sleep, all this information and states are integrated with the help of dreams. This reflection-integration process allows the mind to regulate itself, to put itself in order, so that it can function optimally, satisfying the needs of the day.
Imagine going shopping. You hastily fill a shopping cart with the things you need. You get home and place all the groceries on the kitchen counter, without the energy and time to deal with them. That's pretty much what the mind does during the day when we're awake: it fills up and spills into the unconscious. Once you've calmed down, you take each thing you've bought, analyze it, and put it in its place. Flour in the pantry, milk, and butter in the fridge. This is what happens during the NREM sleep period.
Whether day or night, whether you are awake or asleep, every moment is dominated by one or more needs. In general, needs during sleep are an extension of those during the day, and they need to be satisfied mentally. The need to feed yourself is not satisfied just by buying everything you need and putting each in its place. It is necessary to do something with what you have bought, to integrate them into a meal. You take the milk and butter, you take the flour, what else you need and you make yourself something to eat, you eat and your need is satisfied. This is what happens during REM sleep when dreams use what you have accumulated, reflected, and laid down in your mind, getting something through which your need is met and satisfied.
So, you need good quality sleep for the mind to allow dreams to integrate information and states so that personal needs are met. If you fall asleep with difficulty, i.e. you suffer from insomnia of falling asleep, or you wake up during the night and can't fall asleep, i.e. you suffer from insomnia of waking up, the brain and the mind don't have enough time to do this integration because the cycle in which the REM period is much longer than the NREM period doesn't run anymore. Integrating the elements and harnessing them with the help of dreams to regulate and cleanse the mind, satisfy needs, and generate the mental energy needed for the new day is simply not done or is done poorly. The result: you wake up feeling tired, dissatisfied, frustrated, states that turn into exhaustion and overwhelm during the day.
It is essential to dream for mental health and to function optimally throughout the day because it is dreams that help regulate the psyche. For them to be regulatory, they need time to occur, they need good quality sleep.
The Aidoma Institut has developed a psychotherapy program dedicated to tackling insomnia. You can get guidance and support right here: https://www.aidoma.com/course/insomnia-18.html
