EVER WONDER by Jacque Scott: Sleep and Dreams

Sleep and Dreams

Ever wonder about how many hours of sleep you should get every night?  Is it better to sleep on your back, stomach or side?  How many pillows should you use?  What about REM sleep?  Sleep is a topic that gives everyday people and scientists alike many many questions and just as many answers.

     Famous people have been quoted as having definite feelings about their sleep habits.  About sleep requirements, poet John Milton said, “Nature requires five, custom takes seven, laziness takes nine, and wickedness eleven.”  Enrico Caruso, the great tenor, liked to sleep surrounded by 18 pillows.  Charles Dickens could only sleep in a bed in the north-south position.  Benjamin Franklin slept in two beds every night.  He would move from one to the other when the first bed got too warm for him.  Thomas Edison, Napoleon and Winston Churchill were said to be the great men that they were because they could only sleep short periods at a time.  It has been that Marilyn Monroe slept in nothing but her Chanel No. 5.

Most of us spend almost a third of our lives sleeping.  Psychotherapists have studied sleep positions and their relationship to our innermost feelings and secrets.   

Lying on one’s back with arms at the sides and feet spread slightly apart is called the ‘royal’ sleeping position.  This position indicates security, self-confidence and strength of personality.

A sleeper in the ‘chain-gang’ position lies on a side with knees apart and ankles crossed.  Some studies say that this reveals hidden anxiety.  The prone position may mean a compulsion to over organize one’s daily activities.  The ‘water-wings’ position—on the back, arms bent, and head resting on palms of hands–characterizes people who hide behind their intellectual powers.

Scientific researchers have found that sleep is far from simple.  With the help of sophisticated devices such as the electroencephalograph, which measures brain-wave activity, they have found that the sleeper passes through several states or phases during the night.  The most unusual of them is characterized by rapid eye movements that can be seen behind closed eyelids and is called REM sleep. During this phase, brain temperature and blood flow rises, sleepers stop turning and tossing, snoring ends and breathing becomes irregular.  Often the muscles of the arms and legs become stiff.  Periods of REM sleep occur regularly about four to six times a night or about every 90 minutes and last from 10 minutes to an hour each.  Dreams occur only in REM sleep, sometimes even in color.

Not only has sleep been a topic for discussion, but the meaning of dreams has puzzled and intrigued people for thousands of years.  The British Museum holds a 4,000 papyrus giving instructions for dream interpretation.  A dream about a moon was supposed to be good, but a dream about distant crowds warned of impending danger.

Socrates believed that dreams were the voice of conscience. The Iroquois Indians believed that dreams were commands to be followed.  Sigmund Freud considered dreams to be suppressed thoughts. He called them the “royal road to the unconscious”.  Dream interpretations continue to be a topic for many great debates.

But, we need to dream…when lab rats are given drugs and are deprived of REM sleep, they quickly develop symptoms of classic paranoia.  When permitted to sleep again without drugs, they go on REM ‘dream binges’ of almost pure REM sleep.

For some people, dreams are given the credit for great things in their lives.  Robert Louis Stevenson thought up the plot for ‘Dr Jeykll and Mr. Hyde’ in a dream.  The golfer Jack Nicklaus found an innovative way of gripping the club in a dream.

However most of us are not that fortunate.  We spend about five years of our lives dreaming, and we tend to sleep through most of our dreams.  God bless you.