Why don’t you have dreams and should you worry about it?

The magical world of dreams is an integral part of every person’s life. Sometimes they are disturbing, but more often dreams give a lot of amazing emotions, which then, throughout the day, cheer up the dreamer. Most people see subliminal stories and images almost every night. But it also happens that during a night’s rest a person sees nothing. Many scientists all over the planet have thought about why people almost never dream. When is this the norm, and when is it a violation, read on this page of the women’s website “Beautiful and Successful”.

Where do dreams come from?

When we sleep, our body does not plunge into a state of unconscious rest, but switches between the phases of slow and fast sleep. They replace each other fully only if a person sleeps at night, because during daylight hours the functioning of circadian rhythms is disrupted. This is a kind of biological clock that is responsible for how we relax.

During REM sleep, the brain remains very active. The first of them lasts about 10 minutes, closer to the morning they become longer. At these moments, our eyes begin to move intensely under closed eyelids, breathing quickens and becomes irregular. During these phases we see vivid, memorable dreams.

During periods of long sleep, dreams also occur, but usually they turn out to be simple, fragmentary, dim and inconsistent.

All our dreams are based on memories, feelings and images received during our waking hours, and even the strangest ones contain elements borrowed from reality. This is largely why, for example, people with depression may have nightmares. They reflect a difficult mental state.

How to get your dreams back?

If you haven’t had dreams for a long time, you can try to get them back. Using simple techniques:

1. First of all, try not to overeat at night, also exclude alcoholic drinks. By following this rule, you will also save yourself from nightmares.
2. Use life-affirming attitudes when going to bed, tuning into a positive mood and driving away anxiety.
3. Spend your daytime actively, giving moderate but sufficient physical activity to your body. Don’t avoid creative activities either, they are what help your brain dream.
4. From time to time you can throw snippets of dreams onto paper. Carefully remembering the details. This activity will help turn your imagination in the right direction.
5. It would be a good idea to regulate the duration of sleep. Ideally, it should be 6-8 hours, which will facilitate the correct alternation of cycles.
6. Train your memory through meditation or other mental practices. This will allow you to learn to concentrate your subconscious and relax emotionally.
7. If you want, try the practice of lucid dreaming. It lies in a kind of borderline state when the sleeper consciously controls and manages his sleep. This can be achieved with a special set of exercises.

Are there any benefits to dreams?

Scientists have not yet fully decided why a person needs dreams. The most popular explanation is that they can help us cope with our emotions and make sense of the world around us. So, during sleep, memories are selected and either built into our store of knowledge (long-term memory) or deleted. That is, we get rid of everything unnecessary. This is a kind of unloading.

There is also a study whose authors found a connection between the amount of REM sleep and creative thinking. Scientists believe that active mental activity associated with dreams helps develop associative connections in the brain.

However, much more is known about the benefits of sleep in general. For example, during it, toxins are removed from our brain.

Why are visions forgotten?

Exciting, extraordinary, cosmic - most visions are forgotten. A separate part of the brain is responsible for their preservation, in which all information is stored. For the normal functioning of this area, an active relationship with other segments is necessary.

A person’s visions are forgotten:

• awakened in the slow sleep phase;
• under the influence of alcohol or drugs;
• being in a stressful or unstable emotional state.

Lack of dreams appears not only in depressed, apathetic, tired people, but also in people who are completely satisfied with their lives.

Why don't I have dreams?

Most often there is nothing wrong with this. But sometimes the absence of dreams indicates health problems.

You dream about them, but you forget them

Most people have dreams that collectively last about 2 hours per night. But we forget almost all of them. Therefore, it may seem that you were not dreaming.

The fact is that during REM sleep, the ability to remember information deteriorates. This happens because neurons that are responsible for the production of melanin-concentrating hormones begin to work in the hypothalamus.

Most often, only the dream that was dreamed before waking up is recorded. When we wake up, our memory begins to function normally again. The ability to remember returns and the dream is not forgotten.

The content of the dream also plays a role. The brighter and more specific it is, the better it remains in memory. For example, the images we see during long sleep phases are more like static photographs than movies. Therefore, such dreams are poorly remembered.

You are over 60 years old

With age, the amount of REM sleep, as well as sleep in general, decreases in a person. Therefore, older people may gradually stop dreaming. This is a natural process and you should not be afraid of it.

You have sleep apnea

This is a sleep disorder that interrupts breathing. As a result, the body cannot enter the REM sleep phase. It’s worth thinking about the possibility of this disease if you suddenly stop dreaming.

You have narcolepsy

This is a neurological disorder that causes attacks of daytime sleepiness and disrupts normal routine. Because of this, the natural regulation of REM sleep is disrupted. As with sleep apnea, the development of such a disease can be indicated by the sudden disappearance of dreams.

You use certain substances

Difficulties with the body's transition to REM sleep may occur due to the use of antidepressants, alcohol, nicotine or coffee before bedtime. For example, antidepressants relax and therefore induce deeper stages of sleep, while caffeine, on the contrary, leads to insomnia.

Return to the monastery of Morpheus

If you rarely have dreams and this is causing you anxiety, you can try to stimulate their appearance in simple ways:

• 
  Get creative. Any hobbies associated with creative processes activate the part of the brain responsible for the formation of dreams.

• Work with positive affirmations. Try to formulate your desires by repeating settings like “I see bright and colorful dreams”, “I remember all my dreams” several times at night.
• Don't overwork yourself. Plan your working day so that the body does not experience overload, and alternate mental activity with physical activity.
• Avoid alcohol and overeating before bed. This will not only help solve the problem of lack of dreams, but will also minimize the likelihood of nightmares.
• Keep a dream diary. If you manage to remember a dream, describe it on paper. With this technique you can kill two birds with one stone: develop your imagination and learn how to competently express your own thoughts. In addition, it is quite possible that later you will have a desire to feel like Lovecraft and share the plots that arose in your brain with a wider audience.
• Adjust the length of rest. Make sure you get at least 6 hours of sleep (ideally, at least eight). During normal rest, the cyclicity of the phases is not disrupted.
• Play sports. Calm activities such as Pilates, stretching and yoga are well suited - this heals the body and promotes sleep.
• Wake up in the fast phase. There are special apps that allow you to track your sleep cycles and ensure a gentle awakening at the most appropriate moment. Using them will help you remember your dreams more often.

What to do to make dreams come back

If you always sleep soundly, but the next morning you can never or very rarely remember what you dreamed, there is nothing to worry about. Your body simply works in such a way that dreams are not remembered or are remembered very rarely. This may be offensive, but it does not mean anything bad.

If you still want to remember your dreams, use the advice of Professor Robert Stickgold:

• While you are falling asleep, repeat that you would definitely like to remember today’s dream.
• Drink water before bed. By getting up to relieve yourself at night, you will activate your memory and better remember your dreams.
• Stay in bed for a while after waking up. Think and try to remember what you might have dreamed.

If you stop dreaming as you age, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to do anything about it. In any case, regardless of your age, it will be beneficial to maintain healthy sleep. Sleep 7–9 hours a night, try to relax and not use gadgets before going to bed, do exercise and follow a routine. It’s not a fact that it will help you dream, but it will definitely have a beneficial effect on your health.

It would also be useful to give up the abuse of alcohol and cigarettes. It is also better not to drink coffee at night. This will help you get rid of the negative effects of these substances on your sleep. You should take medications only if they have been prescribed by a doctor.

What it is

In scientific terms, sleep is a physiological state of a living organism. It significantly reduces reactions to a variety of external and internal stimuli. This is a moment that gives the body a chance to rest, gain strength, and recharge with energy.

People have long believed that during rest the soul separates from the body and wanders through the astral world. And dreams are what comes along the way. This theory has now been disproven, but the physiology and causes of dreams remain mysterious.

For many, visions are important, so they strive to remember what they dreamed. Their interpretation helps to get rid of difficulties in reality.

Reasons for absence

A common belief is that there are no dreams. When you wake up, it is impossible to remember absolutely nothing. In fact, I have at least 4 dreams every night, but I just don’t remember them.

Hence it is said that nothing is dreamed. This occurs due to sleepy phases replacing each other. They are divided into two groups.

1. Slow - in her time the breathing is slow, even, and the posture is motionless. It is the longest and it is difficult to wake a person during this period of time.
2. Fast - a period of time from 20 to 40 minutes. It is important to note that during this time the person may move their limbs or even talk.

The whole answer lies in which phase the person woke up in.

Dreams and fears

As for anxiety and nervousness, this theory has one indirect confirmation. According to David Randall, a British journalist who published the book “The Science of Sleep,” people who are completely satisfied with their lives practically do not dream. Calvin Hall, a psychology professor at Keich Western University in Cleveland, spent more than thirty years recording various people's stories about what they saw in their dreams. After analyzing the information received, he came to the conclusion that people who are not afraid of absolutely anything do not see dreams. According to Hall, in dreams it is not always possible to trace a logically consistent plot, and the characters there behave quite unusually, sometimes even inappropriately, but any dream is as close as possible to the reality in which a person lives. And most often, according to the observations of Calvin Hall, the sleeper sees vile, evil, even cruel people in his dreams. As the scientist puts it, the dream world is most often similar to the worst days in middle school. As soon as the fear goes away, dreams disappear along with it.

Doctors' opinion

Experts believe that the lack of dreams is due to excessive load on the brain and too much information. As a result, our nervous system requires deeper rest; it simply cannot reproduce “night pictures”. In this case, the doctor may recommend changing your lifestyle, relaxing and resting more.

Experts say another reason is the inability to remember a dream. In fact, it exists, but most adults quickly forget it. Only too vivid scenes remain in memory. If a person had a good rest during the night's sleep, feels good and light, there is no need to worry.

Results

Worried about why a person cannot dream, a person often begins to look for signs of mental disorders or illnesses. In fact, there is no need to panic, since in many cases everything is connected with excessive fatigue of the body. It is enough to stop worrying about trifles, reduce the load, and everything will return to its place.

Let's not forget the fact that we can simply forget about dreams when we wake up. Only the most vivid and interesting scenes remain in memory. If you want to make your nightly rest more exciting, read a book or watch a bright movie, then your chances of dreaming increase.

Initial causes of sleep disturbances and nightmares in children

Authors : Zakharov A. I.

Most often, nightmares (hereinafter referred to as CS) occur in children whose nighttime sleep has certain deviations. Without them, nightmares are also possible if the child is impressionable, the circumstances, the environment are traumatic, or there is any painful disorder. We were able to find out the general prevalence of sleep disorders in children through a survey of 1,466 parents at two pediatric clinic sites. The figures below are based on the opinions of parents who report visible sleep disturbances, when in fact there are many more of them.

Every third child from 1 to 15 years old falls asleep poorly, usually for a long time, without differences by gender. In preschool age, difficulties in falling asleep are significantly more common than in school age, which is associated with more pronounced signs of neuropathy and organic disorders of the central nervous system in preschoolers. Girls and boys fall asleep the worst when they are five years old. In girls, this coincides with an increase in the CS, that is, nighttime restlessness in girls is more reflected in falling asleep than in boys, or, which is the same thing, girls are more sensitive at this age to what they dream at night. Every third child also sleeps restlessly (talks, wakes up, tosses and turns), be it a girl (somewhat more often) or a boy.

Let us note (according to computer analysis) reliable relationships between disturbed sleep and the characteristics of pregnancy and childbirth, and the psychological state of the mother. Using them, you can reliably predict what sleep disturbances await children.

Let's start with superficial sleep, when even at the slightest noise the child immediately loses sleep, and at best he plays, at worst he screams and cries. It turned out that shallow sleep is associated with worries (emotional stress) of the mother during pregnancy. The unrest itself stems, in this case, from the mother’s lack of confidence in the strength of the marriage and the presence of fear of childbirth. Keeping yourself in constant tension and fear, as we see, is not in vain. The fetus is tense, restless and cannot sleep properly while still in the womb. Increased maternal fatigue during pregnancy, no matter what the reasons, leads to the same results.

Let us remember: with the most common neurosis - neurasthenia - sleep is most often disturbed. You can’t get enough sleep, sleep doesn’t bring you joy, it’s filled with all sorts of worries and anxieties. You feel even more tired during the day, your sleep gets worse - a vicious circle arises with inevitable irritability and mood disorders. What can we say about the overstrain of neuropsychic forces during pregnancy, when the load is already taking its toll, and endurance may not naturally be the highest. Accordingly, the fetal sleep biorhythm is upset, and often for a long time.

Any pediatrician will confirm another pattern we have established: restless, shallow sleep is most typical for children born prematurely. Their sleep is immature, intermittent, and day and night change places. And here everything can be settled if everything is calm at home and the mother is loving, and not always dissatisfied with the child who appeared “early of time,” and she herself is too nervous. The child's restless sleep also brings constant torment to young parents. Everything doesn’t suit him, he can’t find a place for himself, he rushes about in his sleep, throws off the blanket, babbles something, tries to fall out of bed. And... the more the child behaves in this way, the more worried and tense the parents become, invisibly conveying their excitement and only aggravating the child’s sleep problems.

You need to worry, but not excessively, and don’t dramatize your children’s nightly problems. This will not make them sleep better. But it’s worth stroking the sufferer, whispering friendly words, and calming down yourself. Parents were usually surprised when they saw how I, as a pediatrician, calmed the most hopelessly crying children. He took the children in his arms and walked around, rocking them slightly, talking gently and soothingly - for the mother, naturally. And she studied, since she was young and programmed by the rules written in another country.

How can one not remember the grandmother from the village: without any books or instructions, she rocked the cradle with one hand, cooked porridge with the other, and even sang a song. And in similar cases (in the 60s) I did not see nervous sleep disturbances in those who no longer crawled, but walked. In the village, new life is a sacred thing. The family was not supposed to worry about a newborn, and they were not supposed to invite loitering people, so that they wouldn’t “jinx it.” Folk wisdom and instincts spoke about this. On the physical side, of course, there were flaws - and they worked until the last minute, and gave birth in the field, but to “poison” a child, to prevent him from being born or to give him to strangers - this happened extremely rarely. Pregnancy as a message from God was perceived as something natural, natural, bestowed by fate.

Now there is continuous stress before birth, among which in the first place is a lack of confidence in the strength of the marriage, conflicts with the husband, other worries, poor health and irritability, the threat of miscarriage and emotional shock during childbirth from painful contractions. We ourselves can eliminate all these causes of restless sleep in children if we are more mature at the time of motherhood and more mentally protected.

Crying in a dream in children of the first years of life does not allow parents to sleep peacefully, feeling clearly “out of place.” It affects not only emotional stress during pregnancy (anxiety, poor health and increased fatigue), but also various deviations during pregnancy and childbirth (toxicosis of the first half of pregnancy, premature birth, excessively rapid or prolonged, premature release of water, entanglement of the newborn’s neck with the umbilical cord) . Swaddling is the same routine procedure as feeding. However, some children clearly calm down, being tightly swaddled, others, on the contrary, struggle to free themselves, and only when fairly tired from the abundance of movements do they calm down and fall asleep. The temperament is already visible here.

Children with a choleric temperament find it more difficult to tolerate any constraint and are just waiting to be freed; phlegmatic people prefer to be wrapped up according to all the rules. And sanguine people, that’s why they are sanguine, so as not to make special demands: not very tight and not very loose - it will be just right. But even outside of temperament, sometimes we see how a child falls asleep only tightly swaddled. Such addictions are associated with the presence of a threat of miscarriage during pregnancy and extremely painful contractions during childbirth. The same factors are involved in the origin of restless sleep in children, since sleep is in a certain way analogous to intrauterine existence, when the child is left alone, in the dark and in a confined space. In addition, negative emotional reactions were recorded in the fetus from the ninth week of life - at the standard age of artificial termination of pregnancy or abortion.

When there is a threat of miscarriage, the appearance of emotional shock cannot be ruled out, which, together with the mother’s similar stress, leads to the release of a large amount of anxiety hormones into the blood. This dose is in some cases enough to disrupt sleep in the coming months and years. A completed miscarriage means the inevitable death of the fetus, but the threat of miscarriage also leads to disruption of the placental circulation and intrauterine hypoxia (insufficient oxygen supply to the fetal brain). The same applies to excessively intense, painful contractions of the muscles of the uterus during the opening of its cervix. The threat of death, physical destruction reflexively turns on the instinct of self-preservation in the fetus in the form of a defensive reaction of motor anxiety and fear.

After birth, an excessively open space, the absence of a cradle, crib, as well as clothing, gives rise to an unaccountable feeling of anxiety, usually in the form of crying, less often - screaming and difficulty falling asleep. Now it is clear why tight swaddling calms children who have suffered the threat of miscarriage and painful contractions of the mother during childbirth. They are again, as it were, in the womb, but in safe conditions of existence. The main thing is that if there was any threat of premature birth, swaddling is necessary, reproducing the conditions of safe intrauterine life.

With organic damage to the brain from asphyxia, birth trauma, the sensitivity of the skin painfully increases, there are tremors of individual parts of the face or convulsions, tension, hypertonicity of the limbs and torso. Then tight swaddling, on the contrary, will increase the child’s anxiety and crying; The best option would be loose swaddling or more frequent positioning of the baby fully open.

In general, 10% of boys and 15% of girls are susceptible, according to their parents, to frequent night terrors. Much more accurate, but not absolute due to repression and amnesia of night fear, we obtain data from direct, morning questioning of children about what they saw at night, including nightmares. Over the course of ten days, 79 children from 3 to 7 years old in kindergartens were interviewed in a similar way. It turned out that during this time, 37% of children (at least every third) had a nightmare, 18% (almost every fifth) saw it repeatedly, sometimes in serials, almost every night. Thus, parents state only the “tip of the iceberg.”

In case of nervous disorders, as shown by an additional survey of children in the speech therapy group of the kindergarten, the CS is even greater. Regardless of the state of the nervous system, the number of CS in preschool age, according to a survey of children, significantly increases from 3 to 7 years, marking an increasing awareness of the problems of life and death, the beginning and end of one’s life. We have repeatedly been convinced of the existence of a relationship between the fear of nightmares and their actual presence in children. Moreover, such fear unmistakably indicated the existence of a CS, even if the child could not remember what exactly it was. As already noted, the question was formulated as follows: “Are you afraid of bad dreams or not?”

Despite the possibility of reflecting the past traumatic experience of dreams in the answer, in most cases the answer reflected the current, that is, the last experience of perception of terrible dreams. A total of 2,135 children and adolescents aged 3 to 16 years were surveyed. The survey data is shown in the table.

Table. Age distribution of fears of nightmares (FS)

From the table we see that the maximum values ​​of fears of CS in boys are observed at 6 years old, in girls - at 5, 6 years old and in preschoolers - at 7 years old (the survey was conducted in the late 70s). This is far from accidental, since it is in older preschool age that the fear of death is most actively represented. It is precisely this fear that is present in children’s nightmares, once again emphasizing the underlying instinct of self-preservation, which is more pronounced in girls.

A unique comparison can be made among preschoolers and schoolchildren aged 7 years. It seems that the age is the same, but the tendency towards a decrease in fears of CS is noticeable among first-graders. The explanation is similar to the decrease in the average score of all fears at school age, due to the new, socially significant position of the student. This is a kind of left-hemisphere shift in the child’s consciousness, when the right-hemisphere, spontaneous, intuitive type of response (which includes fears) must give way to the rational perception of left-hemisphere school information. We see that the number of fears of CS is significantly greater in preschool age for both boys and girls. In turn, fears of CS (like all fears in general) are significantly more often observed in girls, reflecting a naturally more pronounced instinct of self-preservation. It was previously noted that the most active in relation to all fears is the senior preschool age. The fear of CS is no exception, which is closely related (according to computer factor analysis) with fears of attack, illness (infection), death (oneself and parents), animals (wolf, bear, dogs, spiders, snakes), elements (storm , hurricane, flood, earthquake), as well as fears of depth, fire, fire and war. Based on all these fears, one can almost unmistakably assume the presence of nightmares and, accordingly, fear of them.

It is interesting to compare the fear of CS in children from the so-called normal population and children suffering from neurotic personality disorders. People with neuroses have more fears of CS than most of their peers who are healthy. This is not surprising, given the increased anxiety, emotional vulnerability, instability of mood, and lack of self-confidence, self-confidence, and capabilities that are characteristic of neuroses. What also attracts attention is the defenselessness of children, their inability to withstand danger; even a small child can offend them, as one mother said.

Children with fear neurosis are most afraid of CS, when they are so overwhelmed by fear itself that they cannot fight back any dangers that await them day and night. In children with all neuroses, fears of the CS are most often presented at the age of 6-10, when fears appear during the day, like mushrooms after rain, under the influence of experiences caused by the fear of death, problems of learning and adaptation at school. Normally, fear of CS is usually limited to older preschool age. In other words, the fear of CS in neuroses has a more prolonged, extended nature and indicates a more pronounced inability of children to solve their personal problems on their own, without the help of adults.

Since children with neuroses are much more sensitive to CS, it makes sense for them to further consider all the problems associated with CS. “What is Caesar’s is for Caesar, what is Caesar’s is for Caesar.” The same applies to girls and boys. The former have a relationship with CS during pregnancy, the latter do not, and nothing can be done about it. If there is a girl in the mother’s womb, and the mother has toxicosis in the first half of pregnancy (uncontrollable vomiting), then after the birth of the girl, they will significantly more often see CS and be afraid of them. And toxicosis of the second half of pregnancy (nephropathy), albeit at the level of a trend, will have a similar effect. Boys have similar relationships “at zero.”

Thus, the mother’s problems during pregnancy and her poor health have a more traumatic emotional impact on girls, as can be seen in their subsequent dreams. Since the fetus “sees” dreams in the womb, starting from 8 weeks of life (according to neurophysiologists), we can compare this period of pregnancy with the maximum severity of toxicosis in the first half. Then our conclusions, even statistically based ones, will not seem meaningless.

When asked why all this is expressed only in girls, we point out their more pronounced instinct of self-preservation compared to boys (remember that girls experience fears 2 times more often than boys). Therefore, toxicosis, creating the threat of weakening and termination of pregnancy, causes, first of all, hormonally mediated anxiety in girls, as a kind of instinctive protective reaction.

The relationship between fears immediately before sleep and fears during sleep, that is, CS, was examined separately. The previously made conclusion about the reproduction of children's daily experiences in the CS was confirmed. Moreover, by the anxiety experienced by children before bedtime, one can confidently judge the appearance of CS in them, even if they are completely amnesic (forgotten) in the morning.

Encyclopedia of practical psychology "Psychologos"

published 25/11/2013 15:15 updated 09/12/2013 – Pedagogy and psychology