WHY YOU SLEEP SIX TO EIGHT HOURS
Why do we sleep eight hours a night? As you sleep, the body relaxes but the mind stays active. Sleep lab research suggests that regenerating the body takes only a few hours. If only a few hours are needed to refresh the body, why continue sleeping? While construction workers, athletes and others with physically demanding lifestyles need more recovery time for their bodies during sleep, most lead sedentary lives. Many dream experts agree that we continue to sleep to meet emotional and psychological needs.
SLEEP DIGESTS EMOTIONS
Sleep is more about balancing emotions and mobilizing coping skills than it is about resting muscles. Sleep also allows us to engage the unconscious in problem solving, a critical but overlooked default mechanism of the sleeping mind.
Dreams are an automatic emotional coping mechanism hard-wired into brain. During the day, you get stressed as you confront difficult situations. Often you go to sleep stressed, wondering how to handle a person, decision or difficult problem. Yet when you wake up, you feel a sense of peace about it. You may not yet be aware of the solution but something has shifted. Something happened during sleep that changed what was going on. What shifted? What changed?
The sleeping mind acts to reconcile emotions. As you sleep, you sort out feelings and thoughts about an issue. You examine a question or problem in the light of past experience. You compare what is going on to what you would like it to be. And somewhere before morning, you reach a conclusion that makes you feel better.
How does a dream play into this default mechanism? After this review and sorting process, the mind may come up with an insight or solution. It plays that solution back to you as a dream, a visual playing-out of a scene like a charades game, to help you remember the solution once awake. At night, we have only images as the language of communication, so that is what your brain uses to communicate a message back to you.
SLEEP TURNS ON COPING MECHANISMS
If you don't remember or notice the dream, you may not yet have the answer you are seek, but something in your awareness has changed. While asleep, thanks to a subliminal review process, you figured out that there is an answer, or that you handled such a situation before and can do it again. That is why you wake up feeling less anxious than when you went to sleep.
It may take a few nights, weeks or months to get the whole answer, but your coping skills have kicked in. So instead of reaching for the yummy chocolate or a drink, look to your dreams to find answers and relieve stress. Plugging into your sleep and dream mechanisms speeds up coping and finding solutions.
| YOUR LEFTOVER FEELINGS
CREATE A DREAM MESSAGE
When someone records their dreams and interprets them regularly, dream messages become clear and direct. But even for those who don't analyse their dreams, they still have an indirect effect. Instead of a message, the person gets a feeling, like a hang-over, as they wake up. Such feelings create a shift in perspective or provide a new sense of peace. You may not know WHY something changed, but you notice there is a change. Deliberately using dream analysis assists in problem solving. It is like thinking out loud at night and reaching conclusions sooner, with less strain.
THE DEFAULT STANCE
OF THE SLEEPING MIND
IS TO PROBLEM SOLVE
As you sleep, your mind solves problems and communicates solutions in a dream because dreams are the only available " communication channel" while asleep. Learning theory in psychology tells us your memory bank stores images, not words, so you "remember in images". You store items as an image. All thoughts and feelings become images in your brain's filing system.
Dreams are a language of images, like playing the game of Charades which makes them a natural vehicle of communication between the unconscious and waking mind .
Use the Five Step Method as a free DIY tool on this site to find out how to translate the message of a dream image.
WHERE DO DREAM MESSAGES
COME FROM?
Who or what is the source of a dream communication? What creates a dream message? The source of most dream messages is your unconscious as it dips into your storehouse of experience. Like looking through a notebook, while asleep, you search your memory at night to find out: "What did I do with this before?" "What have others done?" What is left undone?" What are new possibilities? From this place on the mountain top of your own experience, you answer those questions. Sometimes the answer comes one piece at time; sometimes it appears all at once.
A message can also originate from the soul. You may be the captain of your ship, but the soul is its owner and occasionally has something to say about the direction you are heading.
On occasion messages also come from the voice of the Divine Itself or designated angels. All three are possible sources.
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