How To Avoid Traumatic Dreams

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark. The real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.
- Plato, philosopher, pupil of Socrates, teacher of Aristotle (428-347 BC)

Harkening back to our prehistoric past, as social but uncivilized dwellers of forest and savannah, we required a degree of caution and sensitivity toward activity that might take place around us at night, activity which might result in our becoming lunch for a predator.

However, why should a child be afraid of the dark today? In the womb, the fetus had nothing to fear in permanent darkness. That fear, like all fears, had to be learned after birth. In most cases, the fear would be learned as a result of something a parent did, or did not do when something alarming happened during the night.

Others, including extended family or other children, might have implanted scary stories in the mind of the child, but the parents have control of the child's activities during most of the times that he or she could experience something that could develop into a fear.

Night is also a time when most children are left alone in their bedroom, apart from the security they enjoy during the daytime with parents or other caregivers. But nothing in nature says that they should be afraid, unless something has sparked that fear.

Sure, scary dreams can produce a fear of the dark. However, dreams tend to be frightening for a reason. We have control over our conscious mind during the daytime, but our unconscious mind takes over at night. The unconscious can be just plain crazy sometimes, unfettered by norms, securities and boundaries we have during the daytime.

In general, my experience tells me that a brain that is active and learning fruitfully during the daytime seldom has scary dreams at night. If anything, the brain that is intellectually active during the daytime tends to have rather boring dreams at night, such that they are quickly forgotten. A brain that is active during the daytime with thoughts relating to emotional or social problems is more apt to have bad dreams at night.

The best way to give a child calm dreams at night is to provide a stimulating environment in which they can learn during the day. A boring daytime or an insecure one might well lead to scary dreams at night. Daytime fears or insecurities tend to develop into nighttime dramas. Small daytime experiences can become monstrous at night.

It's equally true that fears in adults are learned. Nothing in nature suggests that we are born with fears, though we might have some degree of caution built in (see above). It's also equally true that adults who lead mentally stimulating lives during the daytime tend to have fairly mundane dreams at night. Those who lead boring daytime lives may well have nightmares or bad dreams.

The whole topic of dreams is not as simple as this, of course, because science knows relatively little about consciousness or the unconscious. However, the tips given above may help you to analyze your own daytime and nighttime mental activity to determine if you need to change something about how you spend part of your daytime life.

You can as well help someone else--especially a child--who may be having trouble coping with traumatic experiences at night. It won't be the whole answer, but it could be the beginning of a solution to apply the knowledge you received here.

The brain, like the rest of the body, wants to exercise, demands to be exercised. Provide that exercise--without forcing anything that causes information overload--in the daytime and the nights should pass peaceably.

Bill Allin
Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book for adults who want to learn why they are the way they are and how they can change themselves. And for parents who want to know how to grow their children well.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Sleep Can Affect Every Part of Your Life

[Sleep is] the golden chain that ties health and our bodies together.
- Thomas Dekker

No one knows for certain why we need sleep. Obviously we need to rest our body and our mind, as they can't go on indefinitely without aperiod for recuperation. Or can they?

It's not certain why even that is necessary. Within each cell of our bodies is, in effect, a biological engine. It consumes fuel and expels waste, just like a mechanical engine that we might expect to be able to work endlessly (except for periods of downtime for maintenance and replacement of parts).

Why sleep and not just rest? So far as anyone knows, essentially the same types of recuperation could take place whether we rest or sleep. In fact, some people who live in considerable pain have little more than a few minutes of light sleep each day. The cause of their pain may get worse, but it doesn't seem to be as a result of not sleeping.

Dreams have always presented opportunities for people to speculate as to their meaning. Can dreams be interpreted or not? Recent research suggests that dreams consist of parts of our brain at work without connection to other parts that deal directly with reality. That is, without the active participation of the frontal lobes that keep us on track as members of a functioning society.

For that reason, dreams have no connection with morals or societal norms, because these are known to be functions of the frontal lobes. In other words, dreams must be considered to be amoral. If we had only the same parts of our brain operating when we were awake as are in gear when we dream, we could likely be considered insane.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that those who lead active intellectual lives in their waking hours, ones requiring a great deal of thinking, may have relatively mild dreams. Those who have few mental demands during their waking hours tend to have more active dreams, like adventure or horror movies. This may be more the brain getting exercise or relaxing while dreaming, as needed, rather than doing something warranting our attention as prophesy or warning.

Several kinds of animals--sharks and dophins would be two examples--have two sides to their brains, as we do, but they must continue swimming day and night or they would die (either suffocating or drawning, depending on the animal). To accommodate the necessary brain function to continue swimming, they rest one side of their brain at a time, usually for a couple of hours each side before switching off the active side and switching on the sleeping side of the brain. Some migrating birds are known to do the same in flight.

Some people believe that humans do the same thing at certain times. Have you ever tried to adjust your car radio and drive at the same time? You can be in complete control of your car as it moves along the road, but also give attention to your fiddling with the radio until you find the station you want. Then you may have trouble remembering driving but you will retain full memory of what you did with the radio.

The two sides of our brain can therefore function separately, even if they do so seldom. Do we sleep with one side of the brain awake and dreaming while the other is asleep and resting? Research says no, there is no evidence of "sidedness" when we sleep or dream.

Dreams occur as deep in the middle of our brain as we can imagine.

Compared to the full size of our brain, very little is used when we dream. At this stage of research, no one knows what the rest of the brain is doing when the few small parts are dreaming.

The brain is easily the most mysterious and complex organ of the body.

Moreover, it almost totally controls the health of the rest of our body.

Even when we sleep and are not dreaming, it continually sends messages to the other body parts that control our autonomic systems, such as breathing and blood pumping. Cells get fed 24/7.

But cells can't work 24/7. Even while they continue to eat from blood supplies, they take rest while we sleep so they can perform when we are awake. Hair and nails grow more when we sleep than when we are awake. But these are the least sentient parts of our body.

As Dekker suggests, we may not know exactly how sleep works to keep us going, but our bodies don't work well indefinitely without enough of it.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic SocialProblems, striving to make sense of some of the mysteries of life.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Frankenstein and Dracula Tell Us About Dreams

A quiet conscience sleeps in thunder.
- English proverb

I have wrestled with this quote for weeks and am still not certain what it means. It seems to mean what the reader wants it to mean.

However, it may refer to something I have researched informally over several years. It's the relationship between the levels of emotion of a person's daytime life and that in their dreams.

People who lead relatively calm and untroubled lives seem to have very active, even dangerous, dreams. Like adventure movies. Their dreams have risk, danger, loved ones or themselves in precarious situations. Blood racing, adrenaline charging through the system.

Those who lead very active daytime lives where their brains are always in at least second gear or higher tend to have more boring and untroubled dreams. Exceptions must be made here for those who have panic attacks at night.

The trouble I have had with this theory is not finding evidence, but of persuading people that their minds are either relatively at peace during the daytime or highly active during that period of the day. Few people want to categorize themselves. They seem to believe that they will be somehow transformed by a label.

I wonder if Bram Stoker (creator of Dracula) led a peaceful daytime life. Or Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, creator of Frankenstein. It is well known that Bram Stoker awoke from a dream (nightmare?) with a Dracula scenario already in progress.

The active brain needs peace at night, so has unremarkable dreams, while the brain that is relatively during the day needs more exercise at night.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to make sense of nighttime neural exercises.
Learn more at http://billallin.com