The Brain Never Sleeps: Why We Dream and What It Means for Our Health

In later years, I worked with doctors, nurses, and sleep technicians at the lab. I went on to oversee daytime operations and helped develop virtual sleep services before wearable sleep technology went mainstream. As a writer, I believe in the power of accessible, trustworthy information to improve our health and well-being. I'm passionate about prioritizing sleep in our busy lives and spreading the word about its importance in our physical and mental health.

The nine-year-old kid in me is still in complete wonder of the dreams that sleep offers. I'm as fascinated by the fantasy as by the reality of dreams; the fictions our dreaming brain creates and the real moments on which it shines a spotlight.

A couple of years ago, I came across a paper by Rubin Naiman called "Dreamless: The Silent Epidemic of REM Sleep Loss." I learned that we are as dream deprived as we are sleep deprived, and our REM dream loss is harming our physical and mental health. It made sense that if we weren't getting enough sleep, then we weren't having enough dreams. The idea of a dream deprived society shifted my focus back to dreams. Why, I wanted to know, are dreams important in their own right? Why do dreams matter, and what benefits are we missing out on if we are depriving ourselves of dreams? Naiman explained that our REM dream loss is harming our health and well-being. To make matters worse, we are in denial of the deleterious effects of REM dream loss.

How, I wondered, did we get here? Why don't we pay more attention to our dreams? In our sleep-deprived society, dreams can be hard to come by. I've had my fair share of sleepless nights because of illness and puzzling bouts of insomnia, a sick child, or a frightened puppy. I thought about how difficult it is to ponder our dreams when we're in survival mode, trying to snatch whatever sleep we can get. I thought of another possible contributing factor: dreams have a bit of an image problem. As several dream researchers told me, dreams still carry psychoanalytic baggage from the time of Sigmund Freud, who believed that dreams are unfulfilled repressed wishes. The neuroscience of dreams offers another side of the debate over the meaning of dreams, focusing on the neural mechanisms of the dreaming process.

In this accelerated world, many of us don't stop and think about our dreams, as if they were fictions unrelated to us, the ones who created them. "Today, too many of us view dreams the way we do stars—they emerge nightly and seem magnificent, but are far too distant to be of any relevance in our lives," wrote Naiman.5

This reignited my fascination with dreams. I had a big picture understanding of why we dream, which left many unanswered questions. Why, I wondered, do we spend so much time and energy to create such complex dream stories? Wouldn't a simple plot line suffice? How are dreams connected to our waking lives and, as a result, our mental health? When I'm preoccupied or worried, my concerns often show up in my dreams in strange and bizarre ways. But what insights lay beyond my personal dream experiences and general reading on dreams? I wanted to dig deeper into the research. I was curious to understand how dreams can gauge our current state of mind and then change along with our psychological well-being. Above all, I wanted to learn how we can use our dreams to improve our mental health. I had many questions to investigate and expand my thinking, which set me off on this journey through dreamland.

This is a book about the art and the science of dreaming. It's about how dreams are built, why we dream, and how we can use our dreams in everyday life. It's about the intrinsic connection between dreams and our well-being. Dreams illuminate our state of mind, from everyday worries and preoccupations to struggles with our mental health. Dreams reveal what matters most to us and what remains unsettled in our lives. During times of crisis, dreams tell the story.

This is the story of my exploration of the dark side of the mind that is often dismissed or forgotten. We spend a large amount of our waking hours daydreaming and a third of our lives asleep. We think of ourselves as rational and analytic. Yet above all, we are dreamers. We spend a lot of our time imagining and planning, with our minds elsewhere. In dreams, we are free thinkers who pursue the impossible. Yet many of us don't pay much attention to our dreams. We are busy thinking every moment of our lives, whether it's waking or dreaming thoughts that swirl around our heads. The Brain Never Sleeps investigates dreaming as part of this twenty-four-hour loop.

It  examines  many  facets  of  dreaming, from the psychology to the neuroscience of dreams, and weaves scientific findings with personal experiences. Through interviews, research, and dreams that span two decades, I share what I learned about the art and science of dreaming, including why dreams matter and how we can reclaim this other realm of thought and experience.

I begin my tour through dreamland with Sigmund Freud as my guide. It has been well over a century since Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, and the debate continues over the meaning and nonsense of dreams. I discover that it isn't an either-or situation with a dream being a mental junkyard or a psychological dig just waiting for the archaeologist in us to uncover its meaning. Dreams by their very nature are about possibility, offering many facets and complexities to explore. I dig up early dream experiments and chart the course of some trailblazing dream researchers whose work is often overshadowed by Freud. These pioneers in dream science experimented with their own dreams, proposing some of the major dream theories that are still studied today.