Continuing with our recent exploration of sleep, I came across this passage by sleep researcher Rosalind Cartwright in The Twenty-four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives, on the role of dreams:
Despite differences in terminology, all the contemporary theories of dreaming have a common thread—they all emphasize that dreams are not about prosaic themes, not about reading, writing, and arithmetic, but about emotion, or what psychologists refer to as affect. What is carried forward from waking hours into sleep are recent experiences that have an emotional component, often those that were negative in tone but not noticed at the time or not fully resolved. One proposed purpose of dreaming, of what dreaming accomplishes (known as the mood regulatory function of dreams theory) is that dreaming modulates disturbances in emotion, regulating those that are troublesome. My research, as well as that of other investigators in this country and abroad, supports this theory. Studies show that negative mood is down-regulated overnight. How this is accomplished has had less attention.
I propose that when some disturbing waking experience is reactivated in sleep and carried forward into REM, where it is matched by similarity in feeling to earlier memories, a network of older associations is stimulated and is displayed as a sequence of compound images that we experience as dreams. This melding of new and old memory fragments modifies the network of emotional self-defining memories, and thus updates the organizational picture we hold of ‘who I am and what is good for me and what is not.’ In this way, dreaming diffuses the emotional charge of the event and so prepares the sleeper to wake ready to see things in a more positive light, to make a fresh start. This does not always happen over a single night; sometimes a big reorganization of the emotional perspective of our self-concept must be made — from wife to widow or married to single, say, and this may take many nights. We must look for dream changes within the night and over time across nights to detect whether a productive change is under way. In very broad strokes, this is the definition of the mood-regulatory function of dreaming, one basic to the new model of the twenty-four hour mind I am proposing.
(*Update*) While not on dreams, this passage on circadian rhythms from Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Health and the Science of Healing, fits very much into our recent look at sleep:
Studies have shown that disrupting circadian rhythms by even one hour during the switch to daylight saving time may increase depression, traffic accidents, and heart attacks. These rhythms affect consumption and metabolism in animals—it is hard to imagine that they aren’t also playing a role in human appetites as well. Controlling environmental light with lamps, TVs, and computers gives us incredible flexibility and productivity. But it interrupts daily and yearly cycles that were billions of years in the making and are shared by countless creatures on our planet.