REM sleep boosts memory, creativity, and more, experts announce.

In  a new study, people who took naps featuring REM sleep -in which dreams are most vivid – performed better on creativity-oriented word problems. That is, the REM, or rapid eye movement, sleep helped people combine ideas in new ways, according to psychiatrist Sara Mednick, who lead this study.

At midday, after the first round, the subjects were given a 90-minute rest period, during which they were monitored. Some participants took naps with REM sleep, which typically begins more than an hour after a person falls asleep. Others took an REM-less nap. A third group rested quietly but didn’t sleep.

There was a second round of tests in the afternoon. In a typical second-round test, participants were asked to guess what single word is associated with three seemingly unrelated words. For example, given “cookie,” “heart,” and “sixteen,” the answer would have been “sweet.” The correct answers to many of the second-round questions were the same as the solutions to analogy questions from round one.

On the second-round questions whose answers matched first-round answers—for example, “sweet” and “sweet”—the REM nappers improved their performances by 40 percent. Non-REM nappers and the non-nappers showed no improvement on these problems, said Mednick, of the University of California, San Diego, who presented her findings Friday in San Diego at the American Psychological Association’s annual convention.

That means that REM sleep improved participants’ ability to see connections among seemingly unrelated things: the answers from the first-round analogy problems and the three words in each round-two association test, she said. Read The Full Story…

Your dreams are many symbols and allegories. When you venture into the realm of dream interpretation you must try to decode your dream, you need to analyze it into the individual fragments and examine each for its particular meaning. Every one contains a small piece of the entire picture. Dreams are composed of a collection of little parts of your own life experience that are stored away in your brain symbolically.

What type of dream are you dealing with?

To interpret your dreams, you need to determine what type of dream you are dealing with. There are two categories that they fit into, those that are generated from within your physical body and mind and those that come from your spirit guides or tutors. They have different purposes and its necessary to recognize what these differences mean to you and how they interact in your waking and dreaming state.

Physical body dreams

Food: Did you ever notice that when you take a nap after you’ve eaten lunch that you can have some crazy images go through your mind. The same thing happens at night too, because food can trigger some wild and wacky dreams. If you enjoy these psychedelic excursions, then take note of what you had to eat before hand and repeat the process. On the other hand, if you’re not interested, then take note of what you ate and make certain to avoid eating whatever it was. Food is one of the generators of dreams, which are not worth interpreting.

Health Your subconscious knows a lot about you that you don’t, or maybe don’t care to know. Often times it will tell you something about your practices or lifestyle to tip you off about what its needs are. In dreams it tries to get the point across to you, sometimes politely, at other times not so.

Psychology: Stressful relationships and social situations can cause our mind to get out of kilter but our subconscious intervenes to straighten things out. Read The Full Story…

Sleep is one of the body’s most mysterious processes. REM sleep is the part of sleep when there are rapid eye movements (REM). Dreams occur during REM sleep. We normally have 3 to 5 periods of REM sleep per night. They occur at intervals of 1-2 hours and are quite variable in length. An episode of REM sleep may last 5 minutes or over an hour. About 20% of sleep is REM sleep. If you sleep 7-8 hours a night, perhaps an hour and half of that time, 90 minutes, is REM sleep.

REM sleep is characterized by a number of other features including rapid, low-voltage brain waves detectable on the electroencephalographic (EEG) recording, irregular breathing and heart rate and involuntary muscle jerks.

During REM sleep, you dream actively, but your limb muscles are immobile. Your breathing is rapid, irregular, and shallow. Your heart rate increases, your blood pressure rises, males may have penile erections, and females may have clitoral enlargement. Your brain is at least as active during REM sleep as it is when you are awake.

Infants spend about 50 per cent of their sleep time in REM sleep; after infancy, you spend fifteen to twenty per cent of your sleep time in REM sleep.

REM Sleep Disorder Causes

The exact cause of REM sleep behavior disorder is unknown, although the disorder may occur in association with various degenerative neurological conditions such as Parkinson disease, multisystem atrophy, diffuse Lewy body dementia, and Shy-Drager syndrome. In 55% of persons the cause is unknown, and in 45%, the cause is associated with alcohol or sedative-hypnotic withdrawal, tricyclic antidepressant (such as imipramine), or serotonin reuptake inhibitor use (such as fluoxetine, sertraline, or paroxetine) or other types of antidepressants (mirtazapine). Read The Full Story…