At night, we process the things we didn’t deal with during the day for various reasons. Perhaps we were afraid to process certain matters, because if we allowed ourselves to think about them or feel what was happening in our body, it could have triggered irrational reactions. These irrational reactions might have led us to say too much, reveal too much, or dare to do something. Due to fear of reactions or consequences, we often choose to keep things inside.
At night, however, those barriers disappear. During sleep, a vast amount of emotions can move from the body to the brain and back. This especially happens in the second half of the night, when we enter REM sleep. When we first fall asleep, we experience a longer phase of deep sleep and a very short REM phase. This cycle then repeats two to four more times, depending on how long we sleep.
At the beginning of sleep, deep sleep is long and REM sleep is short. With each subsequent cycle, deep sleep shortens and REM sleep lengthens. For this reason, dreams are usually strongest after the third or fourth hour, depending on when we went to sleep. If we fall asleep after 10 p.m., deep sleep becomes shorter and we increasingly lack deep sleep. During deep sleep, the brain performs a sort of inventory. It roughly organizes what from the day is worth storing for later and what should be discarded, as it is not needed.
The brain stores the whole day in five-second cycles or intervals. During deep sleep, these intervals are either compressed or expanded. If something important happened, or if it triggered a strong emotional response in us, the system marks it as significant. Those five seconds slow down so much that it feels like one or two minutes, or we might even feel it lasted an hour. Unimportant things are compressed, merged, and space is thus made for the upcoming day.
With each sleep cycle, the hippocampus, which is primarily responsible for memory, is slightly emptied. In the REM phase, what remains—what has been deemed important or useful—is processed and connected in various ways. Events that we didn’t understand at the time due to stress and to which we responded through subconscious patterns are then enriched with the creativity of the conscious mind, thereby changing the memory and the influence of the past on the present. Increasing overall emotional maturity changes this process and brings to consciousness feelings and memories we previously weren’t even aware of (literally, we didn’t even dream about them), and we start dreaming more about actual past events.
Continuing the process of raising overall emotional maturity allows us to process these events from a semi-conscious state (dreams) into full awareness, helping us move forward from suppressed trauma and helplessness into strength and transformation. Dreams are, therefore, a practice in which we undergo change or re-experience an event in a simulated world, in virtual reality.
I teach a deeper understanding of dreams, their meaning, and their influence in the 3rd module of Level 4 training and at the Level 3 AEQ Relationships seminar.
