What your dreams reveal about your health
THE concept of dream analysis has fallen out of favour among scientists. Nonetheless, experts believe our dreams can still give clues about our state of health.
We have four to six dreams a night but typically only remember one when we wake during it, and they get longer and more intense as the night progresses.
Exactly why we dream is unclear, but Professor Jim Horne, a sleep neuroscientist, believes their main purpose is to act as ‘the cinema of the mind’, keeping our brain entertained.
Here’s what your dreams might indicate.
NIGHTMARES
BETA-BLOCKERS, sometimes taken for high blood pressure, can make dreams ‘more intense and quite frightening’, says Professor Horne, formerly a director of a sleep centre.
The medication helps widen blood vessels but may alter the balance of some brain chemicals, triggering nightmares.
Bad dreams may also be linked to heart problems. A study in The Netherlands Journal of Medicine found that having an irregular heartbeat increases the risk of nightmares threefold.
One explanation could be that people with heart problems are more likely to have breathing difficulties, which may lower oxygen levels in the brain.
Too little sleep may also lead to a nightmarish state called sleep paralysis. This is where the muscle paralysis that normally stops us acting out our dreams continues into wakefulness, and for about a minute you are unable to move.
It can also be accompanied by the feeling that someone is pressing on your chest, ‘because some of the muscles that affect breathing are also affected by the paralysis’, explains neurologist Dr Guy Leschziner.
The paralysis will wear off, but you can break it by moving your eyes rapidly from side to side, says Professor Horne.
DREAMING MORE OFTEN
ANYTHING that disturbs sleep – such as feeling hot – can make you more likely to wake during dreaming (or REM) sleep, which means you may remember that dream. Women may report more dreams during their period, perhaps due to increased discomfort, says Professor Horne.
Depression can alter the structure of sleep, increasing the amount of time a person spends in dreaming sleep.
More dreams can also occur when someone comes off antidepressants, because the drugs can reduce REM sleep – when you stop taking them there may be a REM sleep rebound effect, where you have more dreaming sleep and more vivid dreams, says Dr Leschziner.
DREAMS THAT WAKE YOU
EATING a large, fatty meal before bed can put pressure on the valve between the stomach and the gullet, increasing the chance of acid reflux – where stomach acid splashes up into the gullet, causing heartburn.
As this usually happens during the hours soon after falling asleep, it may wake you early in the night.
In fact, it’s not the not the dream but the reflux that’s waking you.
BIZARRE DREAMS
DRINKING alcohol before bed may trigger more powerful dreams. The reason is that alcohol tends to suppress dreaming sleep, says sleep physician Dr Tim Quinnell, but as it wears off the dreams come back, sometimes more vividly.
Having an infection is also said to trigger bizarre dreams.
This is possibly because in an attempt to fight the bug, the body experiences a greater amount of slow-wave, non-dreaming sleep.
As a result our dreaming sleep starts later and can erupt into consciousness, leading to strange hallucinations.
Very vivid dreams are also a known side-effect of the antimalarial drug mefloquine. One theory is that these drugs disrupt levels of the brain chemical acetylcholine, which helps control our dreams.