Dreams have been viewed as a key to the unconscious mind ever since 1899, when Sigmund Freud wrote his canonical textThe Interpretation of Dreams. Freud theorized that dreams act as a mental safety valve, allowing individuals to experiment with what it might feel like to act out negative emotions, fantasies, or impulses in a “safe” space, not the waking world.

While Freud’s dream theory has been an important contribution in the history of psychology and psychoanalysis, it has since been discredited as unscientific — along with his idea that analyzing dreams can uncover the root cause of a patient’s neurosis, usually a repressed traumatic event experienced as a child.

But the purpose of dreams, and their possible connection to both our subconscious and conscious minds, continues to fascinate neuroscientists and psychologists alike.

Sleep also transformsshort-term memory into long-term memory, which is why it’s now regarded as an important part of the learning process — the old adage of “sleeping on it” seems to have been good advice. Dreams are just one element of sleep research, but scientists say they are a key part.

Through this work, Walker developed the theory that REM-sleep offers a form of overnight therapy in the form of dreams. In his acclaimed bookWhy We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, he writes, “REM-sleep dreaming takes the sting out of the difficult, even traumatic, emotional episodes you have experienced during the day, offering emotional resolution when you awake the next morning.”

For example, a dream might allow us to remember a frightening incident from our past like witnessing a car accident without the same emotional feeling of fear that accompanied the event itself. The REM-sleep dreaming removes the memory of the emotion that we felt during the event, allowing us to remember it without the same emotion we experienced when it happened. Life would be very difficult without this process, as we would always relive our past emotions when we remembered something. In this way, dreams can actuallyboost mental health.

Both Cartwright and Walker say that the discipline of sleep research is in its infancy, and we should expect many more revelations about the importance of our time spent in the land of nod.

Our goal at Talkspace is to provide the most up-to-date, valuable, and objective information on mental health-related topics in order to help readers make informed decisions.

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