We Can Change Our Dreams: The Science of Sleep
July 25, 2022
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Babies dream more than adults. Waking up during sleep impacts whether a dream is remembered – and some people remember them while others don’t. Does that mean anything? Why are we ‘paralyzed’ while we dream? What does research say about the impact of supplements? Behavioral sleep medicine expert and licensed clinical psychologist, Dr. Carolyn Ievers-Landis, PhD has the answers and also examines our ability to control our dreams and get rid of our nightmares.
Pete Kenworthy
Our goal with the Healthy@UH podcasts has always been to break down medical myths and help people understand complex medical topics. And Macie, we might have met our match with today’s topic.
Macie Jepson
I think you could be right. I don’t know. We’re talking about something that is different for everyone. I’m guessing it’s hard to understand. I wonder how much of the information that’s out there is actually backed by scientific evidence. Pete, I don’t know. Maybe we’re just dreaming to think that we can get into somebody’s psyche to understand the science of dreams and nightmares. We’ll be talking about that as well. That’s exactly what we’re going to do today.
Pete Kenworthy
When you say psyche, we’re talking about our minds. But what can our dreams tell us about ourselves exactly? Well, I looked it up. And there’s a lot out there about the science of dreams and nightmares. So, let’s get straight to what is fact and what isn’t. Joining us today is Dr. Carolyn Ievers-Landis, a licensed clinical psychologist certified in behavioral sleep medicine at University Hospitals in Cleveland. Thanks for joining us.
Dr. Carolyn Ievers-Landis
I’m happy to be here.
Pete Kenworthy
So, let’s start broadly. Why do dreams and nightmares happen?
Dr. Carolyn Ievers-Landis
The answer is we don’t know. We don’t know for sure. We kind of have some ideas, but we don’t know. We think it’s to consolidate memories, to process our day, maybe a little bit of emotional work there. But we don’t know for sure still, scientifically.
Pete Kenworthy
So, these dreams and nightmares that we’re having, is that a process of the day that we just had, or is it something else?
Dr. Carolyn Ievers-Landis
And I think it’s a combination of both. It’s processing your day, but it’s processing your life, too. Not just your day.
Macie Jepson
So, do we all dream?
Dr. Carolyn Ievers-Landis
We do all dream. Some people dream less than others. Infants dream half of the time. Half of their sleep is dreaming. And as you get older, it’s only 20% or so. And even older adults dream even less. So, it really, it’s interesting that we dream less as we get older.
Macie Jepson
So, we do all dream. But everybody remembers different things. Some people remember everything. Why is that different?
Dr. Carolyn Ievers-Landis
Yes, I think that is so interesting. And I talk to my patients about that all the time. There are some really interesting answers to that. One answer is that at the beginning of the night, after we go through our first stages of dreaming, we end with just a little bit of REM, about 10 minutes, and we dream. And as the night goes on, we have more and more REM. After each REM period, we have a little brief arousal from sleep. People that don’t have that much adenosine, the sleep hormone, let’s say they’ve been a slug all day. They’ve been laying around. They haven’t done anything. Maybe they took a nap. They’re going to have longer extended wake ups throughout the night that happened right after they’ve been dreaming. Therefore, they wake up and they’re like, oh my goodness. I was dreaming. Ooh, that was a weird dream versus somebody else that had a busy, busy day. They were at the beach all day. They were running around. They didn’t have…they have such a quick arousal that they go right back to sleep and they didn’t even, weren’t even remembering that they were dreaming.
Macie Jepson
That is fascinating. It has to do with how deep we sleep, what happened that day, how emotional…oh, that, that really is fascinating.
Dr. Carolyn Ievers-Landis
Whether you slept in or not. It’s, there are so many factors. One other thing that is so fascinating, especially for some of my teenagers that have so much trouble getting up for school, like they’re basically totally groggy and out of it, and the parent is like, it’s almost like they’re sleep walking to the car. I even had a kid when they were driving to school who opened the car door because she was still so like half asleep. So, what I say is, if you can time your wake up to REM…and sometimes you can use those little watches to try to figure out when that’s going to be…then your brainwaves during REM are the same as your wake brainwaves. So, your brain doesn’t have to switch its brainwaves, and you can wake up and feel alert right away. And I find that myself, if I’m dreaming, I can just sit up and I feel totally awake. But if I wake up, you know, my cats wake me up or something I’m not dreaming, then I feel out of it and groggy. So, that’s another fascinating aspect of dreams is timing your wake up to when you are dreaming. Helps you get up more easily and feel less groggy in the morning.
Macie Jepson
Am I the only one who feels this is counter to what I thought I knew about REM? I thought REM was deep sleep. And then you’re saying if you wake up in REM, you’re actually more alert?
Dr. Carolyn Ievers-Landis
Yes. It’s because your brain, it is deep sleep, but your brain waves are the same as when you are awake. And also, interestingly, I think, or maybe you were going to get to this, when we’re dreaming, our bodies or our main muscle groups, are paralyzed. Okay. So, we’re not moving around in our dreams. And some people thought, well, this is because, you know, maybe so we wouldn’t injure ourselves as we’re dreaming, if we’re acting out our dreams. And there is such a thing as REM behavioral disorder where people’s bodies are not paralyzed, and they do move around and could injure themselves. I had a patient who was dreaming about being attacked by wolves. And she would wake up in the morning and her forehead was bleeding, in part because she was moving and she was on an SSRI, which can also cause symptoms of REM behavioral disorder. So, that’s something, when some people will wake up, if they’re very sleep deprived, they might have hyposomnia, they might have narcolepsy, they wake up and they can’t move for a while. And that’s because they’re in REM and the paralysis part is still hanging on for a little while before they wake. But our actual brainwaves or the way our brains are similar in REM as to when we are awake, interestingly.
Pete Kenworthy
Before we move on, you said she was on an SSRI. What is that?
Dr. Carolyn Ievers-Landis
Okay. It’s a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor like Prozac, that sort of thing. And those meds can sometimes affect REM as to whether or not you, you know, have the paralysis during that phase of sleep.
Pete Kenworthy
Okay. So, we’ve talked a little bit about people remembering what they dream, right? And why. Right? Boring, sluggish day versus a really active day certainly contributes to, what you remember and when you wake up. But I want to get into also about those dreams that we don’t want to remember, right, the nightmares. And some people have nightmares that are almost crippling, actually. So, I don’t know if you want to go into the why, but the why might be interesting cause that that maybe leads to answers of how we stop having nightmares.
Dr. Carolyn Ievers-Landis
I think that is so important. So many people have, I usually say, dreams they don’t want, because some people’s nightmares are other people’s exciting zombie dream, especially with some of my little boy patients. So. I would say, do you have dreams you don’t like as opposed to saying nightmares? But yeah, so, I mean, it can be, I’ve had patients that have had the same dream every day for a year, something about like their parents are dying or something and, and it can be extremely crippling, cause there’s such a thing as nightmare disorder. So, that’s when people will wake up after having the nightmare and have trouble falling back to sleep. They also might not even want to sleep. They might avoid going to sleep because they’re afraid of having the nightmare. And it really can be very crippling, as you said, and you know, some of our soldiers or, you know, troops come back from combat, and that’s really one of the symptoms even of PTSD is nightmares about something that they witnessed. So, it is very important to ask people or talk about if you’re having dreams that you don’t like and to get help for those, cause there are very effective treatments for nightmares.
Macie Jepson
Let’s talk about those treatments. And do the treatments have anything to do with the why?
Dr. Carolyn Ievers-Landis
There can be a why for why you have bad dreams, but there isn’t necessarily always a why. So, sometimes people will have something that will happen to them, some traumatic event or some of the little kids that I see will see some scary poster or something on YouTube or something, and it will trigger them having dreams about this. So, sometimes there is a very clear why. Sometimes it’s just totally unknown. People don’t know why they’re having certain dreams. It’s not like they’ve been worrying about something during the day or what. So, I don’t think we totally know why. But regardless, there are ways that people can get help for these. There is a therapy called Imagery Rehearsal Therapy, which Barry Krakow is a person that developed this. And there’s a lot of research in this area, both for adults and emerging research for children. And I actually do this in my own practice with the children and adolescents and young adults that I see. So, it’s very, very exciting that it works.
Macie Jepson
Can you walk us through it? What would that look like and feel like?
Dr. Carolyn Ievers-Landis
So, it’s literally about replacing dreams that you don’t want with ones that you do. It’s like a form of meditation. And I’ve found that some of my patients are doing this anyway. I just saw a patient last week that had been thinking of kind of the movie set of a horror movie but without the horror happening, just kind of the cool staircase and roses and chandelier. She just loves that. And she was kind of drawing pictures and thinking about this and therefore dreaming about it, which was replacing bad dreams and scary dreams that she didn’t like. So, it’s really about spending time every day, thinking of, well, what would I rather dream about? Which also gets to your why. Have you ever been reading your newsfeed, certain types of stories about certain people, and you’ll dream about them? So, what we think about during the day is then processed during our dreams at night. So, you have some control over that. If you put aside this time and you think about this same content using all of your senses…it’s a form of meditation…and say, I would rather dream about this, this is what I’m going to process and think about, that comes in at night.
Pete Kenworthy
And for help with that kind of therapy, people should seek out behavioral sleep medicine specialists?
Dr. Carolyn Ievers-Landis
Right. So, yeah, so people that know how to do Imagery Rehearsal Therapy, sometimes people will change something about the dream. Sometimes people replace it. It is a good idea to see an expert to do this.
Macie Jepson
All right. This is fascinating that we can somewhat control our dreams. I think we buried the lede. That is huge. All right. So, we can control them. I’m always kind of jealous when I hear from other people that they can remember their dreams, because I can’t. Is it true that there are certain supplements or things that we can put in our body or that we may put in our body for other reasons that have an effect on how vivid our dreams are?
Dr. Carolyn Ievers-Landis
I think that this research is still evolving, but there is something about melatonin, for example, where people that are taking melatonin, which is a hormone that the brain produces naturally that sometimes can be linked to more vivid dreams. We’re not exactly sure why, or, you know, how. But I mean, that might be something that happens for some people, which it can be good or bad depending upon what type of dream you’re having.
Macie Jepson
So, any supplement that would put you into a deeper sleep or that would assist in your sleep.
Dr. Carolyn Ievers-Landis
Right. So, for example, magnesium, I think has also been mentioned that people are like, they sleep better. They have, you know, more deeper sleep, but then they might experience more vivid dreams, because we also dream in non-REM sleep, but not as much as REM. So, that’s something to keep in mind.
Pete Kenworthy
You talked at the very beginning, the very first question we asked you was something about why dreams happen, and the first part of your answer was we don’t know. But at the same time, throughout this conversation, it has sounded like, and you have said, there’s science on this, or there’s science on that. It sounds like there is a lot of science behind this.
Dr. Carolyn Ievers-Landis
There is science. Obviously people are fascinated by dreams. We think it is kind of processing your day, consolidating memories and things like that. But then there’s also been some findings that people that don’t have as much REM, they don’t dream as much are okay. So, why is that? You know, and the fact that infants dream for half the time, and we only dream for 20% of the time and things like that, but that seems that’s a normal developmental process. So, maybe there’s something about processing our day or consolidating memories that we don’t need dreams as much for as we get older. But I think there’s still a lot more science that has to be done for us to truly know the answers to that.
Macie Jepson
What would be your takeaway from this conversation that you would want people to understand about our dream cycles? What they mean to us. About us.
Dr. Carolyn Ievers-Landis
I really want people to know that you are not helpless. You are not helpless. If you are having dreams that you don’t like, there’s lots that you can do. You can have better sleep and have briefer arousals. You can surround yourself with positive images and activities throughout the day. You can sleep regularly, get enough sleep and get up around the same time every day. So, and if you’re having dreams you like, you can wake up and write them down right away and try to capture as much of that as you can, which is fun, if you are into that sort of thing.
Macie Jepson
And if we’re not remembering dreams, because we’re all dreaming as we’ve learned from you, but if we’re not remembering them, is that saying something about our sleep health that could be bad for us or worrisome?
Dr. Carolyn Ievers-Landis
I don’t think it’s an issue. I mean, you know, again, as we get older, we have less sleep. You might be someone that gets up to an alarm clock. You might be someone that doesn’t sleep in on the weekends. I think it’s okay. I don’t think people should feel badly or judge themselves because they don’t remember their dreams, and some people do.
Pete Kenworthy
This has been fascinating. Thank you so much for being here, Dr. Carolyn Ievers-Landis, licensed clinical psychologist certified in behavioral sleep medicine at University Hospitals in Cleveland. Thanks again.
Dr. Carolyn Ievers-Landis
Thank you so much. I think it’s fascinating, too.
Tags: Carolyn Ievers-Landis, PhD, Sleep