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Journalism of Courage
Right before your alarm goes off, do you feel bombarded with the most vivid visions in your dreams — reconnecting with ancestors, getting thrown off the edge of a building, fighting with your loved ones, or playing hero to a damsel in distress? While friends and family claim that morning dreams often come true, we wonder if this actually rings true from a scientific perspective.
Recently, psycho spiritual healer Kavyal Hathi Sedani shared her thoughts on the same during an exclusive chat with Pinkvilla: “Subah ke jo sapne hote hai, unko venting bolte hai. They are called venting dreams, literally trash can dreams. Sab kuch process ho gaya, ab baaki ka kuch information hai jiska humein koi bhi kaam nahi. Log bolte hai ki subah ke sapne sach hote hai, magar woh sach nahi hai. Jis information ka aapko koi kaam nahi hai, sochlo aapke brain ne usko phenk diya,” she shared.
Is this true?
Dr Srikanth Srinivasan, MD, DM[Neuro], Master of Psychiatry, told indianexpress.com that early morning dreams are those that occur roughly between 4 a.m. and 6 to 7 a.m. They occur during a specific phase of the sleep cycle known as the REM sleep period, also referred to as the Rapid Eye Movement sleep behavior, which is the longest REM period.
“There are multiple REM periods that happen during the sleep cycle, and this particular period that happens in the early morning is the longest REM sleep period during a night’s sleep. Since it happens very close to waking up, and because it lasts for such a long time, say about 90 minutes or so, we tend to remember the dreams that happen early in the morning,” he explained. There’s also a significant difference in the content of the dreams that we experience early in the morning.
According to Dr. Srinivasan, during a particular REM period dream, our repressed emotions, deeper psychological conflicts, and past events all come to the fore. “This is because certain areas in the brain get activated during this particular, the last REM period of the sleep cycle,” he said.
These areas include the memory part of the brain, known as the hippocampus, the emotional part of the brain, referred to as the limbic areas or the amygdala, and certain areas that control vision, located at the back of the brain, known as the visual association areas.
He believes this is why the content of early morning dreams is often more emotional and vivid — because the visual association areas in the brain are also activated during this particular period.
Dr. Srinivasan said that because the frontal or logical part of the brain becomes less activated, it does not inhibit any of the normal activities or processes that happen in the brain. So, all of these deeper psychological conflicts come to the fore. And since this happens close to waking up, we tend to remember a lot of this content during the last REM cycle of the sleep period.
The expert shared that it has some psychological significance in clinical psychiatry. “A lot of our psychological conflicts — if we maintain a dream diary or a sleep journal and keep writing them down — we will be able to analyze what our deepest emotional conflicts are, what events have significantly affected us which we might not have realized earlier,” he said, adding that by maintaining all this in classic psychoanalysis, we might be able to recognize and address these repressed emotional conflicts and psychological problems.
