What Role REM Sleep and Dreaming Play in Mankind

In a paper published last month in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Dr. J. Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist and longtime sleep researcher at Harvard, argues that the main function of rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM, when most dreaming occurs, is physiological. The brain is warming its circuits, anticipating the sights and sounds and emotions of waking.
“It helps explain a lot of things, like why people forget so many dreams,” Dr. Hobson said in an interview. “It’s like jogging; the body doesn’t remember every step, but it knows it has exercised. It has been tuned up. It’s the same idea here: dreams are tuning the mind for conscious awareness.”

So ‘Dreaming’ is not only psychological but also physiological! So interesting….We now know while we sleep, our body still does so many work and when there is sleep disorder or sleep depletion, our immune system becomes weaker and has more chance to get infection, then how about dreaming? Why we dream at all?

In ancient Eastern medical textbook, the interpretation of dream was considered as a important subject in the context of the accurate diagnosis of psychological and physiological disorders, Acupunturists still learn about the dream interpretation in the fundamental theory of traditional chinese medicine at school.

no matter how scientists try to find out the reasons of dreaming or decode dreaming, it seems as if those areas of human activities are still in the mystery. maybe that’s why we still see the signs of dream interpreter on the street.