Tag: health

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Scheduling Work and School with Sleep in Mind

The Covid-19 pandemic has caused, in addition to a health crisis, an unprecedented crisis of work and education. Many businesses and schools have closed, or soon will; those that survive will not look or function the same after the pandemic as they did before. The only certainty is that the old ways are gone, and new ways must be created.

As society develops new structures for the future of work and education, now is a perfect opportunity to adjust the scheduling of these activities so they are consistent with current scientific knowledge about sleep. This would mark a big change from past practices. The basic human need for sleep has rarely been a factor in such discussions. But a neglect of sleep science is no longer tenable. The field of chronobiology (the study of the body as a 24-hour system) has grown tremendously in recent years, showing how sleep is an indispensable part of healthy functioning and conscious clarity in waking. Poor sleep weakens the immune system and makes it harder to recover from illness. It diminishes the cognitive ability to learn new information and remember it later. Chronic insomnia is a major factor in several maladies including obesity, diabetes, heart disease, depression, and substance abuse.

Researchers have also found significant variations in the length, timing, and quality of people’s sleep. For instance, children and adolescents need much more sleep than do adults. Women tend to have more insomnia than men. Some people are “polyphasic” sleepers, meaning they sleep in several smaller amounts of time over the 24-hour cycle rather than all at once (monophasic sleepers). Some people do well with 6 hours of sleep a night, others need at least 8 or 9. Some people are most alert early in the morning, while others are slow to awaken and only feel truly conscious late at night.

All of this is to say, there is no right or normal way of sleeping. There is only what makes you and your body feel rested.

These two basic findings of sleep science—the necessity and variability of sleep—have important implications for how work and school activities are scheduled. For example, it’s not healthy for children, especially teenagers, to start their school days too early, or stay up too late doing homework. It’s not healthy for employees to work on shifts far out of sync with their natural sleep cycles, or to travel frequently to places in different time zones. It’s not healthy for schools or businesses to establish a single schedule governing the activities of a large group of people without building in flexibility for the significant number of people whose bodily rhythms will need a somewhat different schedule to stay optimally functional.

It often takes time for scientific research to overcome entrenched cultural attitudes. Such will hopefully be the case with sleep, despite the persistence of contrary beliefs. From Thomas Edison to Elon Musk and President Trump, a view of sleep as nothing but wasted time has prevailed among many Americans. Denying the need for sleep has become a symbol of heroic devotion to productivity, innovation, and success. Anyone who believes otherwise is simply weak or lazy, a slacker with no drive.

That attitude should be left behind as an artifact of the pre-pandemic world. The truth is that people who get adequate amounts of sleep far outperform their sleep-deprived peers—they are more alert, emotionally balanced, and capable of complex thought, and less likely to get sick or have accidents. Perhaps most importantly given the enormous challenges facing society today, people with sound sleep patterns are also more creative, better able to respond adaptively to unusual or unexpected circumstances as compared to sleep-deprived people.

The science is clear, if we choose to heed it. The path to a healthier, more productive, and more resilient future for students and workers begins with simply letting them get the sleep they need.

Note: this post first appeared in Psychology Today on August 24, 2020.

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Healthier Sleep: A Path to Lucid Dreaming

More awareness of sleep leads to more awareness in sleep.

Why is it so hard to motivate people to sleep better?  Sleep is vital to human health, yet many of us get much less of it than we truly need. Sleep deprivation causes devastating personal and social damage, including more frequent accidents, injuries, illnesses, and behavioral problems.  But people rarely make a serious, sustained effort to improve their sleep habits.  Why not?

One reason is the common assumption that sleep is just an empty void, a barren gap of nothingness between times of being awake.  Who wants to prioritize something that’s empty and blank?

But here’s the thing: that common assumption is false.  Sleep is not empty.  It includes a highly active mode of brain-mind functioning that has stimulated the creative works of artists, visionaries, and innovators throughout history. The better you sleep, the more fully your mind can enter into this natural mode of enhanced mental creativity.  Once you become more conscious of your mind’s activities in sleep, you can begin to develop its powers and focus its creative energies wherever you choose.

Psychologists call this “lucid dreaming,” a modern term for an experience that was well-known to ancient cultures.  Early teachings from Hinduism and Buddhism talked about conscious awareness in sleep as a kind of meditation that goes beyond the waking state.  Philosophers from classical Greece admired the potential in sleep for a pure form of mental clarity.  In many indigenous cultures, shamanic healers were trained to become conscious within sleep so they could seek out cures for people who were sick.

The human mind is capable of becoming conscious and active during the state of sleep—that’s the common thread in all these historical traditions.  Combining this with the findings of modern psychology, it becomes clear that lucid dreaming is a natural power of the human mind.  Everyone has this potential in their sleep.  You have this potential. It’s simply waiting for you to actualize it.

A good way to start that process is by observing and identifying the levels of awareness in your current sleep and dreams. You may be surprised to find there are already many elements of lucidity in your dreams right now; you just hadn’t noticed them before.

The practice is easy. When you go to sleep each night, repeat to yourself: “I’m going to be more aware tonight when I sleep and dream.” When you wake up each morning, write down whatever dreams you can remember. If nothing comes to you, that’s fine, don’t worry about it. If you do remember a dream, write it down and give it a score based on the following scale of awareness, which I’ve adapted from Purcell et al., 1993:

Levels of Lucidity

  1. You are not present in the dream, and the content is vague. (For example, “Something about chasing.”)
  2. You are present as an observer, and the content includes some details. (“I see someone being chased by a monster.”)
  3. You observe and think about the content, which includes more specific details. (“I see a dark-haired man being chased by a monster, and I wonder where the monster came from.”)
  4. You are a character in the dream, but with no power or agency. (“I am being chased by a monster, and I can’t get away and I start to panic.”)
  5. You are a character in the dream, with some awareness and agency. (“A monster chases me in my house, and I decide my best option is to hide in the basement.”)
  6. You gain more awareness and agency in the dream. (“While a monster looks for me upstairs, I realize my car is outside, and I grab my keys and run.”)
  7. You gain full control within the dream. (“I see a monster coming, so I lock all the doors to my house, and the monster has to leave me alone.”)
  8. You gain some control over the process of dreaming. (“A monster gets into my house, so I mentally pause the dream to give myself a chance to escape.”)
  9. You gain more awareness and control over the process of dreaming. (“A monster gets into my house, but I know that’s the start of a chasing dream, so I switch everything to a beach scene where I’m flying over the ocean.”)
  10. You consciously co-create the dream.(“I realize I am dreaming, and I decide to go back in time to my family home, where I can learn more about my hopes and fears during childhood….”)

Most dreams are in the 1 to 6 range. Many people have experienced dreams at the 7 and 8 levels, but rarely. Only a few people have experienced dreams at the 9 and 10 levels, although virtually anyone with the right training and practice has the potential to experience dreams reaching the highest levels of conscious awareness.

If you record your dreams using this scale, you will quickly discover which scenarios bring the most lucidity into your sleeping mind.  You will learn what kinds of dreams stimulate your consciousness, and what kinds of dreams block or diminish it.  Maybe you have dreams with less awareness during the week, and dreams with more awareness on the weekends. Maybe there are certain things you do during the day, or people you see, or places you go, that have a direct impact on the lucidity levels of your dreams.  Perhaps your awareness varies depending on what you eat, or when you exercise, or what you watch on tv….

This is valuable information to know about yourself, and you can use it to guide the development of a lucid dreaming practice that is focused directly on your needs and interests.

There are many different methods and techniques available for increasing the frequency of lucid dreaming, all of which have their pros and cons depending on the individual dreamer.  A method can be very effective for some people, but completely useless for others. You will have an easier time finding the approach that works best for you if you start by learning about your own natural patterns of awareness in sleep.

Once you establish a solid foundation of healthy sleep, you can train your mind to become an amazing source of creativity and innovation. I suggest you begin your journey of lucid dreaming by reviewing your sleep and making sure you are doing everything possible to settle your body, deepen your rest, and prepare your mind for new adventures in the growth of consciousness.

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Note: The “levels of lucidity scale” is adapted from: Purcell, S., Moffitt, A., & Hoffmann, R. (1993). “Waking, Dreaming, and Self-Regulation.” In A. Moffitt, M. Kramer, & R. Hoffmann (Eds.), The Functions of Dreaming (pp. 197-260). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

This post was first published in Psychology Today on October 18, 2018.

 

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What Dreams Reflect in Your Waking Life

New research highlights 13 areas of continuity between waking and dreaming.

Since 2009 I have been experimenting with word search technologies to identify meaningful patterns in people’s dreams, using an empirical method that others can test, replicate, and verify.  In a recent unpublished working paper I performed a “meta-analysis” of these studies to determine the strongest signals of waking-dreaming continuity I have found so far.  Below is a summary and condensation of the initial results, sorted into three broad groups: Self, Relationships, and Culture.

Self

Professional/public identity: Dreams accurately reflect a person’s main activity, profession, or job in waking life.  Based only on the content of dreams, we can tell whether someone is an educator, a journalist, a soldier, a student, a scientist, or a musician (as examples I’ve found in previous studies).

Health: Patterns in dreaming correspond to various aspects of the dreamer’s physical and mental health.  Dreams indicate when people are depressed or anxious, when they have suffered a trauma, when they are injured or disabled, and when they are facing the end of life.

Personality: At least some aspects of personality are accurately mirrored in dream content, including emotional temperament, either balanced or turbulent, and sociability, either high or low.

Gender: An individual’s gender is reflected in dream content, and so are the gendered aspects of an individual’s interactions in the social world, either more male-oriented or more female-oriented.

Death: There is a strong correlation between the appearance of death-related words in dreams and concerns about death in waking life.

Relationships

Family and Friends: Dreams offer an especially accurate reflection of the most important relationships in a person’s life.  The more frequently someone appears in your dreams, the more likely it is that you have an emotionally significant relationship with that person, whether or not the person is physically present in your current life, and whether your feelings toward that person are positive or negative.

Sexuality: Patterns in dream content accurately reflect the level of sexual activity in a person’s waking life, both physical and imagined.  Romantic relationships and falling in love make a discernible impact on dream content.

Animals: People who have strong relationships with animals in waking life also tend to dream frequently about those animals.

Culture

Reading & writing: People who enjoy reading and writing in waking life also have higher frequencies of these activities in their dreams.

School: People’s educational backgrounds can be discerned in the patterns of their dreams, either highly engaged with schools or far removed from schooling and formal education.

Sports: Dreams accurately reflect people’s engagement with sports and athletics. Patterns of dreaming can identify people who are actively involved in sports and enjoy watching it, or who have no interest at all in sports.

Artistic interests: People who are engaged with art in waking life tend to dream extensively about art, too.  I found correlations between people’s dreams and their interests in painting, music, theater, literature, and poetry.

Religion/spirituality:  Patterns of dream content reflect important aspects of the dreamer’s religious or spiritual concerns.  For some people, their dreams reveal a deep involvement with a formal religious tradition.  For others, their dreams reflect a sense of “unchurched” spiritual curiosity and eclecticism.  And for others, their dreams indicate a generally low level of interest in religion or spirituality in waking life.

There are many limits to the use of word search methods in the study of dreams, and many challenges that need to be overcome if this approach is to grow into a generally useful tool for dream researchers.  But even with these limits, we can identify several strong signals of meaning in dream content.  These are the simplest, most obvious ways in which dreams accurately reflect people’s concerns in waking life.  Future studies, using more sophisticated tools, will likely reveal even deeper levels of meaning.

 

Note: previous publications on this material include 2009, 2010, 2012, 2014, and 2016.

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Sleep, Dreaming, and Human Health

250px-AlbertusMagnusDominican University’s Albertus Magnus Society will present a lecture titled “Sleep, Dreaming, and Human Health” by Dr. Kelly Bulkeley, visiting scholar at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, on Thursday, February 11 at 7:00 p.m. The lecture will be held in Priory Campus Room 263, 7200 W. Division Street, River Forest. The event is free and open to the public.

     Bulkeley will explain how sleep and dreaming are natural processes hard-wired into the human brain, as well as universal portals into religious experience and spiritual insight. He will describe current scientific research on the health benefits of sleep and the evolutionary functions of dreaming. He will integrate these findings with philosophical and religious teachings about the healing power of dreams.

     Established in 2006 by the Siena Center of Dominican University, the Albertus Magnus Society pursues new information and insight in a setting that is both scholarly and congenial, and reflects the Dominican understanding of the compatibility of religion and science. The society was named for Albertus Magnus, patron saint of scientists, and thirteenth century Dominican famed for scientific discoveries and a theology reflective of the emerging science of his day. For more information on the Albertus Magnus Society, please call (708) 714-9105 or visit the website at http://www.dom.edu/ams.