🐓 What do you know about sleep? 🦉

The primary reason why do we sleep – is to recover from the days’ stress on the body, to repair muscle damage, and to freshen up to the next days’ demands. On the other hand, as paradoxical as it may seem, our mind buzz of activity while we are asleep, even more than when we are awake.

But why the brain is so active during the sleep?

We are experienced a lot during the day – our brain is too busy taking in everything we see, hear and feel, hence during the sleep our mind categorize and store all of this information. To increase performance on certain mental tasks – sleep is good but dreaming while sleeping – is better, and it means we dream to remember.
However, we also dream to forget. Mainly during R.E.M. sleep cycles, our neocortex reviews these neural connections and dumps the unnecessary ones. This "reverse learning" is very important for our mind because useless connections and parasitic thoughts could disrupt the necessary thinking.
We always dream but we not always remember. In our brain remains only a small fraction of what we actually dreamed. In exception, if we happen to wake up suddenly while we are in the R.E.M. phase of sleep, we are often able to remember quite a lot of our dream’s content.
John Steinbeck once wrote that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the “committee of sleep” has worked on it. Unconstrained by reality and the rules of conventional logic, in our dream, we can create limitless scenarios to help solve a problem. It has been proved by numerous scientific discoveries, that changed the world. Among them, Mendeleev’s periodic table, the structure of the benzene molecule detected by August Kekule, James Watson’s envision of DNA double helix, Larry Page’s idea with the Google. That’s why there is an idiom “sleep on it”.
It is highly important for the body to be relaxed during sleep. If a body is disturbed by some external or internal sensations, a subconscious will be affected by this. Anything like that will either bring a person out of a dream state, or influence on the dreams he has. Specialists recommend, if you experience unpleasant dreams, try to pay more attention to taking care of yourself and to deal with circumstances that are causing you stress.

Even after a great deal of scientific research, technological advancement, and persistence, we still don’t have any definite answers. Thus, there is still so much to learn about the mind and the dreams, making it one of the most fascinating and intriguing scientific fields.

So why do we dream?

Learn more on Webpage of TED-Ed Animations educational Website

Answer a couple of questions to see if you have a lack of sleep