[Music]
My name is Matthew Walker I am a
professor of neuroscience and psychology
at the University of California Berkeley
and I am the author of the book why we
sleep
what is dreaming and what happens and
are there any real benefits to dreaming
well to take a step back I think it's
important to note that dreaming
essentially is a time when we all become
flagrantly psychotic and before you
perhaps dismiss that diagnosis I'll give
you five good reasons because last night
when you were dreaming first you started
to see things which were not there so
you were hallucinating second you
believed things that couldn't possibly
be true so you were delusional third you
became confused about time place and
person so you're suffering from
disorientation fourth you had wildly
fluctuating emotions like a pendulum
something that we call being effectively
labile and then how wonderful you woke
up this morning and you forgot most if
not all of that dream experience so
you're suffering from amnesia and if you
were to experience any one of those five
symptoms while you're awake you would be
seeking psychological or psychiatric
treatment yet during sleep and dreaming
it seems to be both a normal biological
and psychological process what are the
functions then or the benefits of
dreaming well we know that dream sleep
which principally comes from a stage
that we call rapid eye movement sleep or
REM sleep dream sleep actually provides
at least two benefits for the brain the
first is actually creativity because
it's during REM sleep and dreaming
specifically when the brain starts to
collide all of the information that
you've recently learned together with
all of this back catalog of
autobiographical information that you've
got stored up in the brain and it starts
to build novel connections it's almost
like group therapy for memories and
through this pattern of informational ow
Kamille at night we create a revised
mind wide web of associations and you
can start to divine new novel insights
into previously unsolved problems so
that you wake up the next morning with
new solutions and it's probably the
reason that no one has ever told you
that you should stay awake on a problem
instead people tell you to sleep on a
problem and we now have good evidence
that it's dream sleep that gifts you
that type of informational wisdom rather
than simply knowledge the second benefit
of dream sleep is essentially a form of
overnight therapy it's during dream
sleep where we start to actually take
the painful sting out of difficult even
traumatic emotional experiences that
we've been having and sleep almost
divorces that emotional bitter rind from
the memory experiences that we've had
during the day and so that we wake up
the next morning feeling better about
those experiences so you can think of
dream sleep as emotional first-aid and
it sort of just offers this nocturnal
soothing balm that smoothes those
painful stinging edges of difficult
experiences so it's not time that heals
all wounds but it's time during dream
sleep that provides you with emotional
convalescence