Deciphering Dreams

April 24, 2006 — -- Dreams are more than just the mini-dramas of your sleeping mind.

Dr. Edward O'Malley, who studies sleep disorders at Norwalk Hospital in Connecticut, says dreaming helps us to process and even memorize information we have encountered throughout the day.

"Even though the situations may be bizarre, there's a certain logic behind the dream," he said.

Dreaming also helps to relieve stress and clear the cobwebs from our brains so that we wake up clear and alert.

According to O'Malley, dreams contain a surprising amount of very important content and meaning. He says we should pay close attention.

"While there are general archetype images in dreams like fire and water that mean generic things across the human species, there are very specific cues in your dreams that can give you information that can help you function in the daytime," he said.

In fact, new research shows dreams help us to solve problems.

"If we have certain conflicts or problems that we may be trying to solve during the daytime," said Dr. Eric Nofzinger of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, "these problems become reactivated in dreams at nighttime and may get played through."

Nofzinger's dream research uses pet scans -- an imaging technique -- to view the brain's activity during dream sleep. Remarkably, he has found that the brain's same emotion centers that are active during the day become active when we dream. Some researchers believe that while we are dreaming, our brains are still working through the emotional conflicts of the day. It is one of the reasons that doctors tell patients to make sure they get enough sleep.

There have been famous examples of people who have dreamed up solutions to problems, said Dr. Deirdre Barrett, a Harvard professor and author of "Trauma and Dreams."

For example, dreams helped Otto Loewi conceptualize an experiment on a frog heart that later won him the Nobel Prize for medicine and biology. Friedrich August Kekule sorted out the structure of chemistry's benzene ring in his dreams.