Seeing the Voice of God: What God Is Telling You through Dreams and Visions by Laura Harris Smith Page A
Authors: Laura Harris Smith
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memory. I have had occasion to analyse, with my patients, dreams which occurred to them twenty-five years or more previously, and I can remember a dream of my own which is divided from the present day by at least thirty-seven years, and yet has lost nothing of its freshness in my memory. 2
Forget Me Not
If you wake up immediately after a dream, you have an 80 percent chance of remembering it, according to a 1953 study done by University of Chicago researcher Dr. Nathaniel Kleitman, Ph.D., and two of his students, William C. Dement and Eugene Aserinsky. Suspicious that darting eye movements were associated with dreaming, they did a test and awoke subjects during various sleep stages, to discover that 80 percent of them reported having dreams and only 7 percent did not. I am not sure what the other 13 percent reported—perhaps they were unsure—but for certain on that night, REM sleep was discovered and linked to dreaming. Dr. William Dement, now known in the medical community as the father of modern sleep medicine, said of that night in his book Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep ,
The vivid recall that could be elicited in the middle of the night when a subject was awakened while his eyes were moving rapidly was nothing short of miraculous. It [seemed to open] . . . an exciting new world to the subjects whose only previous dream memories had been the vague morning-after recall. Now, instead of perhaps some fleeting glimpse into the dream world each night, the subjects could be tuned into the middle of as many as ten or twelve dreams every night. 3
Dr. Dement is also quoted as saying, “The simplest definition of REM sleep is a highly active brain in a paralyzed body.” That is why in my gears analogy in chapter 4, although it would have seemed more logical to label the sleep stages as moving from fourth gear downward to first since the subject is winding down toward sleep, that would have meant interpreting the fifth stage as “park,” and the brain is in anything but “park” during REM sleep! In fact, REM dream brain waves look more similar to waking brain waves than any of the other brain waves of sleep—beta, alpha or delta.
Interestingly enough, the same Dr. Evans whom I interviewed for chapter 4 says that if he phones someone in the middle of the night and awakens them, he can tell which stage of sleep they are in. If they are in REM dream sleep and get awakened, they can immediately engage in conversation, but if they are in deep sleep, they will hardly be able to talk and may not even remember the call the next day. He adds, “It’s because the mind is ON during REM sleep and OFF during deep sleep.”
The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) in Bethesda, Maryland, states it like this:
This sleep-related form of amnesia is the reason people often forget telephone calls or conversations they’ve had in the middle of the night. It also explains why we often do not remember our alarms ringing in the morning if we go right back to sleep after turning them off. 4
In the sixty years since that 1953 University of Chicago study, it has been tested, proven and printed hundreds of times over that there are four to six of these 90-minute to 120-minute cycles each night, with each cycle containing four to six dreams. Thus, you could be having up to 36 dreams each night. You have the potential of dreaming over 13,000 dreams per year. That means that by age 75, with proper sleep, you could have dreamed almost one million dreams.
Then why aren’t you remembering your dreams, or even most of them? Would you like to? I ask because I am amazed at howmany people have resigned themselves to a dreamless life. You do not have to.
The number-one line I hear when I begin discussing dreams with people is, “Oh, I never dream.” The experience seems gated to them, and they have accepted it as part of who they are. But it is not who they are, nor who you are. You do dream every
Forget Me Not
If you wake up immediately after a dream, you have an 80 percent chance of remembering it, according to a 1953 study done by University of Chicago researcher Dr. Nathaniel Kleitman, Ph.D., and two of his students, William C. Dement and Eugene Aserinsky. Suspicious that darting eye movements were associated with dreaming, they did a test and awoke subjects during various sleep stages, to discover that 80 percent of them reported having dreams and only 7 percent did not. I am not sure what the other 13 percent reported—perhaps they were unsure—but for certain on that night, REM sleep was discovered and linked to dreaming. Dr. William Dement, now known in the medical community as the father of modern sleep medicine, said of that night in his book Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep ,
The vivid recall that could be elicited in the middle of the night when a subject was awakened while his eyes were moving rapidly was nothing short of miraculous. It [seemed to open] . . . an exciting new world to the subjects whose only previous dream memories had been the vague morning-after recall. Now, instead of perhaps some fleeting glimpse into the dream world each night, the subjects could be tuned into the middle of as many as ten or twelve dreams every night. 3
Dr. Dement is also quoted as saying, “The simplest definition of REM sleep is a highly active brain in a paralyzed body.” That is why in my gears analogy in chapter 4, although it would have seemed more logical to label the sleep stages as moving from fourth gear downward to first since the subject is winding down toward sleep, that would have meant interpreting the fifth stage as “park,” and the brain is in anything but “park” during REM sleep! In fact, REM dream brain waves look more similar to waking brain waves than any of the other brain waves of sleep—beta, alpha or delta.
Interestingly enough, the same Dr. Evans whom I interviewed for chapter 4 says that if he phones someone in the middle of the night and awakens them, he can tell which stage of sleep they are in. If they are in REM dream sleep and get awakened, they can immediately engage in conversation, but if they are in deep sleep, they will hardly be able to talk and may not even remember the call the next day. He adds, “It’s because the mind is ON during REM sleep and OFF during deep sleep.”
The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) in Bethesda, Maryland, states it like this:
This sleep-related form of amnesia is the reason people often forget telephone calls or conversations they’ve had in the middle of the night. It also explains why we often do not remember our alarms ringing in the morning if we go right back to sleep after turning them off. 4
In the sixty years since that 1953 University of Chicago study, it has been tested, proven and printed hundreds of times over that there are four to six of these 90-minute to 120-minute cycles each night, with each cycle containing four to six dreams. Thus, you could be having up to 36 dreams each night. You have the potential of dreaming over 13,000 dreams per year. That means that by age 75, with proper sleep, you could have dreamed almost one million dreams.
Then why aren’t you remembering your dreams, or even most of them? Would you like to? I ask because I am amazed at howmany people have resigned themselves to a dreamless life. You do not have to.
The number-one line I hear when I begin discussing dreams with people is, “Oh, I never dream.” The experience seems gated to them, and they have accepted it as part of who they are. But it is not who they are, nor who you are. You do dream every
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