ANSWERS: 5
  • It isn't. Everyone has dreams. Not everyone remembers them.
  • I don't know if that is possible. But I know that if you are really stressed out sometimes you lose the ability to remember your dreams. I had the most amazing dreams in the last 2 nights because I am no longer with my ex (stressful situation). I hadn't remembered a dream in 16 months... Maybe not remembering your dreams is a sign that you are not in a "good" space.
  • Its very likely that people being TREATED for mental disorders report less dreams. This is because drugs such as benzodiazepines, used in chronic anxiety for example, reduce the amount of REM sleep (the kind when dreams occur) in proportion to the other stages of sleep. So it's perhaps not so much an indication of mental disorders as a side-effect of treatment.
  • Everyone dreams if they fall into REM sleep (the kind where your eyes move under your eyelids)....often we don't recall our dreams. Dreaming or not dreaming has not been shown to be an indicator of mental health.
  • You're probably thinking of sleep deprivation studies where subjects are hooked up to an EEG in a sleep lab. Just as they're entering REM (rapid eye movement) sleep and are likely to begin dreaming they are awakened by the researchers. Even though they get an adequate number of hours of real sleep, after several nights without REM/dreaming they display psychotic behavior and hallucinations. Normal sleep restores sanity. Despite decades of good sleep research, nobody quite yet knows why our brains require sleep to keep functioning normally. Replenishment of neurotransmitters is perhaps one piece of the puzzle.

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