Dream

Do Other Animals Dream?

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Researchers are finding signs of multiple phases of sleep all over the animal kingdom, including some that look very much like REM

Cuttlefish
Researchers have found bouts of REM-like activity in cuttlefish. Teresa Iglesias

Young jumping spiders dangle by a thread through the night, in a box, in a lab. Every so often, their legs curl and their spinnerets twitch—and the retinas of their eyes, visible through their translucent exoskeletons, shift back and forth.

“What these spiders are doing seems to be resembling—very closely—REM sleep,” says Daniela Rößler, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Konstanz in Germany. During REM (which stands for rapid eye movement), a sleeping animal’s eyes dart about unpredictably, among other features.

In people, REM is when most dreaming happens, particularly the most vivid dreams. Which leads to an intriguing question: If spiders have REM sleep, might dreams also unfold in their poppy-seed-size brains?

Rößler and her colleagues reported on the retina-swiveling spiders in 2022. Training cameras on 34 spiders, they found that the creatures had brief REM-like spells about every 17 minutes. The eye-darting behavior was specific to these bouts: It didn’t happen at times in the night when the jumping spiders stirred, stretched, readjusted their silk lines or cleaned themselves with a brush of a leg.

Though the spiders are motionless in the run-up to these REM-like bouts, the team hasn’t yet proved that they are sleeping. But if it turns out that they are—and if what looks like REM really is REM—dreaming is a distinct possibility, Rößler says. She finds it easy to imagine that jumping spiders, as highly visual animals, might benefit from dreams as a way to process information they take in during the day.

Rößler isn’t the only researcher thinking about such questions in animals distantly removed from ourselves. Today, researchers are finding signs of REM sleep in a broader array of animals than ever before: in spiders, lizards, cuttlefish, zebrafish. The growing tally has some researchers wondering whether dreaming, a state once thought to be limited to human beings, is far more widespread than once thought.

REM sleep is generally characterized by a suite of features in addition to rapid eye movements: the temporary paralysis of skeletal muscles, periodic body twitches and increases in brain activity, breathing and heart rate. Observed in sleeping infants in 1953, REM was soon identified in other mammals such as cats, mice, horses, sheep, opossums and armadillos.

Events in the brain during REM have been well characterized, at least in humans. During non-REM periods, also known as quiet sleep, brain activity is synchronized. Neurons fire simultaneously and then go quiet, especially in the brain’s cortex, making swells of activity known as slow waves. During REM, by contrast, the brain displays bursts of electrical activity that are reminiscent of waking.

Even across mammals, REM sleep doesn’t all look the same. Marsupial mammals called echidnas show characteristics of REM and non-REM sleep at the same time. Reports on whales and dolphins suggest that they may not experience REM at all. Birds have REM sleep, which comes with twitching bills and wings, and a loss of tone in the muscles that hold up their heads.

Still, researchers are starting to find similar sleep states across many branches of the animal tree of life.

Animal Sleep Graphic
Researchers are finding different phases of sleep in more and more creatures across the animal kingdom. In mammals, sleep is divided into active, rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep and quiet, non-REM sleep, and these phases are associated with specific patterns of brain activity. Though such brain activity patterns haven’t been investigated in many animals, researchers have documented active sleep phases, wherein animals experience jerky movements such as twitches or rapid eye movements, interspersed with quiet (quiescent) sleep, when those behaviors aren’t present. The growing tally suggests an evolutionary importance for multiple types of sleep. Adapted from N.C. Rattenborg & G. Ungurean / Trends in Ecology & Evolution 2023 / Knowable Magazine

In 2012, for example, researchers reported a sleep-like state in cuttlefish, as well as a curious, REM-like behavior during that state of putative sleep: Periodically, the animals would move their eyes rapidly, twitch their arms and alter the coloring of their bodies. During a fellowship at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, behavioral biologist Teresa Iglesias investigated the phenomenon further, collecting terabytes of video of half a dozen cuttlefish.

All six showed bouts of REM-like activity that repeated roughly every 30 minutes: bursts of arm motions and eye movements during which their skin put on a show, jumping through a variety of colors and patterns. The creatures flashed camouflage signals and attention-grabbing ones, both of which are displayed during waking behaviors. Since the cephalopod’s brain directly controls this skin patterning, “that kind of suggests that the brain activity is going a bit wild,” says Iglesias, now at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan.

Researchers have since observed a similar state in octopuses. If octopuses and cuttlefish dream, “it just kind of blows down the walls of what we think about humanity being so special,” Iglesias says.

Researchers have also observed a REM-like stage in bearded dragons by recording signals from electrodes in their brains. And they have reported at least two sleep states in zebrafish based on the fishes’ brain signatures. In one of the states, neural activity synced up as it does in a non-REM stage of mammals. In another state, the fish showed neural activity reminiscent of a waking state, as happens in REM. (The fish didn’t show rapid eye movements.)

Observing multiple sleep stages in such an evolutionarily distant relative from ourselves, the authors suggested that different sleep types arose hundreds of millions of years ago. It’s now known that flies, too, may flit between two or more sleep states. Roundworms appear to have one sleep state only.

Researchers consider the possibility of nonhuman animals dreaming during REM-like sleep because creatures act out waking-like behaviors in this state—like the cephalopods’ pattern-flashing or the spiders’ spinneret-shaking. In pigeons, sleep scientist Gianina Ungurean of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence in Munich and the University Medical Center Göttingen has observed, with colleagues, that pupils constrict during REM as they do during courtship behavior. That evokes the question of whether the pigeons are dreaming or in some way re-experiencing what happened during their waking courtship instances, she says.

REM sleep also has been linked to the replay of experiences in some animals. For instance, when researchers looked at the brain electrical activity of sleeping mice that had earlier run a maze, they saw the firing of neurons that help with navigation and are linked with the head’s direction, even though the heads of the mice weren’t moving. They also saw activity in neurons associated with eye movement. The combination suggests that the mice may have had a dreamlike experience in which they were scanning the environment, Ungurean says.

With all these signs, it’s fair to posit that animals could be dreaming, Ungurean says. “However, if we take these reasons one by one, it turns out that none of them is sufficient.” The brain activity associated with replay, like that of the maze-running mice, doesn’t occur only during REM or sleeping, Ungurean says. It can also occur during planning or daydreaming. And the link between REM and dreaming isn’t absolute: Humans dream in non-REM too, and when drugs are used to suppress REM sleep, human study participants can still have lengthy and bizarre dreams.

Ultimately, people know they are dreaming because they can report it, Ungurean says. “But animals cannot report, and this is the biggest problem that we have in purely scientifically and robustly establishing this.”

There’s still debate over what REM is even for. “No one really knows what the function of sleep is—non-REM or REM,” says Paul Shaw, a neuroscientist at Washington University in St. Louis. One of the most accepted ideas is that REM helps the brain to form and reorganize memories; other theories are that REM supports brain development, aids in developing the body’s movement systems, maintains the circuitry needed for waking activities so they don’t degrade during sleep, or boosts brain temperature.

But if REM turns out to be present in far-flung species within the animal kingdom, that suggests its role, whatever it may be, could be very important, Iglesias says.

Not all scientists believe that researchers are seeing REM. They may simply be fulfilling preconceived notions that all animals have two sleep states and interpreting one of those as REM, says Jerome Siegel, a neuroscientist who studies sleep at the University of California, Los Angeles. Some of these animals—such as the spiders—may not even be asleep, he argues. “Animals may do things that look the same, but the physiology isn’t necessarily the same,” he says.

Researchers continue to look for clues. Rößler’s team is trying to develop stains that would allow them to image spider brains—this might reveal activation in areas that are functionally analogous to the ones that we use when we dream. Iglesias and others have implanted electrodes in cephalopods’ brains and captured their electrical activity during two sleep states—one that shows waking-like activity, and another that’s a quiet state, with neural signatures similar to ones observed in mammals. And Ungurean has trained pigeons to sleep in an MRI machine and found that many of the brain areas that light up in human REM sleep also activate in birds.

If cuttlefish and spiders and a broad array of other critters dream, it raises interesting questions about what they experience, says David M. Peña-Guzmán, a philosopher at San Francisco State University and author of the book When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness. Since dreams unfold from the viewer’s perspective, dreaming animals should have the capability to see the world from their point of view, he says.

Dreaming would also hint that they have imaginative capabilities, he adds. “We want to think that humans are the only ones who can enact that break from the world,” he says. “We might have to think a little bit more about other animals.”

Dreams can spill over into the real world, influence productivity at work

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 Dreams often fade away after waking up, but a sizable portion of people can still recall their dreams as they begin their workday. Now, researchers from the University of Notre Dame have found that when someone remembers a dream from the night before, many can’t help but draw connections between their dreams and their waking lives. Those connections, real or not, then end up altering how they think, feel, and act at work.

The team at UND, including lead author Casher Belinda, assistant professor of management at Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, and Michael Christian from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, explain that earlier research reveals roughly 40 percent of the working population recalls their dreams on an average morning.

“Similar to epiphany, we found that connecting the dots between dreams and reality gives rise to awe — an emotion that sparks a tendency to think about ourselves and our experiences in the grand scheme of things,” Prof. Belinda says in a university release. “This makes subsequent work stressors seem less daunting, bolstering resilience and productivity throughout the workday.”

“People experience awe when they undergo something vast — something that challenges their understanding or way of thinking about things,” the study author continues. “These experiences can come in different forms, whether physical, such as when witnessing aurora borealis, or conceptual, such as when grasping the implications of a grand theory. Awe often borders on the extremes or upper bounds of other emotions, for example, when people experience profound gratitude or admiration. Dreams are conceptually vast experiences that have a striking capacity to elicit feelings of awe.”

Man daydreaming at work desk, happy
A man working from home (© fizkes – stock.adobe.com)

Researchers conducted a total of three studies encompassing roughly 5,000 morning-of reports of dream recall among full-time employees. They released a morning-of field study, a single-day morning-to-afternoon study, and a two-week experience sampling study.

These projects discovered that the relationships persisted even after researchers accounted for how much or how well people slept. This suggests that the psychological consequences of recalling and finding meaning in a dream could sometimes offset or mitigate the physiological consequences of poor sleep.

On the surface, dreams may sound like the opposite of a very real workday, but researchers explain that many people are dreaming vividly mere minutes or hours before beginning their professional day. This research shows that when we remember our dreams – which to our sleeping minds are very real – they can influence and set the stage for the rest of our day.

“We arrive at work shortly after interacting with deceased loved ones, narrowly escaping or failing to escape traumatic events and performing acts of immeasurable ability,” Prof. Belinda explains. “Regardless of our personal beliefs about dreams, these experiences bleed into and affect our waking lives — including how productive we are at work.”

Woman sitting at a desk overwhelmed with paperwork
(Photo by Yan Krukau from Pexels)

For example, let’s say you remember an awe-inspiring or meaningful dream one morning. Later that same day in the afternoon, your boss tells you to conduct 10 more interviews than you were expecting. Despite the extra work, your recent dream may help you put everything into perspective. Study authors say dreams may help workers realize there’s a bigger world out there and they are just part of it or recognize the interconnected nature of everything.

“Harnessing the benefits of awe may prove invaluable to organizations,” Prof. Belinda adds. “And one of our primary goals was to understand how to do so.”

Of course, researchers stress that everyone’s number one priority should be to get a good night’s sleep. While it’s true that dreams occur during all stages of sleep, Prof. Belinda explains that the most vivid dreams occur during REM sleep. That phase of sleep tends to take place late in a given sleep cycle. So, study authors recommend getting as much sufficient, high-quality sleep as you can to get the most out of your dreams.

They also suggest the use of sleep-tracking devices that indicate when and how much time is spent in REM sleep for anyone looking improve their sleep schedules and perhaps experience more awe-inspiring dreams.

“Also, keep a dream journal to allow meaningful dreams to stick with you,” Prof. Belinda comments. “Recording dreams gives them repeated opportunities to elicit beneficial emotions and make connections between dreams.”

Meanwhile, the research team has a suggestion for managers and employees as well: Promote the “awe experience” at work as much as possible. Besides just dreams, other elicitors of awe include nature, art, music and exposure to senior leaders. These experiences can help increase productivity at work.

The study is published in the Academy of Management Journal.

The study of dreams: Scientists uncover new communication channels with dreamers

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In his sci-fi film Inception (2010), Christophe Nolan imagined his protagonist slipping into other people’s dreams and even shaping their contents. But what if this story wasn’t so far away from real life?

Our research suggests that it is possible to interact with volunteers while they are asleep, and even to converse with them at certain key moments.

The scientific study of dreams

While we sometimes wake up with vivid memories from our nocturnal adventures, at others the impression of a dreamless night prevails.

Research shows we remember on average one to three dreams per week. However, not everyone is equal when it comes to recalling dreams. People who say they never dream make up around 2.7 to 6.5% of the population. Often, these people used to recall their dreams when they were children. The proportion of people who say they have never dreamt in their entire life is very low: 0.38%.

Whether people remember their dreams depends on many factors such as gender (women remember their dreams more frequently than men), one’s interest in dreams, as well as the way dreams are collected (some might find it handy to keep track of them with a “dream journal” or a recorder, for example).

The private and fleeting nature of dreams makes it tricky for scientists to capture them. Today, however, thanks to knowledge acquired in the field of neuroscience, it is possible to classify a person’s state of alertness by analyzing their brain activity, muscle tone and eye movements. Scientists can thus determine whether a person is asleep, and what stage of sleep they are in: sleep onset, light slow wave sleep, deep slow wave sleep or Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep.

What this physiological data does not do is tell us whether a sleeper is dreaming (dreams can occur in all stages of sleep), let alone what they’re dreaming about. Researchers don’t have access to the dream experience as it happens. They are therefore forced to rely on the dreamer’s account upon waking, with no guarantee that this account is faithful to what happened in the sleeper’s head.

Man sleeping, dreaming
What one dreams about remains a well-kept secret. (Credit: Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels)

To achieve this, it would be ideal to be able to communicate with sleepers. Impossible? Not for everyone – that’s where lucid dreamers come in.

Lucid dreaming

Most of us only realize we’ve been dreaming upon waking. Lucid dreamers, on the other hand, have the unique ability to remain aware of the dreaming process during REM sleep, a stage of sleep during which brain activity is closer to that of the waking phase.

Even more surprisingly, lucid dreamers can sometimes exercise partial control over their dream’s narrative. They are then able to fly away, make people appear or disappear, change the weather or transform themselves into animals. In short, the possibilities are endless.

Such lucid dreams can occur spontaneously or be engineered by specific training. The existence of lucid dreaming has been known since ancient times, but for a long time it was considered esoteric and unworthy of scientific exploration.

Such views have changed thanks to a clever experiment set up by psychologist Keith Hearne and psychophysiologist Stephen Laberge in the 1980s. These two researchers set out to prove that lucid dreamers were indeed asleep when they realized they were dreaming. Departing from the observation that REM sleep is characterized by rapid eye movements while one’s eyes are shut (hence the name ‘Rapid Eye Movement sleep’), they asked themselves the following question: would it be possible to use this property to ask the sleeper to send a “telegram” from their dream to the world around them?

In 1981, Keith Hearne and Stephen Laberge asked dreamers to send “telegrams” to the outside world. More than 30 years later, scientists continue to blaze trails to communicate with the sleeping mind. (Credit: Johannes Plenio/Unsplash, CC BY)

Hearne and Laberge recruited lucid dreamers to try to find out. They agreed with them before they fell asleep on the telegram to be sent: the participants would have to make specific eye movements, such as moving their gaze from left to right three times, as soon as they became aware that they were dreaming. And while they were objectively in REM sleep, the lucid dreamers did just that.

The new communication code allowed researchers from then on to detect dreaming stages in real time. The work paved the way for many research projects in which lucid dreamers act as undercover agents in the dream world, carrying out missions (such as holding one’s breath in a dream) and signaling them to the experimenters using the eye code.

It is now possible to combine such experiments with brain imaging techniques to study the brain regions involved in lucid dreaming. This represents a huge step forward in the quest for a better understanding of dreams and how they are formed.

In 2021, almost 40 years after the pioneering work of Hearne and Laberge, our study in collaboration with academics from around the world has taken us even further.

From fiction to reality: talking to the dreamer

We already knew that lucid dreamers were capable of sending information from their dreams. But can they also receive it? In other words, is it possible to talk to a lucid dreamer? To find out, we exposed a lucid dreamer to tactile stimuli while he was asleep. We also asked him closed questions such as “Do you like chocolate?”.

He was able to respond by smiling to indicate “Yes” and by frowning to indicate “No”. Lucid dreamers were also presented with simple mathematical equations verbally. They were able to provide appropriate answers while remaining asleep.

Of course, lucid dreamers didn’t always respond, far from it. But the fact that they sometimes did (18% of cases in our study) opened a communication channel between experimenters and dreamers.

However, lucid dreaming remains a rare phenomenon and even lucid dreamers are not lucid all the time or throughout REM sleep. Was the communication portal we had opened limited to “lucid” REM sleep alone? To find out, we undertook further work.

Expanding the communication portal

To find out whether we could communicate in the same way with any sleeper, whatever their stage of sleep, we conducted experiments with non-lucid dreaming volunteers without sleeping disorders, as well as with people suffering from narcolepsy. This disease, which causes involuntary sleep, sleep paralysis and an early onset of the REM phase, is associated with an increased propensity for lucid dreaming.

In our latest experiment, we presented participants with existing words (e.g. “pizza”) and others that we made up (e.g. “ditza”) across all sleep stages. We asked them to smile or frown to signal whether the word had been made up or not. Unsurprisingly, people with narcolepsy were able to respond when they were lucid in REM sleep, confirming our results from 2021.

More surprisingly, both groups of participants were also able to respond to our verbal stimuli in most stages of sleep, even in the absence of lucid dreaming. The volunteers were able to respond intermittently, as if windows of connection with the outside world were opening temporarily at certain precise moments.

We were even able to determine the composition of brain activity conducive to these moments of openness to the outside world. By analyzing it before the stimuli were presented, we were able to predict whether the sleepers would respond or not.

Why do such windows of connection with the outside world exist? We can put forward the hypothesis that the brain developed in a context where a minimum of cognitive processing was necessary during sleep. We can imagine, for example, that our ancestors had to remain attentive to external stimuli while they were asleep, in case a predator approached. Similarly, we know that a mother’s brain reacts preferentially to her baby’s cries during sleep.

Our results suggest that it is now possible to “talk” to any sleeper, whatever stage of sleep they are in. By refining the brain markers that predict the moments of connection with the outside world, it should be possible to further optimize communication protocols in the future.

This breakthrough paves the way for real-time dialogue with sleepers, offering researchers the chance to explore the mysteries of dreams as they happen. But if the line between science fiction and reality is getting thinner, rest assured: neuroscientists are still a long way from being able to decipher your wildest fantasies.

In What Language Is a Bilingual or Multilingual Person Most Likely to Dream?

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Summary: Researchers explore how bilingualism and multilingualism influence the language we dream in.

Source: Harvard

There have been very few studies on bilingualism and multilingualism and how they affect dreams. These are small studies, but they certainly find that people who speak any second language, even without good proficiency, at least occasionally dream in the second language.

One study asked the subjects what they thought made the difference, and they said that it was determined by the people and or the setting that was being dreamed about.

If you thought of your family back in your country of origin, it’d likely be in that language regardless of whether it was now your dominant language. And if you were dreaming about people you’ve known as a young adult, living in another setting where you spoke a different language, you’d be dreaming in that language.

It was combination of where the dream was set, what language was associated with that, and what people were in the dream—that’s what they said determined it.

But I’ve heard others say that if they were dreaming about important emotional issues, they would dream in their original language, and if they were dreaming about practical, abstract, or work-related things, they would dream in their newer language.

I heard something different from the most multilingual person I’ve ever talked to. He was a high-level Swedish economist, and he said that he was fluent in about 15 languages. He said that he dreamed in whatever language he was speaking that day, even if the dreams were about his family of origin in Sweden.

There is something that I have never seen mentioned in any of the published studies on this, which is that there are some people who say they are never aware of language in dreams—that they don’t dream in any particular language. I very much identify with that.

Most of the time, I don’t hear language in my dreams. I have only a handful of times dreamed in a language other than English, which fits the findings of some studies that say that your degree of proficiency in a second language determines how often you will dream in it.

I studied French in school, but I am not a proficient speaker. I’ve dreamed in French at least twice.

People who are not proficient in a foreign language sometimes say that they have once or more dreamed in the rudimentary second language, and in the dream, they believed they were very proficient in it. When people discuss it, it’s usually along the lines of “Why is it that we can be so much more fluent in our dreams?”

This shows a sleeping man
There are a few theories that say dreams are there for memory consolidation, for threat simulation, and for wish fulfillment.

Dream psychologists, especially neuroscientists, say that it’s likely because the prefrontal area that is responsible for reality checks is shut down. It is possible that they are more proficient in the dream, but it’s also possible that they feel more proficient in the dream because they’re not doing the usual self-judgment.

I think that dreams are best thought of as just thinking in a different biological state, where areas associated with visualization and emotion are more active than usual intuition, and that is why we’re less verbal and less logical when we dream.

There are a few theories that say dreams are there for memory consolidation, for threat simulation, and for wish fulfillment. And yes, they’re for all of that, and a million other things, just like our waking thought.

The Only Thing Creepier Than Déja Vu Is its Opposite, Dêjà Rêvé

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Déjà vu is the phenomenon that a person experiences when they feel that they’ve experienced an event in their past. Studies show it’s not a psychic experience, but rather a little trick the brain does. Déjà rêvé, however, is something different and there’s no trick to it.

Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams

A new study in the journal Brain Stimulation explained a phenomenon epileptic patients experienced where they were able to recall a dream or have a dream-like feeling while awake called déjà rêvé. Déjà vu is French for “already seen” while déjà rêvé means “already dreamed.”

For the study, researchers searched through reports from 1958 to 2015 of epileptic patients who experienced the phenomena after being induced with electrical brain stimulation (EBS).

Although this sounds like something out of A Nightmare On Elm Street, the researchers view this study as a way to separate the feeling of déjà vu from déjà rêvé and learn more about our dreams.

“EBS-induced déjà rêvé could be an interesting approach to better understanding physiological dreams that cannot be reproduced under laboratory conditions,” says lead author Jonathan Curot, a Ph.D. student at Toulouse University Hospital. “Most studies focus on REM (rapid-eye movements) sleep period and dream reports obtained by awakening a sleeping subject. However, non-REM sleep dreams account for a significant portion of all typical dreams and several factors might render dream reports less trustworthy — especially the sleep stage before awakening — when compared with reports of waking experience.”

Three Kinds of Déjà Rêvé

The study states déjà rêvé happens in three different ways. In one, referred to as “episodic-like,” a patient is spontaneously able to specify that they had a certain dream on a definite date.

“‘I saw something, a dream, a nightmare I had a couple years ago. A dream of an object lying on a table,” said one subject about their event.

The second is refereed to as “familiarity-like,” or when a patient reminisces of a vague dream. One subject explained that they had a vision of a scene from a recent dream.

Lastly, researchers found many patients in their literature experienced a “dreamy-state.” They would have a feeling of being in a dream, or nightmare. A subject tried to explain it as feeling like they passed out and floating.

Déjà rêvé is still a new phenomenon, but this study is the first step to explaining those strange, unexplained dreamy feelings that people have.

You will never dream as vividly as you do on melatonin.

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151104_DRIFT_Friendly-Melatonin

Falling asleep is hard work. After spending a day solving the complex puzzles of daily life, you are expected to lie down, turn off the lights, and quiet your whirring whirlwind of thoughts within a few minutes. In my early years, this process was fraught with frustration and despair: I would lie awake for hours, bored and desperate, staring at the ceiling, wondering why I couldn’t shut off my brain. I tried all the hippie methods—meditation, breathing exercises, even goddamn Sleepytime tea—but none of it eased me into slumber.

Then, around age 15, I discovered melatonin. I first spotted the drug on the shelf of a health food store—the kind that sells vegan dog food and horny goat weed. Melatonin struck me as marginally less scammy than most supplements, so I bought a bottle and took my first dose that night. Thirty minutes later, I was overcome with the drowsy feeling kids get after a day at the beach. Five minutes after that, I eased into sleep.

And that’s when the real fun began.

There is a fair amount of research documenting the effectiveness of melatonin supplements as a sleep aid. But there is relatively little research to explain why it gives you trippy, totally bonkers dreams. This phenomenon is well-documented on the Internet but largely ignored by scientists, presumably because crazy dreams are not (yet) therapeutically relevant. Still, almost everybody I know who takes melatonin confirmed what I discovered on that first night: You will never dream as vividly as you do on melatonin.

These dreams, I should note, are not just normal dreams kicked up a few notches in intensity. They are a different type of dream—more akin (I am told) to a lysergic hallucination than a typical oneiric vision. My melatonin dreams are bursts of energy and excitement: sometimes fast-paced and fragmented, sometimes lucid and evocative. I have woken up from a melatonin dream with a deeper understanding of a friend or family member, or a great insight into a persistent problem, or that relieved, glazed sensation of stepping off a roller coaster. I wake up feeling refreshed, with yesterday’s thoughts neatly compressed, sorted, and filed away.

Why does this happen? Nobody really knows. Melatonin’s basic mechanism is simple: The brain’s pineal gland naturally secretes melatonin, a hormone, when darkness falls—signaling to the body that it’s time to sleep. Melatonin supplements mimic this process, tricking the brain into thinking it’s bedtime. They also help regulate our circadian rhythm, the internal clock that tells us when to sleep and when to wake up.Switching time zones and consuming caffeine can seriously disrupt these rhythms, and some people are just cursed with a faulty body clock. Melatonin supplements keep circadian rhythms healthy and regular. Our natural supply of melatonin may alsodiminish as we age, a problem supplements can help reverse.

But what about those nutty dreams? At least one study has tentatively confirmed that melatonin increases “dream bizarreness”—especially in women, who mayremember their dreams better than men. Researchers speculate that melatonin contributes to the quality and quantity of REM sleep, when most dreams occur. Taking extra melatonin, then, could kick our REM cycle into hyperdrive, giving us longer, richer, more memorable dreams.

Before you rush off to melatonin dreamland, a few caveats: The supplement is extremely safe in the short term, but its long-term effects are basically unknown. The usual dose—1 to 3 mg—can be multiplied exponentially with no apparent side effects. (That dream bizarreness study gave participants a whopping 250 mg dose and reported no issues.) But no longitudinal study has yet confirmed that melatonin supplements are completely safe to take for years. The fear here is that melatonin supplements could somehow diminish our brain’s natural supply of the hormone, getting us hooked on the pills for sleep. There is also some very tentative researchshowing that the positive effects may peter off after a few months of use.

But that doesn’t square with my experience: The stuff still works gangbusters for me nine years into my experiment. And when I absentmindedly miss a dose, I don’t lie awake in restless agony: At most, my sleep is marginally less satisfying. If I ever do feel hooked on melatonin, I’ll probably feel compelled to quit. Until then—or until my wild dreams turn pedestrian—I’m happy to keep playing human guinea pig.

The Story of a Lost Soul Who Forgot to Dream.

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“Dreams are illustrations… from the book your soul is writing about you.” ~ Marsha Norman

A while back I went shopping with one of my friends. As we were looking at all the purses, scars, necklaces and all the other things that women usually look at when they go shopping, we stopped to try a pair of shoes. Because they didn’t had our size in that store, the young man working there sent one of his colleagues to bring the shoes from somewhere else and invited us to take a sit.

As we were siting there, chatting and waiting for our shoes,  I noticed how tired and sad the young man looked.

dreams

“How are you?” I asked him with a smile on my face?

Are you tired? 

You do look a bit tired.

You want to sit down and have a chat with us?

We promise not to be too annoying” and I started laughing.

“No, I am good.” he replied with a shy look on his face.

“What time did you came to work today?” I asked him again.

“It’s late, almost 10 pm.

I’m sure you’re tired.

Have you been working the whole day or did you came in in the afternoon?”

To which he replied:

“I came to work early in the morning.

Yes, I work all day every day.”

“Do you have days off?” I asked.

“I have one day every month” he replied.

My boss only gives me one day off every month.”

“What?!” I immediately asked.

“One day?!

What do you mean one day?

You come here every day, you work all day from early in the morning till late evening and you only have one day off per month?

This is crazy!”

He looked at me a bit confused and replied:

“My boss gives me only one day, yes but I am young.

I am only 18 years old.

I don’t have a family so it’s good.”

“But do you want to do this forever?” I asked him with a very surprised look on my face.

“Will you work here for a long time or do you plan to do something else?

“I don’t know.” he replied.

“I will stay here. 

I am still young.”

“But do you have a dream? Do you know what you would like to do in the future?” I asked.

To which he replied:

“No, I don’t have.

I will work here now and if my boss gives me another job I will take it.”

“So no dreams?” I asked him again.

“You really don’t know what you would love to do in the future…”

I was a bit confused and sat quiet in my sir for a few seconds and then I started talking again.

“What if there were no limits to what you could achieve?

What if you knew that you could do anything, what then?

What would you like to do if you knew that you could do it and nothing and no one would stop you?

Would your life be any different?”

“No, I don’t do that” he replied.

“I don’t dream.

I don’t know.

I don’t have money.

If I get a new job and make more money then I will see.”

“No, but what if you already had all the money you wanted or needed, what then?” I asked him, feeling all happy and excited.

“How would your life be any different?

What would you do and what would you work on?”

He looked at me very confused and replied:

“But I have no money.

I can’t do that. 

I don’t know.

If and when I will make more money I will do more but not now.

I need to make money first.”

“So you don’t have a dream?” I asked.

“There is nothing you’re passionate about?

Nothing you would love to do?

No dreams, no hidden ambitions?

To which he replied:

“No, I don’t have.

I don’t know.

I can’t do it.

I need money and if I make more money I will know more…”

Both me and my friend looked at each other and we couldn’t believe what we were hearing. We left the store feeling confused and sad at the same time.

Because I felt like I had to insist some more, right before I left the store, I told him again:

“Please, think about it some more. 

Think about your dreams, ok?

Go back to when you were a little boy and see if you can find your dreams there.

I am sure you will find them there.

Think about how your life would look like if there were no limits to who you could be and what you could achieve.

Look at it as a game. 

You’re a guy… Guys love games. 

Make it a game.

Think of how your life would look like if there were no limits and start from there.

Find your dreams!

Follow your dreams…”

I really wanted him to think about I told him and to work on discovering and following his dreams but who knows if that will ever happen..

You see, for the past one year or so, I became very intuitive and I got really good at reading people and at what I call “seeing into their souls”. Whenever I see a sad, lost and lonely soul, I immediately jump in and start a conversation in the hope that a seed of greatness will be planted into their beautiful minds and their lives will eventually be transformed. I can’t help it, it’s who I am at the moment

“How can a 18 year old work such long hours and have only one day off per month?” I kept asking myself.

“How come he had no dreams?

He wan’t even able to use his imagination, escape his current reality and envision a better life for himself… 

Dreams are free, how can he have none?”

His story made me feel sad and confused at the same time. Because he was so caught up in his current reality (which was all about making a living), he was too afraid to even dare to think how his life would look like if there were no limits to what he could be, do and have…

I understood him perfectly.

I know how it feels like to be lost in the dark. I know how it feels like not to have a sense of direction, to wake up every morning dragging your body from your bed, not wanting to do many of the things you “have” to do and live a life that has no meaning… Been there, done that.

When I was younger, I had no dreams either. I didn’t even know what dreams were made of.  I was too caught up in my sad and unhappy reality to even dare to dream.

There are some basics needs that need to be met before moving on to daring to dream and even though a lot of times it may be hard to forget about your sorrows and build in your mind’s eye a better picture on how you would like your life to look like, it’s essential for your own health, happiness and wellbeing.

“Only as high as I reach can I grow, only as far as I seek can I go, only as deep as I look can I see, only as much as I dream can I be.” ~ Karen Ravn

Dreams keep you alive. Dreams keep you young, giving you faith, vitality and energy to do many of the things your soul longs for. Dreams give meaning to your life.

You need dreams to stay alive. Without dreams your soul dies little by little and all you have left is a soulless walking body and a soulless life.

I started dreaming just a few years ago and my life continued to get better and better from that point onwards.

The question that inspired me to start dreaming was the same one I have asked that young man:

“If there were no limit to what you could achieve, how would your life look like?”

I am now living my life thinking that there are no limits to what I can be, do and have and the funny thing about it is that many of the limits I used to impose on myself years ago have disappeared. It’s  true what they say, “there are no limits to what you can be, do and have, only those you choose to impose on yourself.”

No matter how hard this may be to digest, I can tell you for sure that there is a lot of truth in these words. It’s us who limit ourselves, not the world around us.

The more I follow my heart and intuition and the more I live my life thinking that there are no limits to what I can achieve, the more I realize how true the following words from Patanjali really are: “When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds: Your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new, great and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.”

Dare to dream. You don’t have to dream big if you feel like you’re not ready. Start with one small dream at a time. Have faith. Trust yourself and when in doubt, let the words of Harriet Tubman to give you strength and courage:”Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.”

Source: purposefairy.com

 

 

3 Ways to Follow Your Passion While Still Working a Full Time Job.

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Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life. ~Confucius

We have all been there – sitting in our cubicle staring into the distance, dreaming of the day when you could leave it all behind and really follow your passion.  Safe inside those four walls it sounds so nice, and just outside your grasp.  But how do you really develop the skills and income needed to leave your job, while still working at your full time job?  It’s hard to stay motivated and pursue your passion when you don’t have that much extra energy after work.

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Here are 3 ways you can keep nurturing your dreams and following your passion, so that when you’re ready to leave the full time job, the path is laid out before you.

1. Keep the Inspiration Alive

Whatever your dream is, make sure it stays alive and real.  Don’t let your ideas fester in your head, only to wilt away.  Feed it, give it a life of its own. Connect with your passion in real life – take classes, go to lectures, attend meetups with folks interested in similar activities.  If you’re passionate about becoming a life coach, attend a coaching seminar or workshop in your area.  If you long to become a yoga teacher, make sure you’re taking classes at a yoga school that also helps train new teachers.

Join online communities of likeminded folks, so you start building your network of people with similar ideas, dreams and passions as yourself.  Tell your old friends and new community about your dream.  It helps make it real and gives you invested stakeholders to support you on your way.

2. Connect with Other People Farther Along Your Path

You can learn from them what to expect, and what the potential pitfalls and benefits are.  It’s a fine line between connecting with people who are doing what you want to do and idolizing people who are years ahead of you.  It can be damaging to look at highly successful people and try to map your journey to theirs, because the distance is daunting.  Especially if you’re just starting out, this can cause paralysis and overwhelm.  We want to avoid that and keep you moving towards your dreams in an informed way.

Mentors are an amazing thing.  Build relationships with people that inspire you, and ask them to mentor you.  It’s a fast track for learning more about your chosen path, quickly.  Mentors can inspire you, support you, and help you understand the next steps in your journey.

3. Gain Experience

As much as possible, get your feet wet before leaving your job.  This way you will know if you really like it, or just loved the idea of it.   It’s totally fine to like an idea more than the reality of something – and it’s good to know if that’s the case before you cut ties (and loose a paycheck).  If you do love it as much as you think you do, it’ll only motivate you more to keep following your passion – and the time gaining experience will give you a solid boost when it’s time to spread you wings and fly on your own.

All of these things can be done after work or on the weekends.  Generally, the more we love something, the more reward we feel doing it, the more motivated we are to invest more time in it.  So don’t be surprised if these start out as one or two hour a week activities that end up taking most of your time! That’s a good thing, it means you’re on the right path, following your passion, making your dreams happen.

If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be. ~Joseph Campbell

Source: http://www.purposefairy.com

5 Vital Prerequisites to Rocket Your Dream off the Ground.

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What is more joyous in life than having a dream and knowing it’s possible?

The answer – going for it and making that dream your reality.

We’re going to share with you 5 vital prerequisites to support you to get your dream off the ground.

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Do you have a dream? Do you know it’s possible to create/achieve it?

Most people get stopped right here – they don’t seriously entertain living their dream and/or they don’t believe it’s possible. So they pretty much kill their dream before it’s even had a chance to breathe.

1 – Allow yourself

Allow yourself to have a dream. Sounds simple right? And it is, but somehow in our modern society many of us have become constrained and suppressed, and focused primarily on working hard, toeing the line, doing what others expect of us, putting ourselves last after everything and everyone else, and making decisions based on fear – so much so that we’ve lost the ability to allow ourselves to follow what our hearts really want.

And here’s a HUGE truth that we’ve learnt first-hand… what your heart wants is  good for you in all respects. Your passions, what inspires you, what lights you up, what rocks your boat, what spins your wheels… those are the things that you need to pay most attention to. When you live from that passion and are driven by your dreams, you thrive, flourish, relax, laugh, smile and contribute. You become the best, most joyful and therefore healthy and happy version of yourself. That is the you that the world needs. That is the you that you need! You have to allow yourself to have what you most need.Self-denial has no place in our emerging world. If you’re going to have a happy and healthy life, and help others along the way, you need to help yourself first because when you thrive, everyone around you thrives.

Everyone has at least one dream, if not many dreams, for what their life can be like. The first step is to ALLOW yourself to release your dream, dig it out of wherever deep inside you it’s been buried. Commit now to being the Director of your own life. Take ownership for all areas of your life. No one else can stop you, only you can let others and circumstances block you from being who you are and doing what you love.

We had the dream to live on Waiheke Island and we did it. We dreamt of a journey through Thailand and we did it. We dreamt of a nomadic adventure to Hawaii and it happened. We dreamt of getting married in a tropical location and we did it. We dreamt of doing our first triathlon/duathlon and we did it. We dreamt of sharing our life changing adventures in books and publishing them onto the Amazon best seller list, and we did it. Those things all started with one defining moment, a moment of allowing. In a single moment of declaring a dream and acknowledging it’s possible, everything changes. If you give your dream air time and energy, it can grow.

You don’t need to know how it’s possible, you just have to believe it is. Every time we’ve created a big dream, we’ve literally never known exactly HOW that dream would be possible.  Like how the heck we’d go to Thailand to live for 3 months when we had jobs and commitments (dog, mortgage) in NZ, like how on earth we’d afford to go to Hawaii for 3 months with new businesses and a mortgage or like how we’d write and publish books when we had absolutely zero experience or knowledge to do so.

But you don’t need to know how, in order for the dream to take flight. You simply have to trust… which leads on to Prerequisite 2.

2 – Trust yourself

When you have a dream, there are always plenty of reasons to say no to yourself. You could come up with a million reasons why you shouldn’t, won’t or can’t follow your dream. But, if you trust yourself, you can make it happen. What do we mean by trust yourself?

Well, dreams aren’t random thoughts plucked from nowhere. They are unique to you. They are emotionally charged, heartfelt, passionate endeavours that come from somewhere within you. Which is the exact point of #2, you have to trust that feeling you get when your dream moves you and motivates you. Trust your gut instinct, intuition, your heart – no matter how radical your dream might seem.

All of us humans have become way too obsessed with our minds and we let our minds drive all our decisions. Our intuition is a very real 6th sense, equally if not more powerful than the mind. Our intuition tells us what direction is healthy and happiest for us to move in, and then we can use our minds as a brilliant tool to navigate in that direction. Over analysis causes paralysis and the mind has a great way of reasoning, rationalising, blocking and destroying dreams. Definitely use your mind, just don’t let your mind use you.

So, what do you instinctively feel is right for you? Trust and respect your inner knowing. Love yourself enough to take that feeling and hold onto it, protect it, let it guide you forward. Don’t disregard what drives you inside, don’t disregard who you know you really are and what you really want to do. That inner motivator for your dream is a very real part of the true you, it needs you to honour it and bring it into life. Don’t tell yourself you’re not good enough or you don’t deserve it or it’s not a priority. And most definitely do not tell yourself it’s not possible

Follow your inner compass!

If doubt is a killer for you, check out our Kick Doubt to the Curb workshop.

3 – Get clear on WHAT

What exactly is your dream? If you have undefined desires, how can those desires come to fruition? Getting clear on what your dream specifically is, is critical to creating it. That’s a no brainer!

Spend 10 minutes sitting quietly with yourself with pen and paper to write down anything that comes into your mind when you say:

  • “What do I dream of?”
  • “If I was being who I really am and doing what I really love, what would my life look like?”

Let me ask you:

  • What lifestyle inspires you?
  • What contribution do you want to make?
  • What hobbies, passions, job, business inspires you to express yourself?
  • Where do you want to live?
  • How do you want to live?
  • What environments do you thrive most in?
  • What do you want to create?

4 – Get clear on WHY

You have to have a big why. Your why is your motivator. In short, why do you want what you want? Why do you want that particular dream? Your “why” is what drives you, it will be what keeps you committed to taking action to create your dream, and it’s the energy that makes it happen. If your “why” is big enough you can create almost anything! Some people never quit, that’s because their “why” is really big and really juicy.

 

Write down why you want what you want. Never stop at the first answer that arises from your mind. Dig deeper to get the answer from your soul, from deep inside. It’s rarely about things, money, external circumstance. It’s usually always about the experience and the feeling you will get from having/living that experience. It’s the intangible inner state of happiness that really drives so many of us.

No external thing or place can ever make you happy. Happiness is an inner state that goes where you go, or not. You can thrive wherever you go in life, whatever you are doing – but not because of WHERE/WHAT but because of WHO you are being. Make choices about what you do and where you go that support you being who you really are, and naturally accentuate the true you.

For all our dreams, our “why” is always backed by our belief that if you’re not living a life you know you love, a dream you know you want, that you know is possible – then you’re robbing yourself of opportunity and you’re robbing the world of having you flying at your full potential and in your full happiness. The world needs all of us to be fully expressed – to be who we are and to do what we love.

If none of that sparks a why that is big enough for you, then check out what a nurse reported as the 5 most common regrets of people on their deathbeds, as reported by the Guardian in the UK. Take a moment to think seriously how this makes you feel…

  1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself not what others expected of me
  2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard
  3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings
  4. I wish I’d stayed in touch with my friends more
  5. I wish I’d let myself be happier

Enough said, so on that note let’s move on to #5.

5 – Be aware of what stops you

If you’ve now stepped up and acknowledged your dream and you know it’s possible, you’ve allowed and trusted yourself, and defined your what and why, you may still fall victim to the biggest trap that keeps most people stuck.

You get stopped by your mind.

The human mind is incredibly capable of coming up with all the reasons why something can’t work, might not work, could go wrong, all the possible obstacles, all the cons, and this all happens with very little effort on your part. The human mind is also more than capable of coming up with all the exact opposite scenarios, pros, how and why something can and will work, but we’re just not conditioned togo into the possibility and positivity space without a little retraining and effort.

#5 is all about being aware of how your own mind might be stopping you. If you need to, you can actually write down all the negative stuff that your mind comes up with to stop you. Get it all out. Better out than in! None of what comes up will stop you, unless you choose to let it.

But at first you have to witness that it’s your own blocks that keep you stuck – your own reasoning, rationale, fears, worries, concerns, rehearsal for disaster, pessimism, and so on.

If you have a solid why that motivates you, your mind-made blocks won’t stand a chance. Your motivators and heartfelt passion will override those fears.

Simply be aware of your mind blocks, without having answers, without knowing how to resolve any of it.

Know it’s possible

We’ve applied this 5 step “allow, trust, what, why and awareness” process for getting goals and dreams off the ground in all areas of our life – from health and fitness to lifestyle, relationships, career and business. We’ve applied the same questions and tests each time. It works!

It’s easy to become lost in the notion that a dream is something that we aspire to but isn’t real. The very word ‘dream’ conjures up a sense of something out of reach. The truth is that dreams exist to be made manifest. Your dream needs you. It needs you in order to spark into life and become real. Don’t rob your dream of that opportunity. Don’t rob the world of your expression. All your dream needs is for you to know it’s possible and step outside of your questions, fears and concerns to give the dream a chance to sprout.