68 October 2015 www.womanthismonth.com If you think that you do not dream, you’re mistaken. Everybody steps into foreign terrain every single night LIFESTYLE | wellbeing You are waiting for the elevator, all dressed up. You step in to see similarly welldressed people. They reciprocate your smile. However, wait; a closer look at your co-riders reveals that their faces are upside down. The hair on the back of your neck is on end and you want to let out a bloodcurdling scream, but your throat is constricted out of terror. The man beside you leans close to ask, “Which floor?” and you realise he has no face. You try to get off, but the doors have closed and the elevator shoots up into a black hole; there is no escape. Then, you wake up with a start. Blurred vision and a foggy brain tell you that you are in your own room; your own comfort zone. You feel the sweat trickling down your neck and remind yourself to breathe easy. In a few seconds, you fall back into peaceful slumber, only to wake up in the morning and have some fleeting memory of a dream that woke you in the night. Dr Ram Vatwani, consultant neurologist, explains this fantastic occurrence that takes place while our body rejuvenates to brace itself for the next day. “Dreams are successions of images, ideas, emotions and sensations that occur usually involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep,” he says. He tells us that scientists believe adenosine, a natural compound, accumulates in our blood during our waking hours, propelling us towards a sleepy state at the end of the day. Gradually, the heart rate and breathing slow and muscles all across the body relax more and more. At about the 90-minute mark, after most people have fallen into deeper, slow-wave sleep, they switch into a cycle of sleep characterised by rapid eye movement (REM). REM is when your eyes move rapidly back and forth under the eyelids and is the stage of sleep where the most vivid and frequent dreams happen. “The body lies mostly still through the REM cycle, but the brain is nearly as active as when it's fully awake,” Dr Vatwani adds. Dreamworks You can party in outer space, have breakfast atop the Eiffel Tower, speak various languages and scale skyscrapers with Tom Cruise in his next blockbuster – all in your dreams. Behnaz Sanjana dives into the mysterious world of the sleeping mind for more.
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