Dreaming may act like a type of overnight therapy, taking the edge off

painful memories, a new study says.

In a recent experiment, brain scans of people who viewed emotionally provocative
pictures and then went to sleep showed that the part of the brain that handles emotions
powered down during rapid eye movement, or REM, sleepthe stage in which dreams
occur.
What's more, the subjects reported that the images had less of an emotional charge the
morning after. This suggests that REM sleep may help us work through difficult events
in our lives, the researchers say.
Why we sleep is still unknown, and even more elusive is the relationship between sleep
and our emotional well-being, said study leader Matthew Walker, a neuroscientist at the
University of California, Berkeley.
(Read about the mysteries of why we sleep in National Geographicmagazine.)
There's already anecdotal evidence for sleep's therapeutic benefitssuch as the oftrepeated adage that a person will go to bed and feel better in the morning, Walker said.
And clinical data show that psychiatric mood disorders, from anxiety to post-traumatic
stress disorder, can lead to sleep abnormalities.
"Despite that suggested interplay, we've understood remarkably little about the basic
brain science that may underlie a relationship between our emotional lives and our
sleeping lives," he said.
As his new research now suggests, "it's not time that heals all woundsit's REM sleep."
Sleeping on It Helps
For the experiment, Walker and colleagues divided 34 healthy young volunteers into
two groups. People in each group viewed and rated their reactions to 150 images
shown at 12-hour intervals while an MRI scanner measured brain activity.
The pictures, which have been used in hundreds of studies, ranged from bland
objectsi.e., a kettle on a counter topto gory pictures of people maimed in accidents,
Walker said.
One group viewed the pictures in the morning and again in the evening without sleeping
in between. The other group saw the same images before a full night of sleep and again
the next morning.

The volunteers who slept between viewings reported a much milder emotional reaction
to the images after the second viewing.
MRI scans performed during REM sleep revealed that brain activity fell in the
amygdalathe emotion-processing part of the brainpossibly allowing the more
rational prefrontal cortex to soften the images' impact. (See an interactive brain map.)
In addition, recordings of the subjects' electrical brain activity during sleep made with
electroencephalograms showed a decrease in the levels of brain chemicals linked to
stress.
When people experience an emotional event, stress chemicals are released to flag and
prioritize that event, essentially reminding the brain to work through it during sleep,
according to Walker, whose study appeared November 23 in the journal Current
Biology.
"Somewhere between the initial event and the later point of recollecting, the brain has
performed an elegant trick of divorcing emotions from memory, so it's no longer itself
emotional," Walker said.
"That's what we mean by overnight therapy."
(Take National Geographic magazine's sleep quiz.)
Dreaming Not an Emotional Cure-All?
But sleep expert David Kuhlmann said the team may have "overstepped its bounds
slightly on the conclusions."
For instance, dreaming is not a cure-all for emotional stress, said Kuhlmann, medical
director for sleep medicine at Bothwell Regional Health Center in Sedalia, Missouri.

Getting More Sleep Image Gallery

We all experience dreams while we sleep. See more sleep pictures.

Some people remember vivid dreams; some swear they cannot remember dreaming at all. Some dream
in black and white; most people dream in color. However, one thing is for sure, everyone dreams. From
the time we are babies until the day we die, our minds constantly produce dreams while our bodies
and brains are at rest. But, what exactly are dreams, and why do we have them?

Dreaming is a symbolic language designed to communicate your inner wisdom to you while you are
asleep. The part of your subconscious that processes dreams -- your dream self -- sends messages as
symbols and images, which in turn conveys ideas or situations in a visual language.
While many agree about what dreams are, there is still debate over why we actually dream. Most experts
believe we dream to assist the body with rest, repair and rejuvenation. Others speculate that we dream
for psychological reasons: to reexamine the day's events, to reduce and relieve stress, and to provide an
outlet for pent-up emotions. Keep reading to see the five most widely accepted reasons why we dream.