Dr. Matthew Walker

And she would, at the time that those individuals were going through this difficult challenge, she would be recording their sleep, looking at their different stages of sleep, and she was collecting dream reports from them.

And then she would track them

and their progression clinically over the next year.

And what she found was that some of those participants, about 50% of them, ended up getting clinical remission from their depression that was instigated by the painful experience they'd gone through.

The other half did not get clinical remission from their depression.

They remained depressed.

And then she used those two classes to go back and have a look at the sleep and the dream reports.

And what she found was some differences in REM sleep, but more interestingly, were the differences in their dreams.

Both of those sets of individuals were dreaming at the time of going through those difficult emotional experiences.

Some of them, however, were dreaming of that challenging experience.

Others were not.

Those who dreamt, but also dreamt of the problematic experience were the ones who went on to get clinical resolution from their depression.

Those who dreamt,

but did not dream of those events seem to be the ones who did not get clinical remission from their depression.

In other words, here, once again, is this new rule that when it comes to dreaming, it's not just about sleep and it's not just about dreaming, it's about dreaming of the specific things that you're trying to get the functional benefit from, whether that's creativity and insight, or whether it's emotional resolution and overnight therapy,

both of them seem to depend very much on the expression of dreaming of specific things itself.

And we'll come on to why that's maybe relevant when we speak about lucidity too.

You're not alone, by the way.

No, no, I didn't mean that.

I just mean that there are lots of people who can resonate with that.