Michelle Carr

Our brain is even, it looks very similar to wakefulness.

We have a lot of really high frequency activity in the brain.

And REM sleep is the stage when we also have the most vivid and emotional and sensory dream experiences.

Yeah, I think this is maybe something that a lot of people can relate to, that we all go through different stressful experiences during the day.

And at night, just before sleep, you might be worrying about an argument you had or really stressed about something that happened during the day.

And then after a night of sleep, if you think about that same problem, it seems completely manageable.

And this is one of the functions of sleep.

It's helping us to essentially...

In a way, let go of a lot of the distress that we accrue during the day, like all of the emotions that get activated during the day.

We kind of are able to let go of them during a night of sleep.

And even for memories that we have, we let go of the emotion that's attached to them.

So it helps us to adapt and to be better able to manage anything that might come up the next day.

Yeah, I think that there is a similarity there in that you're... But I think one of the keys about sleep and what makes it different from maybe like being exposed to stressors in waking life is that there's actually a very physiological component that

The brain and the body are in a specific state where during sleep we're able to reactivate emotional memories, like the amygdala is active, but our physical body is actually subdued in certain ways.

So we think that's really essential to being able to strengthen and to hold on to and to store important memories, but to let go of the kind of stress and arousal that's attached to them.

Yeah, I guess part of that analogy is that the source of nightmares is something that we have experienced.

And so we do see that nightmares are specifically very highly correlated with past experiences of trauma or with adversity.

They occur a lot more during periods of stress.

It's almost like the memory is too intense and the emotion is so strong that it kind of disrupts sleep anyways.

It causes the body to become really aroused and you just