Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

by Matthew Walker

What you will notice is that almost all of them will be memories of an emotional nature: perhaps a particularly frightening experience of being separated from your parents, or almost being hit by a car on the street. Also notice, however, that your recall of these detailed memories is no longer accompanied by the same degree of emotion that was present at the time of the experience. You have not forgotten the memory, but you have cast off the emotional charge, or at least a significant amount of it. You can accurately relive the memory, but you do not regurgitate the same visceral reaction that was present and imprinted at the time of the episode.I The theory argued that we have REM-sleep dreaming to thank for this palliative dissolving of emotion from experience. Through its therapeutic work at night, REM sleep performed the elegant trick of divorcing the bitter emotional rind from the information-rich fruit. We can therefore learn and usefully recall salient life events without being crippled by the emotional baggage that those painful experiences originally carried.