
I'm not talking about how rest improves mental health (although that's true too!) But we've heard that before. I'm talking about cutting edge research that suggests that sleep is needed to help your mind deal with your experiences. Psychologists and scientists alike believe that sleep "reorders" your feelings when you can't. It files them and categorizes them and makes sense of them. When you sleep, your brain is acutally doing important psychological work- and you get to sleep through it.

Once we realize that our brain is working hard all night- dreams begin to make more sense. They are (quite literally) pictures that represent emotions*. Most of the time the pictures are rather mundane housekeeping items. The represent nothing more than hum-drum mental filing. But every now and then we become plagued by repetitive or disturbing dreams and we can't shake them.
Dream analysis has been practiced perhaps forever. Since the dawn of man, we have struggled to make sense of what our mind does while we sleep. Kings often looked to dream interpreters to help them predict the future. Sometimes dreams were considered supernatural messages.
Modern dream understanding is less ethereal, but (I think) much more interesting! If dreams are nothing more than pictures which represent feelings, then our repetitive or bothersome dreams are simply HUGE METAPHORS. It's our mind sending up a flag to say, "Hello! Pay attention to this! You have an issue here!"

I mostly dismissed these dreams until they became more frequent and upsetting. They finally had my attention. So I gave it some thought. I contemplated how I was feeling about life- what my stressors were. When that didn't work I thought about metaphors having to do with fish:

Once I pinpointed the emotion, and began making positive changes in my life, the dreams went away as quickly as they had come.
So, my point is- sleep is good for more than the body. It can help regulate emotions and (sometimes) point us to address emotions we were unaware of. It allows us to categorize and make emotional sense of our experiences and feelings. In fact, what is blissful unconsciousness for us, is arguably when your brain works the hardest! So respect your bodies need for sleep. It is likely still more important than we realize.
And with that, I'm headed to enjoy my own sleep.
Krysta
*I cannot take credit for that term. A good friend of mine used it today. I liked it, so I stole it!
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