A good night’s sleep includes plenty of dream sleep and – if possible – avoiding nightmares. Why do we dream? Dreaming helps keep us sane!

(Featured photo: In case you’re wondering, the Corpse Bride above is granddaughter Mia, Halloween 2021.)

In the wee small hours, Roy’s hairy arm reached out to prod me awake. According to him – though it’s hard to imagine from such a sweet thing as I am – his wife was snoring like a dervish.

It didn’t help that I was lying on my back to protect my new eyelash extensions. (Such vanity, yes.) What’s more, I was actually awake and trying to stay that way to avoid sinking back into a long, complicated nightmare that seemed to have been going on for hours. Evidently, it’s quite possible for us to snore while we think we’re wide awake.

“To sleep: perchance to snore dream: aye, there’s the rub” Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1

My nightmare

Other people’s dreams are crushingly boring, but listen to this one. It’s the short version, I promise – just one paragraph.

I’d been starring in a horror movie, while actually at a movie theatre, which happened to be on a cruise ship – you know how dreams go. Every time I managed to kill the murderous villain – the first time by crushing his head with a bottle of Galliano from the cruise ship bar, he re-emerged in different form. I forget exactly how it all panned out, except that it ended up with myself waiting in a fast food queue to order McDonald’s and moules mariniéres for Roy, me and our Californian friends, the Campbells. There, that’s it. All I could remember, anyway.

Why we dream

REM sleep – or Rapid Eye Movement sleep – is the stage of sleep most associated with dreaming. I get plenty of it. In fact, I wake up most mornings at the tail end of a vivid dream.

That’s a fact that’s borne out by my Oūra ring app. Oūra is known as the world’s best sleep tracker, and it’s just got better. (Here’s my recent review. I’ve got the new Gen. 3 version on order; it should be here by Christmas. You may remember that it featured on my Biohacker’s Christmas Wish List – see here. Thanks, Santa!)

Anyway, here’s my Oūra app evidence of how much REM I’ve been getting in the past six months – an average over two hours a night:

So, why do we need to dream? Sleep researcher Matthew Walker put it well in Why Your Brain Needs to Dream: Dreaming is like overnight therapy, he wrote. REM-sleep dreaming takes the sting out of difficult emotional episodes experienced during the day, resolving them by the time we awaken the next morning and allowing us to carry on with our lives.

Put another way, dreaming helps to keep us sane. Isn’t that ironic, when dreams themselves can be so downright crazy?

So…

Question 1 – Why the Galliano bottle?

An unsuitable boy (from a long, long time ago) once advised me that if I found myself in a free-for-all bar fight, I should grab the Galliano bottle from the shelf. Its lo-o-ong neck and heavy base made it the ideal ad hoc weapon, you see. Unfortunately, the occasion never arose – but the message must have deeply sunk in.

Question 2 – Why McDonald’s?

Why was my dream persona ordering McDonald’s? – especially as I never darken those golden arches. After thinking about it a bit, I realised why.

Earlier that evening, I’d been working on my understanding of colloquial French by watching a YouTube video of a French couple on vacation in Spain. Or Mexico; I forget. Sick of tacos, they’re delighted when they spot a “McDo”. “Finally some proper French food!” they declare. (In French, of course.)

Bizarrely, when you consider France’s culinary reputation, McDonald’s France has one of the highest number of McDonald’s outlets per capita of any country in the world. That said, it may also be a bit better than McDonald’s in the US.

Question 3 – Why mussels?

Again, it’s a classic case of the subconscious working through the events of the day. That morning, I’d listened to an podcast interview, where someone mentioned that vegans could save themselves a lot of deficiency-related health problems if they would just eat a couple of mussels or oysters.

But as the podcaster acknowledged, a belief structure that declares an oyster out of bounds while a head of cabbage is fair game for munching is nothing more or less than a religion – and in this increasingly intolerant and polarised age, he and I both concur that it’s better not to go there.

OK, so I went there anyway.

Question 4 – Why such a horrible nightmare?

I also identified why I’d had such lurid dreams that particular night. I’d taken a couple of valerian tablets to hack my sleep. That’s valerian, not Valium!

Valerian root is an ancient sedative and anxiety-relieving herb used by the Saxons, but it can have the side-effect of delivering more vivid and powerful dreams. It’s also thought to enhance both dream content and dream recall. In excess, it can even cause “night terrors”. (Whatever those are, and they don’t sound good.) But it’s the dose that makes the poison, they say, so I reduced my dose from two to one of the little tablets.

Nerd Alert: For any geeks out there, the US FDA classifies valerian as a GRAS – “generally recognised as safe” – substance; it is believed to exercise a therapeutic effect via “multi-modal modulation of GAGergic neurotransmission”. By binding to GAGAA receptors at the “beta subunit” it sets off a neurochemical cascade that decreases central nervous system activity and blocks the enzymatic breakdown of GABA, so increasing the concentration of GABA – a neuroamine that is critical for relaxation.

Buyer beware – read the label

Before my current supply of Blackmores Valerian, I had bought a bottle of Nutrivital Sleep Formula. The shop assistant at Go Vita had recommended it, explaining that many people complained of valerian-induced bad dreams. Well, the Nutrivital stuff gave me a week’s worth of insomnia before I made the connection and tossed the bottle.

What was in it to make it have the exact opposite effect of what the label promised?

Belatedly, I looked at the ingredients: passiflora, hops, wild cherry extract and vitamin B6. Aha! While the first three are generally benign, it may not be ideal to take B6 just before hitting the sack. While a lack of vitamin B6 is linked to insomnia, so is an excess of the stuff, and I get enough of that in the activated multi-B I take each morning.

Two lessons here: (a) read the label, and (b) we’re all different, and whatever’s in it may not work for you. If you’re not deficient in something, taking it in a supplement will either do nothing for you, or possibly cause a problem.

This past year has taught me a lot about sleep, especially the importance of a regular pre-bedtime ritual. I’m no longer taking valerian at the moment, though it’s part of my just-in-case arsenal, along with melatonin.

Magnesium and ashwagandha supplementation have helped tremendously. Magnesium because most of us are deficient, and ashwagandha because it’s such a powerful adaptogen. (More on that here.) In fact, I credit ashwagandha with helping me cope with the stress and grief surrounding my mother’s death last year.

Also, managing to get a good night’s sleep can hugely depend on how you start your day – especially regularising your circadian rhythm by getting morning light. That’s a whole other story that I promise to get to sometime soon.

But I’m definitely getting better at the business of sleeping – dropping off within just a few minutes, waking up only once or twice or not at all, and getting plenty of REM. More deep sleep would be better. And if someone has advice on how not to snore when I’m sleeping on my back – apart from being prodded awake by an irate husband – do tell!

If you’ve got this far, here’s a reward – granddaughter Holly (7) all dressed up for Halloween a couple of months ago. The featured picture is of her elder sister, Mia, the Corpse Bride.