Why Do Morning Dreams Work Like Trauma Therapy?

On the show, rapid eye movement dreams that dominate towards morning divorce emotion from prior experiences and extract general rules and themes. They work as self-induced therapy, like trauma therapy: an intense emotional experience without the fear. Go without rapid eye movement sleep for too long and you become irritable and start linking negative emotions to almost everything.

During the dreams you are paralyzed and cannot move. Epinephrine, the molecule of stress, fear, and excitement, is very low, so you cannot act the dreams out. The dreams are heavily emotionally laden and include theory of mind. A Nobel Prize winner for immunoglobulins, also a neuroscientist, has shown that replay of neurons in the hippocampus and elsewhere is an approximation of the previous episode, and a lot of fear unlearning, uncoupling emotion from hard or traumatic events, occurs in rapid eye movement sleep. People sometimes wake suddenly from one of the dreams and the heart beats really, really fast, a surge of epinephrine on the way out. Atonia, the paralysis, invades the waking state. Pot smokers experience the invasion a lot more than non-pot smokers. Waking paralyzed for a second is terrifying, until a jolt back to alertness.

Rapid eye movement sleep is for forgetting the bad stuff. The dreams are very intense, and they uncouple emotions from bad experiences.