Is Smoking Pot Making You Dream Less At Night?

Getting high is a synonym for setting your mind free, in a flowing-without-boundaries mode. Then why exactly is that we don’t dream whenever we go to bed in an over-the-rainbow state of mind?

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Here are 13 facts about that.

1. Dr. Elliott Lee of the Royal Sleep Disorders Clinic in Ottawa explains the two primary stages that our sleep session goes through; “There’s REM [Rapid Eye Movement] sleep, sometimes called dreaming sleep. Everything else is non-REM sleep.” He says.

2. Non-REM (NREM) sleep comes in three categories; the first one: where you are transitioning from awake to asleep, the second one: is when you go from one stage of sleeping to the other one, and finally the third one: the most restorative for our mind and body.

3.”About 80 percent of dreams that we have occurs in REM sleep.” Dr. Lee establishes. Although it isn’t that common, we can also dream during an non-REM mode. But it is also harder for us to remember it.

4.  The REM dreams are freakier, while the non-REM are about everyday stuff, also more colorful and emotional.

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5. Weed is literally a major buzzkill for our dreams for many reasons.

6. Pot decreases the continuity of our sleep, it makes it harder to fall asleep and promotes SWS.

7. But, the truth is that nobody really knows the consequences of the REM sleep.

8. Scientists have a lot of theories when it comes to explaining the function of the REM sleep.

9. The most promising approach, according to Lee, is the “sleep to forget/sleep to remember” theory.  Let’s say something traumatic happens to you; that memory goes into either the declarative memory and emotional memory.

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10. Whenever you miss out on a night of sleep, there’s a solution for that; “There is a ‘rebound’ period of high-REM sleep after cannabinoid therapies are discontinued,” says the My Health Freedom team. But the odds are you will have one hell of a weird dream.

11. To demonstrate the REM rebound an experiment was done; the scientist wrote down his dreams for two nights, one sloshed, one sober. The sober night, the dreams were about standard issues. While the drunk night, on the other hand, was an emotional rollercoaster.

12. Dr. Lee says alcohol only helps you dream with infrequent, acute use: “The problem is when people use it chronically, it makes it harder to start sleeping, stay asleep, and it suppresses both stages of sleep. It’s kind of a trap.”

13. If you are used to going to bed high, when you don;t dreams are wayyy more intense. It doesn’t mean that your brain runs out of pretty pictures, but pot causes an effect that changes the origin of those images.

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