REM Illumination Memory Consolidation

This is not a book about dream interpretation. This is a book about why we dream. This is not a dream dictionary that defines what each object in a dream is supposed to represent. This is a book about some amazing recent research that is beginning to tell us at least one of the reasons as to why we dream: Sleep is crucial for the storage of new memories and for their incorporation into the matrix of all our previously existing memories. Although the average person may not remember a dream every night, or even rarely remember one at all, we all spend an average of one and a half to two hours a night in REM sleep dreaming. While we sleep our brains are very busy formulating complicated dreams with twists and turns and seemingly nonsensical details. We dream for a reason: to consolidate memory. As a sleep medicine physician and neurologist, I am a true believer that your most valuable asset is your consciousness. If your consciousness is not optimized, you are not living your life to its full potential. You are not enjoying all of the people and all of the things to the extent that you could. Optimizing your consciousness means being as awake, alert, and as intelligent as possible. I spend every day trying to educate patients about what is going on with them medically. I try to take a patient s complicated medical diagnoses and translate it into plain English, so that any patient with almost any level of education can understand what is going on inside their body. In writing this book I have tried to do the same thing for what we have learned about the importance of sleep and memory. Having a good memory is important to all of us. Which one of us would not like to be more intelligent than we are right now?