If sleep is fascinating, dreaming is even more so. No one knows for sure the meaning or function of night-time dreams, but there is plenty of speculation. Freud believed dreams represented the royal road to the unconscious. They told us our secret desires and fears.
Interestingly enough, there is a connection between smoking marijuana and dreaming. Though sleep seems like a passive state to us, the brain is still very active. In fact, there are a total of five stages of sleep: Stages 1 through 4 and a stage called rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. Each stage is progressively deeper and the complete cycle is repeated several times during the night.
The dreaming happens during the rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. It is that portion of the sleep when you sort of go into paralysis. If you would not go into paralysis, you would be acting in your dreams, jumping around and doing things.
People who use marijuana tend to suppress REM sleep. Therefore, they have less sleep and fewer dreams, because dreams happen only during REM. Many people who smoke marijuana claim to not see dreams, but once they stop smoking there is a rebound phenomena where people can have quite vivid dreams.
Dreams help you sort through the thousands of impressions and images you encounter every day. When you smoke weed regularly, that function is also suppressed. Smoking, except that suppresses REM sleep, also suppresses a lot of important functions of that REM sleep. One of those functions is reliving the things you have experienced and coming to terms with them, as it were.
Once most former users stop consuming and start sleeping regularly, they report more frequent, intense dreams. Of course, if you suffer from nightmares, that could be a bad thing. But most of the former smokers claim that dreams are so vivid that it is actually quite a nice experience.
Sources: Bussiness Insider, Psychology Today, Vice, West Word
