YOU know that feeling when someone wakes you up in the middle of a really good dream? There is a real sense of loss, like ending a TV episode on a cliffhanger. You want to jump back in, but no such luck. That is me every morning. I have a baby sleeping in the same room and am wrenched awake early each day, often mid-dream. That might sound like a trivial complaint. We tend to think of dream sleep as unimportant, the poor relative of vital and restorative deep sleep. But now it seems that dreams are much more than mystical night-time adventures. Recent research suggests that rapid eye movement (REM) sleep - when we have the most powerful dreams - is vital to learning and creativity, and promotes a healthy mind in a variety of ways. It isn't romantic whimsy to say that if we stifle our dreams, we aren't going to reach our potential.
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