The Twenty-four Hour Mind summary

Many people consider their dreams mystical – they scrutinize them looking for patterns, prophecies or some deeper meaning. In reality, dreams are simply a way to help deal with our everyday lives.

When we dream, we’re evaluating the experiences we’ve had throughout the day, linking them to similar, older experiences and filtering out new, important information that should be stored in our memory. This information is then matched with an emotional experience from the past, thus creating a dream image, which represents memories in relation to this new information.

By this point in your life, you’ve probably realized that your experiences in dreaming and waking life are radically different. But why? It all comes down to the fundamental differences in how we process information when we’re asleep or awake.

When we’re awake, our minds receive signals from and respond to the external world almost automatically. In fact, we run largely on autopilot: once we’ve developed the behaviors that take us through the day, our perspectives, attitudes and habits – things we’d often ascribe to our personal identity – are produced without almost any conscious input.

So far, we’ve learned a great deal about the importance of sleep for our waking life. But what happens if our sleeping and waking minds don’t work together as they should?

For starters, if you have difficulties sleeping, it might be a sign that you’re suffering from the beginning stages of depression. In fact, studies show that depression always starts with a malfunctioning sleep cycle, which results in crankiness and irritation. Depressed individuals stay in a sort of REM mode even while they’re awake – in other words, they aren’t able to leave the emotional state of their nighttime mind.

Often, things like poor nutrition or a lack of physical exercise are blamed for many modern-world health problems. But this comes at the cost of overlooking one of the main causes of poor health: bad sleep.

The greatest risk of not getting enough sleep is obesity, which has reached epidemic proportions in the Western world. This was demonstrated in one study in which participants were allowed only a few hours of sleep per night: the decrease in sleep caused an increase in appetite due to malfunctioning hormone regulation, and resulted in weight gain within only a week!