Up All Night? You May Have Actually Been Asleep

If the brain cannot divorce the emotion from memory across the first night following a trauma experience, the theory suggests that a repeat attempt of emotional memory stripping will occur on the second night, as the strength of the “emotional tag” associated with the memory remains too high. If the process fails a second time, the same attempt wil

people suffering from PTSD, whose excessively high levels of noradrenaline blocked REM-level dreams—couldn’t enter deep sleep to process their memories and chemically defang them, so their recollections of unprocessed violence and fear leaked into their waking world.

Perhaps most intriguing, REM sleep helps us maintain our emotional awareness. When we are deprived of REM, studies have found, we have a more difficult time reading others’ facial expressions. REM-deprived study subjects interpreted even friendly or neutral expressions as menacing. This is not trivial: our ability to function as social animals[*3]

many of the symptoms attributed to sleep loss may actually result from suppressed dreaming.

In the one study examining REM, unlike both waking and NREM, there appeared a lack of connectivity between the dorsomedial prefrontal subsystem and the posterior central node of the default network in the pCC (Koike et al., 2011). Koike et al. speculate that this disconnection contributes to the illogic and bizarreness of dream cognition, as has al