Issue 118, June 2008
Groggy & foggy
©Jane Teresa Anderson, June 2008
How do you feel when you wake up after a full night’s sleep? Refreshed and full of energy, mind clear, sharp and ready to get on with the day? Or disoriented, slowed down by a groggy body and foggy mind that can’t be blamed on late night partying or overindulging?
Are some mornings foggier and groggier than others? You know how it goes – you wake up feeling out of sorts, you stumble, mumble and grumble your way through the morning, and the simplest things don’t seem to work right or make sense.
Have you tried going back to bed for a bit of a sleep on those foggier, groggier days? Have you noticed that a short nap often clears the fog?
Waking prematurely from a dream can cause this morning blah-blur. The alarm clock going off, your partner getting up or any external noise can bring you out of a dream before you would naturally awaken. Going back to bed for a short nap gives you the chance to dream your way to the end of your sleep cycle, so you wake up properly refreshed. At these times it’s easy to nap, and you usually slide straight into a dream because this is what your body and mind so desperately need. You rarely drop into the interrupted dream, but the nap dream is usually related to the earlier dream – it covers the same theme in its quest to finish processing your waking experiences of the last day or two.
Think of it this way. When you dream, your brain is sorting through your waking experiences of the last day or two, comparing them to your past experiences, defragging and updating the ‘hard drive’ of your brain trying to make sense of your world. Elements of your past come up in a dream when your dreaming brain is comparing yesterday’s experiences to similar or emotionally contentious experiences from your past. New ideas, attitudes and solutions to problems appear in your dreams when your dreaming brain gets creative while it’s processing those experiences. Imagine all your memories and experiences as files stored in your brain, and imagine your dreaming brain considering yesterday’s experiences and working out where to file them. Should it file them with similar past experiences under ‘same old stuff’, or file them close to past experiences as ‘similar but a bit different’, or should it chuck out some old files and replace them with your new, updated experiences, deemed more relevant to your life today?
Now imagine being woken up prematurely, mid-dream. Some files will be processed and sorted, others will be in piles awaiting decisions – keep, update, or delete – and others will be as yet unprocessed, an untidy, random mess. Imagine waking up and trying to function clearly in that state. It’s no wonder you feel groggy and foggy when you can’t access the files you need. Instead of waking to a brand new day, defragged and updated, you wake to jumbled confusion.
When you go back for that nap, your dreaming brain gets the chance to complete the filing job so you can wake up to a good, fresh start.
But it’s not always possible to go back for an extra nap, so how can you banish the groggy foggy while getting on with your day?
The clue is that the grog-fog results from an unfinished dream, so if you can remember your dream, think up a suitable, positive ending, and visualise this as you get ready for your day. Instead of your dreaming mind packing the files away, you’re the one in control, so you have the opportunity to be creative about your filing. If you consider the best possible outcome for your unfinished dream and visualise it well, you’ll not only clear the grog-fog but you’ll set yourself up for a positive, creative, insightful day. (This is dream alchemy. Dream alchemy can be applied to a full dream, an interrupted dream or a fragment of a dream caught before the whole dream faded from memory. Learn more about dream alchemy and see some examples here.)
If you find yourself in the grog-fog with no recall of that interrupted dream, you’ll need to find a way to get that nap, whichever way you can!
Another reason for waking up feeling foggy despite a full night’s sleep is insufficient dreaming. This can occur when you think you’re getting a full night’s sleep but your sleep is disturbed without you waking up. While you sleep your body and mind cycle through different stages and each of these is vital for healthy sleep and healing – the kind that results in you waking up feeling refreshed and rejuvenated. For example, there are stages for dreaming and stages for physical growth and repair. It’s possible for your sleep to be disturbed enough to disrupt the flow of these cycles and stages without waking you up. Dreams abort, body repair gets slowed, and the fog settles.
One condition that can disrupt your sleep without waking you up is sleep apnoea. This is where your breathing stops for up to seconds at a time on a regular basis, depriving your brain of oxygen. Another disruptive condition is snoring. Being too hot, too cold, in mild pain or discomfort can also disrupt your sleep – and your dreams.
In a good eight hour sleep you experience around five periods of dreaming. These are known as REM sleep, or Rapid Eye Movement sleep, since your eyes move rapidly when dreaming. An observer can easily see your eyes moving under your closed eyelids. Experiments show that the eye movements correlate with your dream – you are watching the action in your dream, just as you would watch the action around you if you were awake.
There are five stages of sleep, and during that good eight hour sleep you cycle through these stages five or six times. (Some people need less, some people need more – but most people need about eight hour’s worth of sleep.) Sometimes you dream in the non-REM stages of your sleep cycle, but the most vivid dreams occur during REM sleep. These are also the dreams that literally keep you alive and sane. Experiments in sleep laboratories show that if you allow someone to sleep for eight hours two nights in a row but you deprive them of dreaming (this is done by detecting REM sleep brainwaves and interrupting them), they become extremely distressed physiologically and emotionally. Symptoms are similar to the DTs people experience during alcohol withdrawal. In similar experiments with animals, the animals withered and died after a few days of non-dream sleep. So those vivid dreams you have during your REM sleep are keeping you alive and sane whether or not you remember them.
If your sleep is disrupted and you only go through two or three sleep cycles instead of five, you may experience slight physiological and emotional disturbance– otherwise known as feeling groggy and foggy - due to lack of REM sleep.
In fact, dreaming is so vital to your health and wellbeing that if you have a restless night you may experience extremely intense dreams towards morning. Your dreaming mind tries to make up for lost sleep by cramming extremely vivid dreams into the only bit of REM sleep you get towards morning. This is known as REM Rebound. You can also experience this after a bout of heavy drinking, when it takes several hours of sleep to clear the alcohol before you get any quality REM sleep.
Usually I write about dream interpretation, and we’ll be back on theme next month. The best way to interpret your dreams is to start with a sharp, clear, refreshed mind, so if you’ve been feeling a bit foggy recently, follow the tips in this article and sharpen up til we meet again. Same time, same place, next month – see you then.
Jane Teresa Anderson
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