Dreaming is like overnight therapy

It’s said that time heals all wounds, but my research suggests that
time spent in dream sleep is what heals. REM-sleep dreaming
appears to take the painful sting out of difficult, even traumatic,
emotional episodes experienced during the day, offering emotional
resolution when you awake the next morning.
REM sleep is the only time when our brain is completely devoid of the
anxiety-triggering molecule noradrenaline. At the same time, key
emotional and memory-related structures of the brain are reactivated
during REM sleep as we dream. This means that emotional memory
reactivation is occurring in a brain free of a key stress chemical, which
allows us to re-process upsetting memories in a safer, calmer
environment.

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How do we know this is so? In one study in my sleep center, healthy

young adult participants were divided into two groups to watch a set of
emotion-inducing images while inside an MRI scanner. Twelve hours
later, they were shown the same emotional images—but for half the
participants, the twelve hours were in the same day, while for the
other half the twelve hours were separated by an evening of sleep.
Those who slept in between the two sessions reported a significant
decrease in how emotional they felt in response to seeing those
images again, and their MRI scans showed a significant reduction in
reactivity in the amygdala, the emotional center of the brain that
creates painful feelings. Moreover, there was a reengagement of the
rational prefrontal cortex of the brain after sleep that helped maintain a
dampening influence on emotional reactivity. In contrast, those who
remained awake across the day showed no such dissolving of
emotional reactivity over time.

That in itself doesn’t say anything about the role of dreaming. But we
had recorded each participant’s sleep during the intervening night
between the two test sessions, and we found that specific brain
activity that reflected a drop in stress-related brain chemistry during
the dream state determined the success of overnight therapy from one
individual to the next.

Dreaming has the potential to help people de-escalate emotional

reactivity, probably because the emotional content of dreams is paired
with a decrease in brain noradrenaline. Support for this idea came
from a study done by Murray Raskind on vets with PTSD, who often
suffer debilitating nightmares. When given the drug Prazosin—a
medication that lowers blood pressure and also acts as a blocker of
the brain stress chemical noradrenaline—the vets in his study had
fewer nightmares and fewer PTSD symptoms than those given a
placebo. Newer studies suggest this effect can be shown in children
and adolescents with nightmares, as well, though the research on this
is still in its infancy.
The evidence points toward an important function of dreams: to help
us take the sting out of our painful emotional experiences during the
hours we are asleep, so that we can learn from them and carry on with
our lives.