According to one study, people spend almost 50% of their waking hours mind-wandering, also known as daydreaming. That’s on top of spending about 30% of our lives sleeping.

Around 20-25% of our sleep is in REM sleep, where vivid emotional dreams typically occur, although we don’t remember most of them when we’re awake.

REM sleep is often considered a distinct third state of consciousness because its neural signature is rather similar to wakefulness. Our brain is active, but our muscles are in atonia. Hence, REM sleep is often called paradoxical sleep.

During REM sleep, brain regions crucial for emotional processing like the amygdala, hippocampus, striatum, medial prefrontal cortex, and the insula are about 30% more active than during wakefulness.

Meanwhile, your dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for executive functions, logic, and reasoning, is mostly silent, even compared to other stages of sleep like deep sleep.

Hence, during REM sleep, it’s almost like your emotional brain is allowed to run free without restraint. That’s why dreams are often so wildly, crazily, bizarrely absurd.

So, have you ever thought about it? Overall, if we put the numbers together, we human beings spend more than half of our consciousness… dreaming!

The ancient sufis did have a point when they said life is just a dream.

As I’m getting deeper into the sleep literature now, I’m constantly reminded that the science of sleep is truly fascinating. It feels, in a way, poetic.

We often attribute a mystical tone to the mysteries of sleep and dreams, those unknown realms where we lose control over our consciousness. Interestingly, as you begin to demystify even just the tip of it, the awe only deepens.

It almost feels like you’re collecting traces of some cosmic power behind the intricate neuronal dances that give rise to human consciousness (or in the case of sleep, the drifting of it).

How did I get so lucky that I can do this as my job? I wouldn’t ask for anything else.

*A note to remind myself whenever I get sick of lab work, which I believe, will come often 😅