This little video addresses an important issue — why do people who suffer from depression often wake up feeling exhausted? The answer that this video advances is rather interesting.  It turns out that depressed people dream more intensely and have longer periods of REM sleep then people who aren’t depressed. Expectation fulfillment theory helps explain why the depressed spend more time dreaming.

Dreams, according to this theory, help people act out undischarged emotions. The more emotions we haven’t acted on, the more intensely we dream.  Eventually, if we’re not careful, we end up with a backlog of unresolved emotions that our subconscious simply can’t cope with. We wake up feeling tired because our minds have spent a good chunk of the night trying to resolve issues we didn’t take care of during the day.

That of course, is my spin on the subject. I haven’t read the book yet, but I find the ideas discussed in the video fascinating, and I look forward to learning more about them.