Is Your Mind Working/reconciling The Couple Of Hours Before You Wake Up

[Joseph Maynor]

Since I've been working on meditation and mindfulness I've become aware of the shallow dreaming I do the last couple of hours before I wake up.  It's like my mind is working on reconciling my problems.  Has anybody else experienced this, and what is going on here?  Work is happening during this time, but I'm not exactly sure what's going on.  Sometimes I'll wake up and realize it.  What is your experience?

[SOUL]

There has been some research done that has some tentative conclusions which could be drawn about the activity in the mind during sleep and what it may be.  The amount of information that is collected by the subconscious mind is so much that it is processed even while we are sleeping hence the "dreaming" we experience.

The issue for the mind is that access to the senses is not possible while we are sleeping so the context of this processing can become distorted and somewhat abstract as we all have come to know about dreams. The mind is storing this information for future reference but since it is an abstract distorted version of the experience it won't be fully contextualized until it is finally referenced during waking hours when it is related to what we are experiencing at that moment.

So there isn't really much we can glean from dreaming that we haven't already been exposed to when we are actually going through the experience as it happens. We can learn about how we attach emotions and symbology to certain circumstances and potentially get insights into how we may respond reflexively when triggered by correlated associations and be prepared for them.