Free Seeing the Voice of God: What God Is Telling You through Dreams and Visions by Laura Harris Smith

perspective. As I said before, sleep is the mattress of dreams. After years of studying dreams themselves, I knew it was time for me to pull the covers back and do some fact-finding on the science that embraces the supernatural.
    I already know everything that the dreamer Joseph, the prophet Jeremiah and the apostle Peter had to say about dreamsin Scripture, but marrying that with a modern-day medical doctor’s knowledge on dream physiology would be, well, a dream come true (pun intended).
    To get started, in the summer of 2012 I met with Dr. Jonathan G. W. Evans, M.D., a board-certified pulmonologist at the Middle Tennessee Pulmonary Associates at Skyline Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee. He specializes in sleep medicine, pulmonary diseases (of the lungs, including sleep apnea), critical care and internal medicine. He knows sleep the way I know dreams, and the verbal collision of our two worlds was, to say the least, fascinating. As I asked him to help me travel into the night hours and discover what we are all doing as we unconsciously lie there apparently doing nothing, I realized that we are not unconsciously lying there doing nothing. With that said, let me set the stage by diverging into a bit of science from what up until this point has been all biblical teaching.
    Brain activity during dreams can be studied noninvasively by affixing anywhere from 4 to 256 tiny electrodes to someone’s head and then attaching these electrodes to an electroencephalograph, or EEG. “Brain waves” are then marked and measured with wavy lines on a paper graph. Heaven knows, I have had my share of EEG glue in my hair over the last three decades. Back when I was suffering from violent convulsions, reading one of my EEG printouts would have surely been like looking at the erratic scribblings of a hyper toddler with an imposing black marker. But neurologists and scientists have a skillful eye when it comes to determining EEG results. They know what a seizure spike wave looks like versus an eye blink wave versus a sleep wave. And yes, there are even special waves for dreams.
    There are also special, specific times each night for dreams (or if you work the nightshift, then you sleep and dream during the day, or even when napping). These times occur during what is called REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, a portion of the sleep cycle where you not only experience darting eye movements,higher blood pressure, accelerated breathing and an inability to maintain a normal body temperature, but also, through a sudden, automatic release to the brain of an amino acid called glycine, you are paralyzed.
    And for good reason! If you were not, you would be acting out all those crazy dreams and be a great danger to yourself and to those around you. However, maybe a dream sometimes lingers at the cusp of exiting REM sleep, because one night my husband had a long soccer dream, at the end of which he finally was given the ball and allowed to kick a goal. He must have been given the ball right as he was exiting REM sleep, because the next morning I had the sore shins to prove it.
    A complete sleep study involves a PSG, or polysomnogram, which not only studies brain waves but utilizes an EOG (electrooculogram) to detect the REM eye movements, an EMG (electromyogram) to detect when you move and when you are paralyzed and an ECG (electrocardiogram) to track heart rhythms. As for the EEG monitoring the brain, our brain waves ride a roller coaster all night long as we sleep, into and out of and back into five different stages of sleep.
    Throughout the day, though, your brain waves are characterized as either alpha or beta waves. Beta waves appear during the normal daily stimuli you encounter (talking, listening, processing information), but alpha waves are slower, wider and typically present during times of relaxation and peacefulness, such as when in quiet introspection or prayer. But during the five nighttime sleep stages, these waves change remarkably. Think