Why Weed Kills Your Dreams

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]So, both of those chemicals, both of which are used as a sleep aid, alcohol and marijuana, are actually very good at blocking your dream sleep, your rapid eye movement sleep.

[00:00:09]And so, what happens is that the brain is quite clever in this regard. It builds up a clock counter of how much dream sleep you should have had, but have not been getting. Wow. And it starts to develop this increasing appetite and hunger for dream sleep. So, that finally when the alcohol actually gets out of your system, Sober October, Yeah. love the name.

[00:00:30]That's all of a sudden where you get what's called a REM sleep rebound effect, where you not only get the normal amount of REM sleep that you would normally have, you get that plus the brain tries to get back some of that dream sleep that it's been losing over the past maybe 11 11 months.

[00:00:47]Um, so you get this >> Try 20 years.

[00:00:49]Yeah, [laughter] I didn't want to make any assumptions. Um, uh, so, um, so you get this REM sleep rebounded effect, and that's where you have these really intense dream sleep, um, situations.