Aaron Hartman, MDFunctional Medicine Specialist | Clinical Researcher

Why Dreaming Feels Like Winning the Lottery

2 Jul 2025

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Aaron Hartman, MD explains why dreams feel so rewarding: during REM sleep, your brain floods with dopamine, the same chemical released when you win money. Deep sleep and REM cycles repair your body and manage stress, making quality sleep as crucial as diet and exercise.

They say it like they just won the lottery. I'm dreaming again. And that's important because they know their sleep is repairing and they're feeling that. And I know that that's translating into their physiology repairing as well. And that's with a lot of the work that we do based on managing your stress or improving their sleep hygiene and some of the things that we're going to touch on and have already touched on. But how would you kind of talk about that a little bit with the stages or add to what I said?
One thing that's interesting about the stages is that you tend to have the rim front loaded in the front part of the night, and you tend to have the deep sleep backload in the back part of the night. So all of a sudden, it makes when you go to bed, the consistency of that super important.