Via Big Think:

‘Anesthesia dreams have likely been a common phenomenon since surgeons first started putting patients under in the 1840s, but there has never been sound reason to study, let alone prolong, them. In fact, early published reports of anesthesia dreams frame them as pesky side effects of an otherwise smooth medical procedure. Regarded as a mysterious feature of the brain, there was little reason to suspect that, under certain conditions, these dreams might have therapeutic value.

“Most anesthesiologists blow right past this,” Heifets says, adding that they pass off dreaming as a meaningless byproduct of surgery or wake up patients before they fall deeply enough into the dream state.

But the phenomenon piqued Chow’s interest. Since 2009, he’s collected observational data on many elaborate anesthesia dreams that seemed to help people manage anxieties that had nothing to do with the surgery itself….’