Dreams to Sleep Easy – Understanding REM Sleep

Rose knows dreams can be very important to sleep easy. According to a recent paper published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience a psychiatrist and long time sleep researcher at Harvard, Dr. J. Allan Hobson, disputed that the main function of rapid-eye-movement sleep or REM when most dreaming occurs, is physiological. The brain is foreseeing sight, sounds and emotions of waking. He explains “It helps explain a lot of things, like why people forget so many dreams. It’s like jogging; the body doesn’t remember every step, but it knows it has exercised. It has been tuned up. It’s the same idea here: dreams are tuning the mind for conscious awareness.”

Deriving on his work and others, he states that dreaming is a parallel state of consciousness that is continually operating but normally suppressed during waking hours. This might explain why we drift off during the day and daydream.

“Most people who have studied dreams start out with some predetermined psychological ideas and try to make dreaming fit those,” said Dr. Mark Mahowald, a neurologist who is director of the sleep disorders program at Hennepin County Medical Center, in Minneapolis. “What I like about this new paper is that he doesn’t make any assumptions about what dreaming is doing.”

This innovative approach about dreaming is partial based on the finding about REM sleep. Studies have found that REM is detectable in humans, other warm-blooded mammals and birds. REM makes its appearance very early in life — in the third trimester for humans, well before a developing child has experienced dreaming. The fetus may be visualizing something long before their eyes ever open. Objects and emotions in their dreams come later in life.

Many people can remember their dreams and enjoy trying to figure out what they mean. A recent study of more than 1,000 people, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Harvard found strong preconceptions in the interpretations of dreams. For instance, the participants tended to attach more significance to a negative dream if it was about something they disliked and more to a positive dream if it was about a loved one. Negative dreams cause the person to wake during the night and harder for them to fall back asleep without visualizing the nightmare when they close their eyes. If you can’t get to back to sleep within 15 – 20 minutes, it is best to get up and do something like read or watch TV to divert your mind on other subject matter.

Scientists know this because some people have the ability to watch their own dreams as observers, without waking up. This state of consciousness, called lucid dreaming, is itself something a mystery —but one in which Dr. Hobson finds strong support for his argument for dreams as a physiological warm-up before waking.

Lucid dreaming occurs during the period when you are not fully awake, but some people experience lucid dreams while sleepwalking and night terrors which represents muscle activity and non-REM sleep. The sleep disorder, narcolepsy, shows that people are in a state of REM during normal daytime wakefulness.

In the journal Sleep, Ursula Voss of J. W. Goethe at the University in Frankfurt led a team that analyzed brain waves during REM sleep, waking and lucid dreaming. It found that lucid dreaming had elements of REM and of waking — they also concluded that when you close your eyes at night you will experience a flash of your last dream. Researchers have found if you are able to remember and reconstruct a (positive) lucid dream it will help you to fall asleep easy.
Paradox Lost - Midnight in the Battleground of Sleep and Dreams - Violent Moving Nightmares, REM Sleep Behavior Disorder

Good Evening,
Rose Sheepskill

REM Sleep

Today we know our brains are very active during sleep, that sleep affects our daily functioning and our physical and mental health. Neurotransmitters or nerve-signaling chemicals control how we are awake or asleep by acting on different nerve cells, or neurons, in the brain. A chemical, adenosine also builds up in our blood stream while we are awake and causes drowsiness. Adenosine gradually breaks down while we are asleep.

While we sleep we pass through five phases of sleep; 1, 2, 3, 4, and REM. REM means rapid eye movement. 50 percent of our sleep is in stage 2, about 20 percent in REM sleep and the remaining 30 percent in the other stages.

Stage 1 which is the light sleep where we drift in and out of sleep and can wake easily. Our eyes move very slowly and muscle activity slows down.

Stage 2 our eye movements stop and our brain waves become slower with occasional bursts or rapid waves called sleep spindles.

Stage 3 we experience very slow brain waves called delta waves which appear, interspersed with smaller, faster waves.

Stage 4 our brain produces delta waves almost exclusively and it is very hard to wake someone. This is also known as deep sleep because there is no eye movement or muscle activity.

REM sleep, our breathing becomes more rapid, our eyes move rapidly in various directions and our limb muscles become temporarily paralyzed. Our heart rate increases, our blood pressure rises and if we are awaken, we often remember our REM sleep dreams.

Since sleep and being wake are affected by different neurotransmitter signals in the brain, foods and medicines can alter the balance of these signals and have an effect on how well we sleep. Caffeinated drinks, diet pills and decongestants stimulate some parts of the brain and can cause REM sleep disorder such as insomnia, or an inability to sleep. Many antidepressants suppress REM sleep and cause REM sleep deprivation.

Alcohol will help people fall asleep, but they fall into stage 1 and are robbed of the other stages and will also have no REM sleep. Alcohol abuse can also cause REM sleep behavior disorder which is characterized by the acting out of dreams that are vivid, intense, and violent. Dream-enacting behaviors include talking, yelling, punching, kicking, sitting, jumping from bed, arm flailing, and grabbing.

Non REM sleep one night and our brain will try to catch up with this stage the next time we fall asleep causing us to go through extended periods of REM sleep. This causes us to be restless the next day because we lost stages 3 and 4, the deep sleep cycles.

When you are under anesthesia or in a coma it is often said you are asleep, but under these conditions you cannot be awakened and you do not produce complex, active brain wave patterns seen in normal sleep.

Sleep and sleep-related disorders can create medical problems such as; stroke, diabetes, obesity, perhaps due to changes in our hormones, heart rate, and other traits associated with sleep. Once sleeping problems develop, they can add to a person's impairment and cause confusion, frustration, or depression. If you feel you have these sleep disorder symptoms see your doctor to talk about available treatments. In the meantime follow these tips for a better night sleep;

• improving your daytime habits
• creating a better sleep environment
• avoiding food and drink that might interfere with sleep
• developing a good bedtime routine

Studies have shown that better REM sleep helps boost your mood during the day. How can you get more REM sleep? One simple way is to try to sleep a little more in the morning. As your sleep cycles through the night, it starts with longer periods of deep sleep. By the morning, the REM sleep stage is longer. Try sleeping an extra half hour to hour and see if your mood improves.

Good Evening,
Rose Sheepskill