Idiot's Guide to Sleep Chapter 3: REM sleep

Read Chapter 2: How we Sleep

Review: What we learned from Chapters 1 and 2

1. Understanding sleep helps us us understand Narcolepsy (ch. 1)
2. Sleeping is a way of re-energizing and rebooting our internal systems (ch. 1)
3. When you sleep you're either in a state of REM sleep or non-REM sleep (ch. 2)
4. non-REM sleep takes place in four stages (ch. 2)
5. non-REM sleep lasts around 90 minutes (ch. 2)

REM SLEEP

As noted in Chapter 2, whoever coined the term REM made it really easy to remember. When you sleep you're eyes are either making quick (aka rapid) movements, or they are not. If they are, we call it RAPID EYE MOVEMENT sleep and if they aren't, then we call it non-rapid eye movement sleep.

Nuts and Bolts of REM

• You enter REM sleep about every 90 minutes starting from the time you fall sleep until the time you wake up.
• If you do the math (and I didn't but apparently other people have), this means that in a typical 8 hour time period, you'll have 4 to 5 periods of REM sleep a night
• Each period of REM is a longer than the previous one
• Those 4-5 REM periods will add to a grand total of 90-120 minutes of total REM

REM sleep is significant because it is when most of our dreaming takes place, and it is when our most intense and vivid dreaming takes place. During REM our muscles are rendered immobile, which we call sleep paralysis, so that we can't act out what we're dreaming. It's a very handy safety feature to say the least.

REM is probably the most highly studied part of the sleep process because it is when dreaming occurs, and the purpose of the dreaming (and thus the purpose of REM) isn't fully understood. Although most researchers do agree that it is an important and necessary function of the body.

Sources Used:
http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/sleep.html
http://www.webmd.com/content/article/105/107660.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_eye_movement