Must Be Dreaming

I used to think that I don’t dream, because it’s been years since I remem­bered a dream when I woke up. Then in my psy­chol­ogy class, I learned that every­one dreams, but remem­ber­ing them depends on where in your NREM-​REM cycle you hap­pen to be in when you wake up.

I’m gonna be a geek for a sec­ond and explain NREM-​REM for the non-​psych majors out there. NREM-​REM stands for Non-​Rapid Eye Move­ment — Rapid Eye Move­ment. (Named such because dur­ing REM sleep, your eye will be rapidly mov­ing… if you watch some­one sleep, you can see it jerk­ing around under their eye­lid.) For peo­ple around my age, the cycle lasts for about ninety min­utes. When you first go to sleep, you start with about eighty min­utes of NREM sleep (split across four dif­fer­ent stages, which vary in “depth”) , dur­ing which your body heals itself phys­i­cally, and about ten min­utes of REM sleep, in which you expe­ri­ence dreams. (It’s been sug­gested that REM sleep is for men­tal heal­ing.) With every com­plete cycle you com­plete, the REM time increases, so you usu­ally get thirty to forty-​five min­utes of dream sleep dur­ing your last cycle of the night.

You only remem­ber your dreams if you wake up dur­ing REM sleep. Oh, and peo­ple who wake up at the end of a sleep cycle have shown to feel more rested than those who are inter­rupted in the mid­dle of a cycle. So you should all try to sleep in ninety-​minute increments!

Any­ways, going back to what I was talk­ing about… the last two nights, I’ve woken up in the mid­dle of dream sleep, so I actu­ally remem­bered them. I was so excited, I was going to write about both here, but yes­ter­day, by the time I brushed my teeth and stuff, I for­got what it was I had dreamt about. And today, I tried to cir­cum­vent that by jump­ing on the com­puter as soon as I woke up, but alas, I was dis­tracted by AIM.

Oh well, although I don’t remem­ber the con­tent any­more, they were both happy dreams. So that’s cool. :)

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  1. last night i had a weird dream. wanna hear about it? well too bad, whether you want to or not, i’m going to tell you!!! have you seen the movie “for­got­ten”? like.. the peo­ple just got ran­domly sucked out of earth and into the sky… well, that’s what hap­pened in my dream. me and some of the aphio folks (i remem­ber BAO in par­tic­u­lar) were locked inside of this build­ing. some of us were being con­trolled and some of us were on a res­cue mis­sion. the peo­ple that were not being locked up had to res­cue the peo­ple that were… but for some rea­son, if we say some­thing with emo­tion (like, “i hate you!” or even just say any­thing not monotone-​y), the words will get sucked into space and you’ll never be able to tell what the per­son said. haha that was weird huh! i woke up and i was like… wow. and then i went back to bed. :)

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