This may also explain why you're not a morning person.Īn alarm cuts your sleep short arbitrarily and denies your final REM phase. This is such a common problem it's known as getting out of the wrong side of the bed. If you wake to an alarm every day, your sleep is likely to be interrupted mid-cycle. What's also important is to look at how you're waking up - ie, after how many sleep cycles. It seems that the amount of sleep required differs from person to person, however as a rough guide experts have come up with the following daily sleep guide based on age: How Much Sleep Does The Average Person Need? Sleeping-in allows extended REM time in the morning, more vivid dreams, and more chances to become lucid. Indeed, the more chances you have to sleep in, the better. This graph also shows how it's essential for lucid dreamers to get sufficient shuteye and not miss out on REM sleep by cutting sleep short. Just allow yourself to gently re-enter the dream, while thinking "I'm dreaming". If you don't wake up to an alarm, you'll find you often wake directly from a dream, which makes it much easier to remember. The graph shows REM sleep occurring at the end of each sleep cycle. Critically, during these later sleep cycles, periods of REM sleep become longer. Your longest and most memorable lucid dreams usually occur in the fourth and fifth sleep cycles of the night - after about six hours of sleep - during the REM sleep stages. When is The Best Time for Lucid Dreaming? REM sleep deprivation impairs our ability to learn complex tasks and form long term memories. If you are woken from REM sleep you're more likely to jump right back in during a later nap. It's known as paradoxical sleep because the sleeper, though showing more active brainwaves than before, is harder to awaken.
If you are woken you will feel especially dopey and confused for a couple of minutes. The sleeper is less responsive to the environment and most stimuli cause no reaction.
You spend around half of all your sleep in Stage 2 a light dreamless sleep. Although your brainwaves have slowed further, they do show brief bursts of higher brainwave activity called sleep spindles and K-complexes. NREM Stage 2 is marked by a loss of nearly all muscle tone so your physical body can't act out your forthcoming dreams.
Your brainwave frequencies descend from Alpha through Theta (4-7 Hz). Stage 1 also marks the loss of self-awareness and most sensory attachment to the physical world. You have hypnagogic hallucinations, swirling light and color patterns which hypnotize your mind into a restful sleep.
You begin to lose muscle tone, causing twitches and hypnic jerks. NREM Stage 1 is a light sleep from which you are easily woken.Let's take a closer look at those four stages: We used to identify five stages of sleep (as above) but recently Stages 3 and 4 have been grouped together for their similarities.
By Rebecca Turner - take our free lucid dreaming course.Įach and every night, your brain transitions through different stages of sleep.Įach stage has different effects on your body - from physical restoration during deep sleep, to memory consolidation during dreams.Īll together, these stages add up to about 90-110 minutes, making up one complete sleep cycle.