A Slightly Freaky Breakdown Of REM Sleep
Super simple, super interesting, and super true.
So, you’ve weaseled into your comfies, crawled into bed, and burritoed yourself into a blanket. Now you’re ready for ultimate relaxation via sleep, I.E. doing a whole lotta nothing.
Except, your brain is actually about to do all of the things.
Once you slip off to sleep, your brain begins cycling through multiple stages of REM and non-REM sleep. REM stands for rapid eye movement, a period of time during sleep where your eyes continuously dart around in all directions without registering visual information. Freaky, right?
While snoozing, the first few stages are non-REM sleep, where dreaming is rare, if not completely non-occurring, and a slew of goodness happens to your body and mind: cellular restoration, emotional regulation, heart health, and then some. And for our last stage of the sleep cycle: Enter REM, stage left. You are more likely to dream (and remember your dreams) during REM sleep. Not only that, but your brain is hard at work committing information to memory and processing information of all kinds that you learned throughout the day. Your muscles can also temporarily become paralyzed, leading to brushes with sleep paralysis, which is freaky part deux.
During REM sleep your limbic system steps up to the plate to cope with emotions and memories, which explains why our dreams can carry the weight of our day-to-day lives.
But why do my dreams always look so bonkers, you ask? How can you say my dream deals with my day-to-day when today I went to work at an office, but in my dreams I was flying out of a whale’s mouth in Ireland?
In our dreams, many of the visuals that we see are disjointed and unrealistic, from the symbols to the scenery to the context. This is likely because the pre-frontal cortex, the part of the brain that handles self-control and logic, is significantly less active during REM sleep, even though it’s tightly connected to the limbic system. This could explain why our dreams often seem so irrational, jumbled, and, you guessed it, freeeaky.
Because your sleeping brain filters through the experiences, feelings, repressions, and memories you had throughout the day, your dreams can offer an unfiltered look into your subconscious. With the help of a dream interpreter, it’s possible to see past the crazy Irish whale mouth symbols to get a deeper look into the emotions and information that your brain is trying to cope with. Knowing this information can lead to epiphanies of all sizes that open the door for tremendous personal growth. Your brain presents the problems, and dream interpretation can give you the freakily accurate answers.
When it’s finally time to wake up and begin a new day of life-ing around, set an alarm that will adjust its timer to wake you up when you’re not in the REM stage of sleep. If you wake up during REM, you’re more likely to experience high blood pressure, have a worse mood, struggle with self-image, and a bunch of other stuff that causes your body and brain to freak out.
