Dream Time

People who are long sleepers will often have much more REM sleep than people who are short sleepers. A person who has a very short sleep time typically will have a much longer delta stage of sleep (the delta stage is the deepest part of a person’s sleep time). The shorter sleeper will have a 5 minute REM dream period, a lot more delta sleep, and then another REM that lasts10 minutes, and that’s usually all of the REM sleep that short sleeper will get for the entire night.

The person who is a long sleeper will have a total of 4 to 8 REM dream periods, one every hour and a half’s all throughout the night. Towards the morning, the periods of REM sleep get much longer, and can last up to 1 hour a piece per dream. So a person who sleeps longer may have two or 3 hours of REM sleep each night, While a person who is a short sleeper may get roughly only 20 minutes. This does not seem to have a negative impact on a short sleeper.

In some of the earlier research performed at sleep clinics on sleeping and dreaming, sleep clinicians would watch an EEG machine to tell when sleepers began dreaming, then they would take those subjects and wake them during the first movements of each of their dreams to prevent them from having dreams. After four or five nights of the dream deprivation, the volunteers at the sleep centers seemed very anxious, very irritable, and suffered from extreme lacks of concentration.

Because of these early studies at the sleep clinics, it was thought that dream deprivation would lead people to become psychotic. While this is not been confirmed in any way, it has proven that people who have been deprived of their REM sleep for a series of nights are more anxious, more agitated, and have less control of their primary drives such as eating.

This has also been proven with animals. Animals that were studied at a sleep clinic who were deprived of their REM sleep tended to pace about the room much more and would eat a lot more. After male cats received deprivation of their REM sleep they would mount almost any object that looks remotely female, including blocks of wood.

When the dream stage is greatly reduced, on the nights that follow the reduction in dreaming, the dreaming stage would begin much sooner and last a whole lot longer. During this test, the REM sleep consumed a much greater percentage of the total sleep time that the person would normally have. The dreams that they experienced also were much more intense and sometimes much more bizarre. Apparently, when you are dream deprived one night, the following night or nights you’ll make up for all of those lost dream periods.

So not only do we have much more REM sleep periods on nights after we have been deprived of REM dream periods, but also it is been proven that some of us can begin to start dreaming in non-REM sleep if we are deprived of REM sleep.

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