I’m going to talk about sleep now and what it means to me. In my last blog post, I mentioned how the topic of sleep has consumed me and that I’ve lost sleep because of it. It’s difficult for me to come out of the rabbit hole once I’ve fallen down it. I once spent an entire week reading the entire Harry Potter series and then watching the movies. I was unmovable. I barely slept. It wasn’t worth it, I had already read all the books and seen the movies more than once, but I can beat every person I know in a game of Harry Potter Trivial Pursuit.
Sleep, to me, is a nuisance. There aren’t enough hours in a day to do everything you need to do and if I had my way, I’d sleep maybe once every three days. I have too much I need to do and you expect me to worry about something as trivial as sleep? Nuh-uh, no way. Thanks, but no thanks.
I know that I need to sleep. Sleep is the body’s time to recuperate from the day it had, to rejuvenate the body. It helps the development of baby’s brains. All they do is sleep and it’s simply because they’re growing. But I’m not growing. I’ve done all my growing.
The fact that I don’t like sleep stems from the fact that I hate not being able to be involved in everything. I don’t want to miss a single thing. It’s why death is such a hard topic for me to grasp, but that’s an entirely different conversation and I am not getting into that right now. It’s about control, I think, and how I have to know everything about everything. But I know that I can’t know everything and I am slowly starting to recognize when I’m fixated on certain subjects. I can set reminders for myself to take breaks, go for a walk, talk to someone other than yourself.
Sleep definitely sucks. It keeps getting in my way. But I’m going to sleep for an entire day because I think I’ve finally got this sleep fixation out of my system.
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Let’s talk about REM sleep. Specifically, dreaming. I’m still not over this sleep thing. I haven’t slept because of it.
REM sleep is the only stage of sleep we dream in. We’re in REM sleep around 90 minutes after we first fall asleep. On average, we cycle through about six REM sleeps each night. Our heart rates increase, our blood pressure increases, we breathe faster, shallower, and more irregular. It’s also very difficult to wake someone up from REM sleep.
We can dream 4 to 6 times each night. I usually only remember one dream each night and it’s usually the weird ones. One time I dreamt of Mike Babcock (he coaches the NHL team Toronto Maple Leafs) naked. He just stood up out of a bathtub and looked like a wrinkly grape. A raisin. Like the way your fingers look after being in the water for too long, but it was all over his body. I can’t look at him without thinking of that dream. And now you can’t either. HA!
Muscle paralysis is common in REM sleep, too. It’s a protective measure to keep us from acting out our dreams. Can you imagine if you were running away from something in a dream and then actually getting out bed and running into a wall, full-speed ahead? Ouch, talk about a headache. And then there are people who experience sleep paralysis, which is when a person temporarily can’t move when waking up or falling asleep. Remember Nell in The Haunting of Hill House? Spooky.
That’s REM sleep. Thanks for reading. Like and subscribe. Follow. Retweet. Good night!!!
Hey!! So, I sometimes go through periods where I’m just fixated on a certain topic and have to learn not everything about it but I at least need to know how it works. And this week I am very interested in learning about sleep and the sleep cycles. Sounds boring, right? It’s just sleep, everyone does it, why is it interesting?
BUT IT’S SUPER INTERESTING!!!
To start with: the sleep cycle. There are 5 stages of the sleep cycle, Stage One, Stage Two, Stage Three, Stage Four, and REM. When I first started researching this, every resource I came across said there were only four stages, stage one, stage two, stage three, and then REM. And then I came across a few websites that had five stages of sleep AND my sister has a psychology textbook that says the fifth stage of sleep is REM sleep. Therefore, I am writing this as sleep having five stages instead of four.
The sleep cycle is just that, a cycle. You start in stage one, move through to stage four, wind back down to stage one, and then you enter REM. I thought that because REM is considered stage five it would occur right after stage four, but it doesn’t. Weird, right?
STAGE ONE: the lightest stage of sleep. The body is beginning to relax and if someone wakes you up during this stage, it feels like you haven’t even slept.
STAGE TWO: this one lasts about twenty minutes. Our body’s temperature starts to drop and our heart rate begins to slow down.
STAGE THREE: this stage is where the body transitions from light sleep to deep sleep. Delta waves begin to emerge during this stage but I’ll be honest, I know nothing about brain waves and don’t know what this means.
STAGE FOUR: Deep sleep. It lasts about half an hour and apparently bed-wetting usually happens in this stage? Huh. Okay. Also sleepwalking. My dad said that I used to sleepwalk when I was like fifteen. I don’t remember doing it but he said I’d walk into the kitchen and start doing the dishes, even though the sink was empty. Sleep is weird.
STAGE FIVE: REM sleep! REM stands for Rapid Eye Movement because during this stage, our eyes are moving side to side behind our closed eyelids. Cool, right? Dreaming occurs in this stage and this stage only. Dreaming happens because of increased brain activity. I looked at this picture in the Psych book and REM sleep brain waves are actually very similar-looking as to the brain waves when we’re awake. The brain is so weird.
ANYWAY!! That’s the sleep cycle. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. Like and subscribe. Follow. Retweet. Good night!!!
