REM Sleep and Dreaming
Like I said I wanted to track my sleep cycles and see if there was any kind of pattern but, I also found out that being a college student I will never have a normal sleep schedule. So, what I have decided to do is see the difference between a night that I got only a few hours of sleep and when I had over 8.
The main difference that I can see is that I got a lot more REM sleep when I had more time to sleep. This does make sense because to enter REM sleep you have to be asleep for roughly 90 minutes and then have time to cycle back through to each stage. Another thing that correlates to the science behind sleep is the amount of time that I spent in the deep sleep stage. It is said that the first time that you enter the fourth stage or deep sleep it should be the longest of the night, which mine is. Every time after that it got shorter and shorter.
Like I have said before REM sleep is the stage of sleep that is most closely related to dreaming so I thought it would be interesting to look at the amount of dreams that I had that night. So, when I woke up the morning after I immediately grabbed a random piece of paper and wrote down what I could remember. Surprisingly or not so surprisingly I remembered quite a few. I remember having a dream about my roommate being a neo Nazi and being murdered by my best friend. Now to say where those dreams came from, I have no clue but, that is two more dreams than I could recall from the night that I only got 4 hours instead of 8. Is it because I had more REM sleep? Science suggests that that would be the cause but it also could have been the rum and coke I had before bed.
Rathus , S. A., Maheu, S. J., & Veenvliet, S. G. (2017). PSYCH Third Canadian Edition. Toronto: Lenore Taylor-Atkins.