Dreams are amazingly persistent. The loss of some of them due to sleep deprivation will cause our brain to keep the score, immediately after you close your eyes. Shakespeare called the sleep “Nature’s soft nurse”, but apparently it’s not like this at all …
The REM Sleep
“When someone is deprived of sleep, the intensity of it will be higher later, which means more intense brain activity during sleep. Thus, the dreams will be more intense as well and will seem more real” says neurologist Mark Mahowald of the University of Minnesota and director of Regional Sleep Disorders Center in Minneapolis.
The phenomenon is called “REM rebound” and refers to the rapid movements of the eye with eyelids closed during sleep. In this state, we dream the most and our brain activity is so intense that it feels like we’re awake. Meanwhile, the muscles are weak and we can not move, the brain protecting our body from actually living the stories we dream about.
Sleep is divided into REM (Rapid Eye Movement) and four non-REM stages, each with its own neural activity. The first non-REM stage is when we feel between sleep and waking and is sometimes marked by a feeling of falling into a hole. Then, the brain literally stops in stages three and four and passes into a light wave of sleep, when breathing and heart rate slows to a trickle.
Only after 70 minutes of experiencing non-REM we pass into the REM period which lasts only five minutes. A full cycle of non-REM – REM lasts 90 minutes and repeats about five times during one night. As waking up get closes, the non-REM periods are shorter and the REM periods increase.
The only way scientists can study the lack of REM is the “torture” by lack of sleep. The only way scientists can study the lack of REM is the “torture” by lack of sleep. “We follow the encephalogram and when the subject enters the REM period we wake him up” says psychologist Tore Nielsen, director of Dream and Nightmare Lab at the Sacré-Coeur Hospital in Montreal. “Once we start to deprive him of REM, the tendency to return to REM increases”. There were cases when Nielsen woke his patient up for 40 times in one single night because he entered directly into REM right after he fell asleep.
Of course, the non-REM period is important as well, but our brain gives priority to REM periods, suggesting the independence of these two phases. In a study published in the Sleep magazine, Nielsen showed that the loss of 30 minutes of REM in one night can increase the REM periods in the following night by 35%. The subjects went from 74 minutes to 100 minutes of REM.
Nielsen also found out that the dream intensity increases with deprivation of REM periods. Subjects who had only 25 minutes of REM have appreciated the quality of their dreams on a scale of 1-9, between 8 and 9. The lack of REM is frequent outside the laboratory. Both alcohol and nicotine suppress REM periods; anti hypertensive drugs and antidepressants have the same influence. When patients stop medication or the vice, they have long REM periods.
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