What a Dream I Had Last Night

Getting the Sleep You Need

I count it as a certainty that in paradise, everyone naps ~ Tom Hodgkinson

Photo by Kinga Cichewicz on Unsplash

An exasperating and indifferent alarm clock awakened me at an unforgivable hour on a Saturday morning. I was so enthralled by an incredibly vivid and somewhat bizarre dream I was having, that I simply sat up on the bed and shut off the alarm.

In the dream, I was dressed in a trench coat and a Sherlock Holmes cap with a huge magnifying glass hanging around my neck on a neon pink ribbon. I was on a typical spy mission to rescue a couple that had been locked away in a dollhouse. When I finally broke in, there sat Barbie and Ken in their finest costumes. I hurried to free them but just as I reached them I was whisked away to a little house on the moon. I don’t know what my moon mission was supposed to be because the boisterous alarm interfered and I woke up.

If I had actually been able to gain control over the dream narrative and rescue Ken and Barbie I would have been experiencing lucid dreaming, a dream during which dreamers, while dreaming, are aware they are dreaming.

Then there are nightmares. A nightmare might just be a bad dream, disturbing and unpleasant but void of emotional response. If a nightmare creates fear, terror or anxiety the dreamer can awaken troubled by emotional responses, insomnia, disruption of the sleep cycle and perhaps daytime distress.

The world of sleep and dreams is an intriguing and mysterious portion of our lives with an almost magical smack. Yet restful, quality sleep is essential to health and wellbeing. Let’s explore this enigma.

Dynamic Sleep

Surprisingly, in the early 20th century, scientists thought that when night fell, the brain shut down to rest and recuperate from the day’s waking activities. Brain functions they surmised, restarted when the sun rose on another day.

The invention in 1929 of electroencephalograms (EEGs) that detected electrical activity in the brain challenged the old way of thinking. The old gray matter was not turned off at all.

Sleep is actually a dynamic behavior during which structures and chemicals in the brain go through characteristic patterns of activity to control and regulate both wakefulness and sleep as well as play a key role in directing quantity and depth of sleep.

Control of Sleep and Wakefulness

Nodding off at an inconvenient moment is usually embarrassing and may even be risky but not as frustrating as insomnia that dooms you to an inability to sleep at your desirable bedtime. These occurrences are prevented from happening more often than they actually do by two systems whose interaction governs wakefulness and sleep.

The transition into sleep is nearly instantaneous — you’re awake one moment, asleep the next. This alteration of consciousness involves a swift but complex interaction between two systems, the internal biological clock and the homeostatic sleep drive.

The pressure to sleep builds with every hour that you are awake. During daylight hours, the circadian alerting system, a function of our internal biological clock found in a fairly small collection of neurons deep inside the brain, opposes the sleep drive with an alerting signal that keeps you awake. The longer you are awake, the stronger the sleep drive becomes. Eventually the alerting signal decreases and the drive to sleep wins out. When it does, you fall asleep.

There is another variation in alertness near the end of the waking period, when the alerting signal is at its highest. Sleep experts refer to the period from 8:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. as the forbidden hour for sleep because most people find it nearly impossible to fall asleep between these times.

In the first half of the nightly sleeping period, your sleep drive is still significant and your alerting signal is rapidly declining. In normal circumstances, this means it is easy to maintain sleep. However, after approximately four hours of uninterrupted sleep the situation changes.

Now that your sleep drive has decreased, the absence of an alerting signal is no longer sufficient to maintain sleep. At this point, the internal clock, which was promoting alertness during the day, begins to play an active role in sleep promotion by sending signals to parts of the brain that serve this function.

In this way, when synchronized, the homeostatic sleep drive and the circadian system interact to provide consolidated periods of both alertness and sleep.

The Cycle of Sleep

Advancing research using EEGs and other instruments that measured eye movements and muscle activity revealed two main types of sleep defined by distinctive electrical patterns in a sleeping person’s brain and the presence or absence of eye movements.

The two main types of sleep are rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep, called active sleep, and non-rapid-eye-movement (NREM) referred to as slow-wave or deep sleep.

NREM sleep and REM sleep continue to alternate through the night in a cyclical fashion. Although not confirmed, some scientists conjecture that specific sequences of NREM and REM sleep optimize physical and mental recuperation as well as some aspects of memory consolidation, neural processing that contributes to permanent storage of memory during sleep.

The sleep cycle can be broken down into steps:
NREM

• Stage 1: During stage 1, you drift from being awake to being asleep. This is a light, NREM sleep that doesn’t last very long.
• Stage 2: Stage 2 of the sleep cycle is still a light sleep, but you are drifting into a sounder sleep. Your breathing and heartbeat slow down and your muscles relax. Your body temperature decreases and your brain waves are less active.
• Stage 3: In stage 3, you enter deep sleep moving gradually into stage 4, the deepest sleep stage. During deep sleep, your breathing, heartbeat, body temperature and brain waves reach their lowest levels. Your muscles are extremely relaxed and you are most difficult to rouse.
• Stages 4: Known as the healing stage when tissue growth and repair take place, important hormones are released to do their jobs, and cellular energy is restored.

REM (Often referred to as Stage 5)

• The first REM cycle of the night begins about 90 minutes after you fall asleep and recurs every 90 minutes.
• The eyes move around quickly behind the eyelids and the brainwaves look similar to those of someone who is awake. The breathing, heart rate and blood pressure rise to near-waking levels.
• Dreams are most likely to occur during REM sleep
• Lucid dreaming typically occurs during REM sleep
• The arms and legs become temporarily paralyzed during this stage to prevent physical acting out of dreams.

Deep Sleep

Deep sleep consists of stage 3 of non-rapid eye movement sleep. Initially it consisted of both Stage 3, which has 20–50 percent delta wave activity and Stage 4, which has more than 50 percent delta wave activity.

Benefits of deep sleep include:

• Fills the need to feel refreshed when you wake up
• Energy restoration
• Cell regeneration
• Increasing blood supply to muscles
• Promoting growth and repair of tissues and bones
• Strengthening the immune system

How to increase deep sleep

Without deep sleep, these functions cannot take place and the symptoms of sleep deprivation kick in. On the other hand, there doesn’t seem to be any such thing as too much deep sleep.

You cannot force your brain into deep sleep. Thus, If you sleep eight hours but toss and turn all night, you may not be getting enough deep sleep.

Here are some strategies that might help increase your percentage of deep sleep:

• Blocking out light such as with an eye-mask
• Brainwave synchronicity
• Eating healthy
• Employing electronic apps
• Launching sleep rituals and routines
• Listening to white or pink noise
• Maintaining a cool temperature in the bedroom
• Meditation
• Reducing stress
• Regular exercising
• Self-help
• Sleep studies
• Use of Personal trackers

Sleep deprivation

Sleep quality is as critical to a healthy and thriving life as food and water. If you are sleep deprived you may suffer some of the following side effects:

• Early Aging
• High Blood Pressure
• Increased Risk of Accidents
• Low Sex Drive
• Memory Difficulties
• Mood Changes
• Poor Response Time
• Risk for Diabetes
• Risk of Heart Disease
• Trouble Concentrating
• Weakened Immunity
• Weight Gain

Factors that Interfere with Sleep

Although we all need to sleep, how we experience sleep varies. Some of the factors that influence sleep are deep-seated in our unique characteristics and some are caused by changes in routines and circumstances. Over a lifetime, the amount of time we spend asleep, the quality of our sleep and even our ability to sustain sleep can change dramatically.

Age and genetics are two factors that influence how long we sleep, when we want to go to bed, when we wake up and how deeply we are able to sleep. Jet lag and shift work can disrupt these normal sleep patterns by forcing the body to be awake when it wants to be asleep.

External Factors

A variety of external factors can dramatically influence the balance of the sleep-wake system, significantly influencing sleep quality and quantity including:

· Light
· Chemical substances
· Sound
· Stress
·Temperature
· The Bedroom Environment

All individuals who experience stress, anxiety, and depression tend to find it more difficult to fall asleep. When they do, sleep is lighter, includes more REM sleep and less delta sleep. This is probably due to the fact that, like our ancestors, we respond to stressful and potentially dangerous situations by waking up.

Light

Under normal conditions, our internal clock strongly influences both our ability to sleep at various times over the course of a 24-hour period and the sleep stages we experience during sleep.

We are currently exposed to more light at night than throughout our evolution. This increased exposure to light disrupts our sleep patterns. Light affects sleep directly through specialized light-sensitive cells in the retina of our eyes and indirectly by influencing the timing of our internal clock.

Exposure to light in the late evening tends to delay the phase of our internal clock and causes us to prefer later sleep times. Exposure to light in the middle of the night can have more unpredictable effects, but can certainly be enough to reset our internal clock making it difficult to return to sleep.

Chemical Factors

Common chemical substances in our lives that have negative impacts on sleep are:

· Alcohol
· Alpha Blockers
· Antidepressants
· Antihistamines
· Beta Blockers
· Caffeine
· Nicotine
· Prescription Medications

Alcohol is commonly used as a sleep aid because it can help a person fall asleep more quickly. However, the influence of alcohol compromises the quality of an individual’s sleep. More than one or two drinks shortly before bedtime have been shown to increase awakenings and, in some cases insomnia, due to the arousal effect alcohol has as it is metabolized later in the night. Alcohol also tends to worsen the symptoms of sleep apnea, the cessation of breathing during sleep, further disrupting sleep in people with this breathing disorder.

How Sound Effects Sleep

Whether you are sensitive to things that go bump in the night or sleep like a rock, sound potentially upsets your rest and your health because even while sleeping, the brain continues to register and process sound. Restless sleep caused by noise affects sleep quality and the transition from lighter to deeper stages of sleep.

If you sleep eight hours but toss and turn all night, you may not be getting enough deep sleep.

There are many potential sources of sleep-pilfering sounds, varying from home appliances, televisions, pets, household members, storms, traffic, and inner-city noise.

A research review published in Noise & Health (Hume KI1, Brink M, Basner M. Effects of Environmental Noise on Sleep (2012 Nov-Dec;14(61):297–302. doi: 10.4103/1463–1741.104897) shows a link between nighttime environmental noise exposure and cardiovascular disease.

Environmental noise is a significant policy issue for the World Health Organization (WHO) based on research suggesting that noise disturbance can cause serious health side effects. The WHO estimates Western Europeans lose one million years of healthy life due to traffic-related noise. Sounds as low as 30 decibels can affect rest. Note that busy traffic registers at 70 dB, a subway registers 90 dB and an airplane taking off comes in at 100 dB.

The level of intensity and severity of noise impacting sleep is individualized because some people are more sensitive than others. Generally, noises are most likely to wake people during stage 2 sleep, the light, non-REM cycle in which we spend about half of the night.

Tips to regain sleep:

• Do not smoke
• Don’t lie in bed while you are awake
• Don’t sleep in
• Exercise each day
• Follow a routine schedule every night and morning
• Limit caffeine and alcohol
• Relax prior to going to bed
• Sleep at the same time each night
• Sleep in a cooler temperature
• Wake up with the sun

Sounds That Help You Fall Asleep

Sound and noise are a fact of life and many types are simply unavoidable. However, there are a few helpful steps you can take to minimize noise pollution during rest and improve your sleep.

If you notice that you wake up often during the night or you feel tired in the morning, consider tracking your sleep using an app that records disruptions while you sleep thus giving insight into noises that may be waking you up or disturbing your slumber.

Often, a little background noise in the bedroom can help when it comes to falling asleep. But picking the right kind is essential — because what works for your best friend may not work for you. When determining which type of sound is best consider:

• White Noise: This is a combination of all noise frequencies, and it helps mask outside sounds. In fact, it’s sometimes used to treat insomnia patients.
• Nature Sounds: Many people enjoy hearing the calming roll of ocean waves, the trickle of raindrops, the gentle chirping of rainforest animals or the powerful roar of thunderstorms as they drift off. These sounds often rise and fall in volume and intensity, which can be relaxing.
• Calming Music: It is wise to avoid songs with lyrics that keep your mind lively or thumping bass lines that keep your toes tapping. Soft mellow music helps you get to dreamland faster just as do musical genres like classical, folk, smooth jazz, Gregorian chants or binaural beats. Soothing sounds such as the crackle of a fireplace, rain, Zen sounds, calming melodies or even train sounds can lure you to sleep.
• Voices: When traditional noises like nature sounds, white noise, or music don’t do the trick, try human voices.
• Pink Noise: Pink noise is fairly pleasant sound resembling a rush of water and is smoother and more soothing across all frequencies than white noise. Previous studies have found that playing pink noise during sleep improves the memory of younger adults. The effect is related to the ability of the sound stimulus to enhance slow-wave sleep.

Daylight Napping

If you tend to suffer a sleepiness attack in the mid-afternoon, it’s not a coincidence.

Although it is common for people in many western societies to sleep in a single continuous block of about eight hours during the night, many people around the world would find foregoing an afternoon nap highly unusual behavior. Afternoon nap time typically last between 30 and 60 minutes and coincides with a brief lag in the body’s internal alerting signal that offsets the body’s increasing sleep drive.

Sleep experts say that adding a power nap as a routine part of your day is a good way for those who do not sleep well at night to catch up, but caution that napping may worsen sleep problems for people with insomnia.

Many people experience a noticeable dip in their alertness, energy level, and ability to concentrate in the afternoon. Common reasons for mid-afternoon sleepiness are:

• You Ate a Carb-Heavy Lunch. Eating carbohydrate-loaded foods like white pieces of bread, white rice, regular plates of pasta, or chips can make you feel sleepy. It’s almost always better to replace simple carbs with complex carbs.
• You’ve Been Sitting Still for Hours. Sitting like a statue may impress your boss, but your body associates stillness with going to sleep. Try standing up to stretch or walk around at least once every hour.
• You’re Somewhat Dehydrated. Even a loss of 1.5 percent of your body’s water weight can make you tired and grumpy. Keep a glass of water nearby throughout the day and sip on it regularly.
• Your Body Temperature Has Dropped. Post-lunch sleepiness can stem from a dip in your core body temperature that naturally happens between 2:00 pm and 4:00 pm releasing the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin, a normal part of your body’s circadian rhythm. Fight it with upbeat music, a quick stroll in the sunshine or a brisk walk to fast-track your body.

Personalize Your Slumber

Because we are all individuals, customization is often prized when searching for the perfect electronic solution. Features to explore if you are considering sleep apps:

• Personal Reminders
• Push Notifications
• Scheduling flexibility
• Select play length
• Diverse sound selection
• Tailored app screens
• Timers
• Support

Once you fall asleep, you surely don’t want the sleep sounds to play all night. A smart idea is to set a timer for the number of minutes or hours that you want the sounds to play. The sound of the timer going off will wake you up.

And what’s better than the ability to start the app without getting out of bed? One app, Sleep Z can be opened by saying “Hey Siri, goodnight!” Wow!

Put it All Together

We have considered a lot of information, probabilities, possibilities, and potentials as we crisscrossed from wakefulness, through dreams, into a deep sleep and back again. One noteworthy observation is that it is not easy to discuss one topic without finding a connection to another because sleep is an interactive and interdependent phenomenon. It requires a balance that is easily upset if we don’t see the whole picture even while focusing on the parts.

That seems like a daunting task. However, although a new science, technology has begun to consolidate and coordinate the slices of the sleep cycle into a whole pie. Sleep trackers, sleep studies and sleep apps that you can carry to any place you rest your sleepy head make it possible to quickly drift into sleep, wake you up at the right time, prevent sleep deprivation and cure insomnia.

Not only that, but this genre of programs will track your sleep patterns, measure bedroom environmental conditions and detect the amount of REM and deep sleep that make up your typical sleep patterns to provide a night of better sleep with relaxing sleep sounds, features such as reminders, timers, sound mixing and Siri support.

Summary

• Sleep was once considered an inactive or passive state in which both the body and the brain turn off to rest and recuperate from the day’s waking activities.
• Scientists have since found that the brain goes through characteristic patterns of activity throughout each period of sleep and that it is sometimes more active when we’re asleep than when we’re awake.
• Understanding these patterns and the factors that affect them may help in making choices that will lead to better quality sleep.
• The average, healthy adult gets roughly one to two hours of deep sleep per eight hours of nightly sleep.

If you are getting the recommended amount of slumber, 7 to 9 hours, you’re spending about one-third of your life asleep. While this may seem like a lot of time, remember that your mind and body are very busy while you are sleeping, assuring that you can be productive, energetic, and healthy when you’re awake.

Scientists agree that sleep is essential to health, and while stages 1 to 4 and REM sleep are all important, deep sleep is the most essential of all for feeling rested and staying healthy.

There are various ways, including personal trackers, apps and sleep studies, to gauge if the stage, quality and quantity of sleep meets your needs,

Making behavioral changes that include establishing a consistent sleep/wake schedule, avoiding caffeine late in the day and limiting your exposure to light at bedtime are just a few things that can help reduce the effects of sleep difficulties.

By being attuned to factors in your sleep environment that put you at ease and eliminating those that may cause stress or distraction, you can set yourself up for the best possible sleep.

Desirable Qualities of a Good Sleep App

• Diversified and wide-ranging selection of sleep sounds
• Sound mixing
• Features such as power naps
• Versatile reminders
• Programmable timers
• Siri Support
• Ability to track and store sleep patterns
• Ability to measure environmental factors such as light, temperature and sound
• Ability to record and evaluate REM, deep sleep
• Suggests ways to get better sleep
• Search option
• Streaming
• Live Background
• Timely Updates

Conclusion

For some people sleep is the most pleasurable time of the day, while others would rather do without it. Sleep can be an escape or a retreat.

Sleep offers a chance to turn off the world for a few hours and savor inspirational, joyous and mystical dreams. For some, it is an opportunity for revitalization and transformation of mind, body, and spirit. When you rest your head on a pillow even after a grueling emotional or physically tough day, there is the knowledge that you can awake refreshed, healed and with new perspective.

Now that you have a broad understanding of what happens once you drift off to sleep, you can insightfully apply what you know to your choice of program, set your schedule and monitor the outcomes to get the health benefits from quality sleep.

The best bridge between despair and hope is a good night’s sleep. ~ E. Joseph Cossman

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